music borrows a body

Songs that have been lighting me up recently (and loosely inspired me to write this small morsel that began as a reminder/gush of admiration for how modern poetry has taught and is continuing to teach me to throw over my old notions of what *proper* writing is. From there, it sort of devolved into a little rumination on how we experience all life through limits – such as our bodies or really anything that exists in the world – and how even art must obey this creed either through noise or material objects):

“Smoking Section” and “Los Ageless” by St. Vincent 

“Francis Forever” and “Crack Baby” by Mitski 

“Lady Day” by Frank Sinatra 

“I’m So Afraid” by Fleetwood Mac

But the no rules, the no structure no gimmicks no innovation or uniqueness committed in the *right way*. Freedom. Its clean conic inhale and divine snap. Clean, like dust swept invisible. Perhaps I can now see the page as some writhing globulus deity and not fear its judgement. Like heat waves, mud. The uncertainty, infinite and molten silk, prison wide as me, I now want to see every shape natural and manmade as confinement. Even music, noise, is pitched to us in silicone casing, sound’s crosshatch hairs burning up themselves with fuse-like obedience, how they branch, trailing parts fading proofless, fading until they’ve traveled to and reached that finger-tip needle cell tower, punctum where that last rioting grain of them can still be heard. Extending past themselves to absence. Until they’re through with themselves or the shapes.

Here is what I’m trying to say: I’m no different from them, the notes in a song. My body is filled with color to define my casing, where my lines stop and every space without me in the world starts. My skin, my fizzling constellation web, my atlas perfect of every square inch the world can touch me and I would feel them. And the one-thousand miles twisting rope in me I can’t feel. Terrifyingly foreign. I feel tar rivers braiding, sewing through the reptile gaps to an eyeless rhythm, like the slide of muscles in a body sighing, the rhythm like echoes from the womb. These invaders, no more akin to me than the blind meat-inflated carnivores of the deep-sea are akin to fish. But I accept. All of it. Every bone and arrowhead, crystal and feather,  in this museum. My inventory can be numbered, and I know that number is small, feels like a false narrative. I accept. All the unseen monster fish breathing in me and keeping me alive too. I adopt them and give them names. Because what else in this world can I claim as me other than the body I feel in? I can only ever talk about sight in relation to seeing through my eyes. But without? Can I ever receive something unsealed?

 Imagine a bodiless sight, not of this planet or any, something closer to a galaxy’s yawn, dreams, the steeping kaleidoscope brew appearing only when balled fists press gently on lids. Careful not to fall through that color like infinity. Like never was and never again.

And soon. A day I’ll see unbridled, aidless from light.