THE LECTURE ON SLEEP

didn’t see it. so
what blanked flash
or mower in bandana

casting gas exhaust,
pollen dross, garbage,
the maintained look

of marketable lawns.
i lay there counting
songs out, out of

luck, love, shifted
wherever inner away
from, against, beside

oneself again to say
how it ends up, how
it guts, a best of.

*

slept the clock
later each day until
circled again, fuck

it, spent, left
off unending, in-
tensity of presences

facing eyes & mind, or
long drift outward,
worn, wherever.

alone & perfect
with. still knowing
as times in love, a

different circulation
of weeks in gentler
solvents, stayed.

cool slept room
w/ cats or m., a
soft dark mind of

twin-like, possible,
zeroed entrances,
a dogwood luck.

now swallow down
vitamin evening of
array, stilled w/

chance, orbital
& fed. so that is
how, or when,

revolving star,
like summon any
more, you’ll burst.

*

temples alongside
teeth, the rushing
against it, grained

to hallucinate meat,
a red picture of
the virus, the

synapse, as sleep
the murdered king.
no shot, ungloved.

as shovels, bid to.
a deprived eye is
a torsion, concentration’s

rationed breath.
dream then, a bandage
in a phase, a cup

as morning drains
against the torso’s
flux, acetylene.

*

floors, over and over,
as light grew, thinning
periphery until

defeat bad dreaming,
hearing my head
evolve, past its

life to find in
understanding it,
as the forgotten

longs, an eyelid
open inward for
suns, outward in

aberrations held, to
say it simply,
a person,

adrift in hours,
how music knows it,
how it clears.

THE OTHER CENTURY

1.

The document is compiled of accidents.
Old laughter gets twisted and abused

and entered as state’s evidence. Somehow,
out of this, a new cinema. Out of this,

a market for miasmas, mysteries, penance.
Thus, she reads the stars. Hesperus, Phosphorus.

Thus, Lucifer is only her mask. And on she goes,
attracting pupils to the rigors of her dream.

2.

In the long hours in detention, you wonder.
In the past, you guided pilgrims to the remains
where nothing is left but a manual. It was brittle.
Its edges were stained (the thumbs of lifetimes,
not so many, not so long ago). This bunker
is a schoolroom in a distant childhood.
Cobwebs of lust veil your eyes as you watch
old calendars spill out through spools of celluloid.
Child clowns collide with actresses, alien manipulations
of your heartbeat begin to feel like an alias. Like credit.

3.

Now they run the reel back.

4.

This was a time of replications, of erogenous mirrors.
Minds consumed the blueprints of other people’s
needs and fears. It was the basis of new gods & art forms—

we watched them pour through bodies like a snow of static.
But these are only formulae, bare ingredients, a recitation
in absentia. As we summon the names, we enter the last

of the American cities—a world once only a figure.
Those of us now charged with its invention, those of us
who deny such charges, we distrust the very mechanism.

We’ve all grown sick of this. There is nothing left to know.
A disheveled rag hid my neck and you calmed me, asleep.
The sick tulip scent of my tattooed eyelids, closing. Closed.

RM Haines runs Dead Mall Press and can be found on Instagram at @rmhaines.etc.