Fragments

Stolnaphase

Floating in rosewood, the angel puckers his lips, waiting for the expected grace from on high, but it never comes. Distraught and confused, he flies down to Earth, wanders through woods and wreckage, the charred remains of a dead world and the blossoming promise of what comes tomorrow. There, within the confines of a boneyard (huge metallic ribcage offering the semblance of shelter), he finds the remains of the last woman to walk the earth. What to do with the sad fossils of a race that gave its all, for nothing? Obliterated by error, or was it design? Even this angel doesn't have the answers. Thundering downward off the port bow, the steward of the ship makes no real motion to answer the angel's question; after all, he's sailed rougher seas than this. Meanwhile, right now in a coffeeshop in Van Nuys, a black sanitation worker sits and stares off into the distance, not noticing the tacky '60s-era decoration, by now safe and anonymous amongst the various styles of humanity. Rather, he just sits and wills himself not to think, not to think about anything too much, not to get caught up in it. In Vienna, a poet concludes his reading to restrained applause. Grafting on the theme of man's bankrupt morality to recent world events (botched elections in Turkey, the Iraq war, increasing American cultural hegemony), his choir has been sufficiently preached to, and no new thoughts emerge, just rearrangements of old ones. In Sierra Leone, mercenaries wage a running gun battle with leftist guerillas through the side streets in a slum district. A Tokyo businessman is having his penis stimulated by a hooker's foot in Kowloon; his wife will not care either way. In Lima, an artist puts the finishing touches on a statue of a sea goddess. In Los Angeles, would-be hipster thugs who have never faced a single day of want or adversity adopt street lingo and style in order to woo ladies. In Kiev, a young girl bleeds from the uterus, the victim of a botched self-administered abortion. This is the world, or at least a few nodes of it. The world is composed of things, and we people are things, active agents in the world, engines of imagination without even realizing it. The natural world progresses, and most don't even recognize that they are part of this, extensions and extrusions, part of the world's ability to recognize itself.

In The Flesh

Where the air and the earth meet, there is no clear demarcation. The air kicks up the earth, the earth directs the air. There's no saying whether they'll ever reconcile, not with brightest fire and darkest water lurking in the background, but the realm where zephyr found valley was always the best place for them to find agreement.

Thalia

I am the story you tell yourself at night to keep the wolves at bay.

Reality is a holistic process. It is a fractal generative force, its shape and being the result of innumerable physical reactions happening every instant everywhere. The scope of it all is so huge, so vast, that it's not even worth getting into, really, it's just that stupidly large. And everywhere, at every time, things happen. Some subtle and unnoticed, some grand and spectacular, most in between.

I am the construct you project outward to try and tame the interplay of atoms and arguments.

You extrapolate, construct, arrange. The mind, outraged at the blind injustice of pure existence, creates motive and reason. Accident is not good enough for consciousness to accept. The sum total of a million small effects is transformed into one reason. A single strand of cause/effect is magnified, smoothed down, shaped into a second-order geometric figure. It is crafted until it satisfies its authors.

These fictions multiply, establish rules of their own, reflect and infiltrate back upon the minds that created and beheld them. A layer of atmosphere surrounds our eyes and ears, full of polished characters with easily-explainable intentions, plot devices that engage our pity and pathos, rhythms of action and emotion that leave us laughing or weeping or simply breathless. A narrative reflex is learned, wherein what 'works' and what doesn't becomes a natural-seeming streamline, a smooth curve, a graph.

I am the lie you tell yourselves to keep you sane.

Myth, legend, folk tale; genre, cliché, stereotype; the air is clogged with worn-out forms, masks, nervosa who have adapted perfectly to their hosts. The best work, however, are the unwieldy ones, the poems, plays, novels and stories that don't fit neatly into any box, the ones with sharp corners and outlandish tangents and inhuman forces that their authors were unable or unwilling to tame. Those are the stories worth telling, because they never deplete their invested energy — rather, they generate their own, because they are more accurate to how reality actually is. They become vital, giving a glimpse at just how much power the human brain has within it.

I am the tale you tell to transform the world.

Fractal

We want easy answers. Let Barbara Stanwyck out of her cell. Keep the remote aimed firmly at the television. Our ancestors haunt us at every opportunity with little or no warning. The flux of reality, the intersections between action and intention. Peppermint. Picture frames keep us all together. Rumbling tummies. Bank notes in a coffee cup. The biochemistry of desire. Faulty wiring. Melted wax. Coughed-up nicotine. Gears and wheels and machines beyond the veil. Up, down, up, down, up, down. Zodiacal thinking. Drumsticks playing on any surface. Kinetic energy into information. Drawing cards for the sisters. Parallel lines oppressing everything. Magnets with messages. Machines talking to each other. Incorrect metaphors that stick. Rewriting the word of God. Redesigns when we get bored. High-energy wavelengths close to our ear. Radiant bodies. Leaves absorbing sunlight. Up the bark, down the well. Fluid dynamics. Chaos butterflies. Silver strings. Nebulae. Glowing green eggs. The physics of perception. Waveform collapsing. Detachable faces. Plotting vectors. Plush rug. Hidden pen. Statement of earnings. Economics of foolish insurgents. Notification. Heat dries us all. Interference. The keys in your hand. Your eye on the road. The head and the heart, the longing of distance, the impossibility of it all.

Digression #1

Everything makes me sad. Keys bounce back when they're depressed. The button that turns off the screen. The chronic pain in your side. How can you cope? Let's forget the day, let's forget and forgive — or rather not, let's dig and root out the source, remove this weed at long last.

We can find people to keep us sane and happy for the short term, but it's only writing in air that keeps us truly stable. We want tongues of fire and emblazoned script hovering before us, some sort of miracle, a flaming Aleph if you please. We want a bit of balance to even things out. We want the Holy Hand to reach down and move the earth for the benefit of all. Here in the Southland, we spend our days consumed with apocalypse. Here it is the easiest of all to consider just how the end might come about. Here we dig for fire. Here we keep watch on the fault lines and fractures, waiting for what will spit up through the cracks. Here we tend the flames, making sure nothing else comes of it. If it costs us a little pain, so be it. Nothing comes without sacrifice.

Digression #2

This is how we bounce: we find someone that has a high caliber of energy, and we throw ourselves at them with all the force we can muster. These words aren't mine. They're borrowed from a polyglot we found scattered on leaves, hidden in mouths. We threw it out there and made it stick, invented some rules and just let the whole thing run its course. The occasional Webster aside, it's been all accidental going forward. Oh, we've whipped up the shapes since then, but now they just become black blurs when we defocus — as we often do.

There's no word for what we're going through right now, at least none that dangles from the lips, as I can't describe the sensation filling me. Ease? Boredom? Autonomy from form and function and oh my, how many more clichés we can drop around here, the herbs if I'm not mistaken. Who knows. This house was built many years ago, and it could stand some renovation — a bit too closed off, a bit too isolated from the rest of the world. A subtle distance and a willingness to leave once in a while should do just nicely, sir. Yes, that should work wonders.

Digression #3, Circling Into Something Else

Perversion. Left and right hands. Enlightened beings and knuckle-draggers. We love the science of discontent. Slaves, obey your masters and nurse that resentment, although the promise of watching your oppressors roast in hell or of supplanting them is growing more and more remote. Don't think you can hang onto that much longer!

Bossanova. Sci-Fi Jesus. These are all collections of words. Aliens don't understand them, really, or at least not the kind that throw you on a ship and do horrible things to your flesh. Trust them not, trust not this communion! Do they know of what they speak? You want answers so badly that you'll take them from anything that jams a metal probe in you or tells you about the 'Star Children.' This is not your father's sex. Let us take our straw plastic men and our decaying icons and give them as beads to these beings. There is nothing to be drawn from constellations, arbitrary abstract lines. There is too much dark matter, but light gives us everything we have. This is the last gasp of animal minds.

Called Shot

In the summer of 1998. After graduation. Kim, the roommate of three months, and Patrice, the more eccentric one, had moved out to seek their fortunes. Now moving in were Steve, Trish, Chris and Melanie. Anyway, it was a hot muggy summer's day. I had just arrived home from my temp job downtown (working for Fidelity Investments, ooh ahh) and Steve was there, and both of us commented that it would be absolutely smashing for a big ol' thunderstorm to roll in. Looking at the sky, it seemed improbable, but it would be just what was needed.

Not fifteen minutes later, the skies turned grey. Perfectly menacing. It had come from somewhere, but its precise origin was a mystery.

Feeling something stir, the upkick of wind around me, the pressure dropping, I pointed out to the clouds. At that exact moment, a bolt of lightning lit up, exactly where I had pointed.

Astounded, I shouted with glee. Did you see that? Wow! Did I do that? Was it coincidence? Synchronicity? Holy crap! Thrilled was I, but also doubtful, for I so desperately wanted it to be my doing, my will working on the world. But of course I knew it was just coincidence. It had to be. Look, I'll prove it again, watch me point and —

and a flash from heaven to earth at the tip of my finger.

Just the sense of knowing was worth it.

When the rain finally came, I tore off my shirt and stood in the downpour, one with all, a man whose relative was a bolt from the skies.

Joycean

Crimkranng off the sodden walls. Leadlined afterdisiacs rummuging underskin. The endless furry walls, the tunnel upwads. Lookiter skinny bones protuding from a white slip as she rung downground calamity on her heels? Silence throughout the engines, in stillwater sweetnether (ping!) colluding into a pool (pang!) — listening off skein, uncle Bob in the backbeat, covering up the duvet legs, clad in hemail, sanguine in lust and longing to emmanuelize the eschaton, dreaming of stone men and the shouters and gutters and fluffers thereof, screaming and gauling and tearing at one another in the pits, in the dancehall of blood and scorging while the men with iron eyes revel and delight in the spectacle, an orgy of excess, mediocrity masked in stainless steel, a shrunk, a shrunk for Sagnor Burns! — his gloumace is empty, fill it with haps! — satellites loosing the track of gravity, unbound and unhinged, careening like a bumper car in a bumper car ride careening madly and colliding with no sense of stars no scents of cars no mode of transport no loud guitars no scene changes no way to realize no transition or transfusion gardin of the assembled parliament we shake our thighs about and cryout at long last Here is what you wanted Here is everything you knew you needed Here is the last stage wherein you have a chance to get the scene right and so let your choices be honest and big and bold and do not try to be funny and just play the scene as it lies and remember you are everywhere —

Parthesis

A million private mythologies collide and clatter like tin pots in an overstaffed and overrun kitchen. Keep them in line, he said loudly, between attempts to pick a stem of spinach from his teeth. The clatter of kidsmoke. The collision of her and yon. The private mythologies boiling over. Grease fire. Kamikaze dive. The rejection of truce. Here, in the last stages. The chopping block overspilling. Over the moon and under the green. The green lodged between his gnashed teeth.

Matrices

Microscopic lightning tetrahedrons shimmering in air for half a second and then phasing out. Red warm tunnels, waves and bands of cyclonic turbulence. A golden/blue paisley fractal lazily radiating from my star. Your astounding geologic warmth, a fire running through earth, permeating everything. Flashes of telepathy. Union of heaven and earth, union of thought and action, union of spark and fusion, the blend, the soul and psyche, the divine fire. The slow, profound swirl around us.

Orbiter

Tonight, looking upwards after a slow holy day, the full moon peering straight down on me, and a ring like a supernova, like a solar system, like Ptolemy's sphere, like the iris of an eye and Selene Herself the glaring opalescent pupil, contracted from the incoming light and staring straight at me.

Everything's A Number

Like Zen painting trying not to tear the paper I write. Like a mathematician I look for the underlying equation to everything. Here in the Southland we worship the rare clouds, the blemishes, the fascinating disfigurings of body and land. There comes nothing that you didn't know you could be. Say why, ask wherefore, and it's only because we are what we are at any given moment, and you can only start from that moment. The storms of sycophancy. Healing your shoulder by reinjuring it. Set it in the proper place. The body has to perform to help swath the soul. There is the full-on breath, the unimpeachable address, that startling revelation of union. Regardless of anything else, that comes through loud and clear. The torus, fingers joining through the center. Adding up to x when we were expecting y and no amount of finessing can make a number other than what it is. The fugue. The overcast day, waiting for the time to once more reveal the sun. The fact, the hope of influence. The two streams winding together. Here, then, the exercise is done.

Quiver

Starbound, thread through mast, a direct hit on the target lying far below. An arrow straight through the heart. How appropriate. A song —

How your eyes light up the sky
How I loved to tell you why
You mean the world to me

— keeps me moving past yearning and sorrow and regret. Here are harps, here are superstrings. Pluck at them both, send me vibrating, harmonics echoing at mathematically precise points. The higher the note, the higher the breath. Your breath and mine, swirling, searching for it. A song lost in feedback, when you don't have any other way to end it, no fade-out, no obvious conclusion. The stunning correction. Make sure all the eyes track the same target, no bending left or right, no words left except how my red-gold-green heart isn't the same, how my own bow waits to be bent. (Oh, naughty.)

Seven-colored, prisms, starlight. All these things, and not you. Vibrating at a different frequency. Harmonics, tuning. Hear the timbre of voice as the chords express themselves. Your sweet voice.

Circumstance

Halos and butterflies. Zingers scorch the pavement. Argonauts sailing westward once more. Harkonnens drowning in their own filth. You came in at precisely 2:37:82 P.M. which is where we will mark the beginning. The note chimes here, slice it down to sixteenths, thirty-seconds, every solid-state hum of vacuum tubes warming up the channel of electrons, glowing orange-red on the back of the CD cover. Walking tall on the range, here we go, indestructible soul energies like plutonium discovered and created simultaneously. Where the feathers fall, we just don't know. This is the life we have been given by circumstance, and we cannot apologize for playing our roles exactly as we are; we can only come to understand that our roles are so much more flexible than we ever think they are. Thus endeth the lesson, kids, run home safe and put these new ideas into practice. Let us all know how they turn out.

Wingspan

Arboretum. Orrery. Aerial photographs. Off the wing. Carmen Chameleon. Sugar plum fairy. The ache and shape of things. Free flight, gliding over wheat fields. All the while catching up on my sleep. Crushed out by a heel, pointed asphalt, smoking a Cavendish in Santa Monica. Femme fatales and dimestore cowboys have running gun battles through the threads. Pardon me, ma'am, but it seems you have a bit of a problem on your hands. Oh yes sir, thank you ever so much. Ma'am, it's my privilege. Shanked out, someone dropping from a helicopter into the back of a Porsche Boxster convertible, a chase scene through the desert, a blacklist, a setlist, the last call at the aching bar, sennefren caldon iasma. Phonemes and pheremones, jumping jacks, childhood games, all encompassed under the grace of a being that was never human, his six wings unfolding, great god of guardian angels. The happenstance of being.

Starbought

Tongue-tied. Escaping higher thought. Let us hide back in the cave — no, not this time, old man. The pants don't fit quite right; take them in, nip, tick here and there. Cloth can be tailored; flesh can't. Exquisite eternal effervescent mangoes. Salmon dinners and banquet feasts. Never mind the tab, it's all coming out in the wash anyway. We elect the starborn to lead us through these dark times and to dispel this energy that sits within us, making us uneasy, making us thrash about like goats on a Sinai mountainside. The Hebrews, wrapped in cloth, brought forth for your edification. Here, let the miracle commence soon. Show me an act of God to shatter this enclave, to bring light into dark, to do, in short, what one expects of any reasonably competent deity. Believe me, a lot more rides on this than one man's simple faith. Sacrifice your son, your cock, your self. Ben Jeshua. Arvor calmate. Here, on the 32nd floor, the view is spectacular if looked outward, daunting if looking down. Garnet and gold rings your mind. Here is everything I ever wanted to give to you, here it is, everything that will not be, here it is anyway in its raw form, my chi, circulating once more after this daftness. A mala on my right wrist to count away the time. Pony up, my dear, it's a long ride to the old West. Better the civilized East Coast for you with carriages and bankers. The parker password. Enormous relief, oh my goodness, all this built-up thunderstorm cannot deign to keep us off the wrong path. This will be the way, this Slack, this zen. Oh, the curtains, oh the shield from the cruel sun, oh the double-edge, oh God your gift brings life and ends it and for that we are fearful and in awe. And this, a new devotional, for the light behind my eyes. That is where I shall worship.

Palette

Dark chocolate. I have all this, all these intangibles, that I wanted to share with you. Random things. The cutting mix of ice cream and beer. Yes, it's all come before, yes to be out of that destructive cycle is so much better than being in it, yes things are 'better,' but at what — what now? What happens once the mad rush is over, once it really is done? What comes after that? What now, now that the bittersweet taste is evaporating from my tongue?

Pressing Hands

'What do you fear?'

'Not confronting you.'

—

Steamroll

'Why are you keeping me at arms' length?'

'If I don't, you'll flatten me.'

'Ah. As much as I might want to, I can't disagree.'

—

Algebra

I keep looking at the formula, the interplay, the history, the facts and I keep trying to bend the facts with my mind, my will, force them into something they're not. Alter the balance, figure out some way to avoid the inescapable conclusion we find ourselves in. Surely something has to give. Memory? Emotion? The bruises? The rollercoaster? Surely a creative accountant can find a way to juggle these numbers, some physicist could donate quantum uncertainty and explain how the impossible can happen. Please, please, some loophole overlooked, something —

And the solution comes back out, the same as the last time, the same as every goddamn time.

The reason we kept going over it and racked our brains for so long is because we didn't get the answer we wanted. So we'd go around one more time, check our math, hit all points of the equation, and the same old answer pops out. After so many times trying, hoping that somehow math doesn't work, the point of exhaustion comes and it just can't be done. Disappointed and disillusioned, we walk away from the board and each head our separate ways. Yet there's this intense dissatisfaction. It should have turned out differently, I think. I run back to the board, pick up the chalk, start again. It's perfect on paper, this is an equation of flawless grace and beauty, right, and if I let this go it means disappointment, it means processing, it means guilt and responsibility have to be assessed, if I just accept this answer then it means I have to move on and go forward and I do not want that, it means that I cannot force the world to go where I want it to go, it means it's not a glorious future but the end of the affair, it can't end this way, no way can it end this way, why won't it work?

What occurs to me, only now, now that things are over and they're weird because I'm not sure what to say, now that it's all about moving on and healing and dating other people, now that it's all about unsatisfying conclusions, is that the equation is entirely dependent on the values of the variables. Plop you and I into x+y and that's what comes out. You and I as we were as 2004 rung in, in that state, with our quirks and baggage and minds and heart the way they were that New Year's night. And while the equation itself can be massaged, simplified and expanded, the variables don't change. We have this answer because that is who we were then, and no amount of hope or wishful thinking can change that. And this is no loop, plugging the solution back into the equation until we get the answer we desire. That line curves downward, never reaching a whole number. Irrational and nonlinear. That describes us perfectly.

Fuck math, fuck history, fuck facts, fuck it all, I want to say, except that this math lies in ventricles and atria, where the answer's been obvious for some time, and it's the rest of me that's been in denial. This means accepting an answer that's everything I don't want to hear, but that is just there, persistent. It means walking away from the equation and doing something else, accepting the stark truth underneath the dramatic beauty. I put down my chalk, open the door of the deserted lecture hall, turn out the lights, and leave the equation on the board. Someone will erase it in time, but I've memorized it. It will come out later, in words and numbers, translated on a crisp white page in some other form, for someone else to take off a dusty shelf, peruse and plug their own variables into. I hope their answer turns out better than ours.

Trapdoor

With you, the bottom drops out, swings uselessly from my left foot, and everything becomes raw experience, all the sadness and shame and unhappiness consumes me. I become a conduit, a tunnel, something not myself, unnerved, until I remember that this trapdoor business and I close it once more and collect myself. And then I am collecting experience once more.

Current

Skittery across wavelines, turbulence, skipping off the atmosphere, bounce a red-hot discus shielding you from the rest of the currents. Treetop foam, detritus picked up and laid on seaside graves from the previous epoch. Windflow, art tunnel, cresting in a 2-D front stirred rapidly around cellbands, settling down in a dinnerplate where two months from now leaves will decorate the cracked concrete: the anticipation, the knowledge of what will be, the settling sun, the autumnal.

Aftershock

There it was again: another quake deep within my core, rumbling to the surface, as those memories and moments and that sense of profound loss; how could she let that go? stands in confusion as the ground once more stabilizes, but I get the sense that any answer I receive will never be truly satisfying.

And the world continues, since no one feels that quake but me.

Colophon

created in collaboration with claude

© 2003-2026 Scott Jason Cohen