from Stranded, Together

HUE:

I wake at 4am thinking about my job

can’t go back to sleep

work taking time from life / takes time from sleep

takes sleep from life

No matter how often I see my friends I wonder where are my friends. Which of them, who, and why? When I die I’ll be released from my body — the brain, a part that fails sometimes, works hard on insignificant things, short-circuited, circular edging, distracted maneuvers. The way some people need a kind of amplified conflict in order to feel okay, to feel close to others, in order to go on. My need to not have amplified conflict — that messy kind you can’t extricate from. I’m there I’m there on the other side each time back again I try from another angle. In the glass, I look. It hurts to know.

“Sometimes I think I want something more than most people think is possible.”

The dawn pulls itself up

through windows

Hue, we’ll be here all night—

It could carry on well into the next day

With the dawn ever upon us

Are you listening, Venn lies on the ground with an arm swaying in the air, lets it flop down and asks, to everyone, in the frame.

CHASE:

If you hold your thumb down for long enough

— see someone squirming under it

You’d have to bother to look

See how you hover over another?

Nobody wants to see that!

Everyone is lying under others’ thumbs

writhing there — that is what they see

The writhing I’ve done, sure I’ve screamed about it all—

slurred and spat my hardships, a fair share

Now I breathe it out — processed

Still hurts, but it’s mine

The square has changed. The stage, no longer —

I spit into the mouths of others without their knowing it

They slurp their tongues into mine when I’m most unaware

Everything left to destroy — plus destroying itself — the ALL of it

The thing about glass, so breakable. A foul shit clogged mind is the tricky thing,

Chase

says,

Trust is gone

but I saved a little for you

Wonder if you’ll have any to spare yourself

for another—

the thorn at the side bites

point to the originator of the thorn, ok

can’t stop talking about it, dead writing—

but friend, what would you do without that thorn?

you’d be like them

HUE:

I know, I’m supposed to not care. Or perform a knowing. At least I could pretend. Everyone’s made of the same stuff, differently arranged — you’re drawn to one and repelled by another, it all depends on where you’re at in the moment, that’s it, do you match compositionally? in most cases it's not the content of what's being said—

You hate seeing yourself in there. You’re obsessed with the aspects of yourself that you hate. So you hate the person who externalizes it. Also you’re drawn to them. You think about them a lot. It’s sensual. You want the stuff they have — you have it too. You hate the stuff they do — it’s also yours. It shows up differently. It shows you up.

Syd Staiti is the author of The Undying Present (Krupskaya, 2015).