( via / me )

Procrustean turn for this timeline, i'm all popcorn.

"If cancer did not swim in the same sea as us, we might admire it, as we admire sharks." —Geoff Ryman

This would indicate to me the existence of a complex society to acculturate to. Probably had schools, intellectuals, & bloggers.

"Against Refrain

The sound of someone learning to dance
again

A marionette’s awakening
and flexing of limbs that chafe
like wooden chimes

A song whose feet are bare
the better they might balance on each
root-note that appears

The sound of breath not quite controlled—
not quite the concertina
but the bellows

      *

Perhaps this coal-dragged dancer fought
the wrong side of a war

and spared from swinging
punishes herself

by limping through a regimen
of grace

      *

Or maybe this benighted piece
was once contender for
the National Anthem

and it would take some dusting off
to rescue from the hiss
another turn

      *

The sound of someone learning to dance
again

a novel world
of novel gravity
entangling her

Like dreams in which we try
to wade through water—
dreams in which the mind maintains
it can command the body
with even less of a claim

And so this former dancer finds
herself as just another
dream refiner

But clad in the state of the novel art—
a deepsea diver of empty heavens—
she listens for the rhythm
of the slipstream
of her pulse

the only sound she can
and must keep close

as with no atmosphere
there is no noise

      *

A murder of crows aggressively clears
its throat and shuffles up and down
a gutter like the brim of an old
hat (though everything is old
compared to Aves’ death-defying

bounds!)

      *

The sound of someone learning to dance
against refrain

the way air resonates
with shaky ground

as ‘dance’ itself reorders the sounds in ‘sound’ "

—@huckastley

"Authors have always elided reality, shoving their means of survival into the background so as to give over more words to other subjects. But in doing so they can sometimes accidentally give us the impression that they are floating above normal life, rather than engaging with it."