your body, the drain plug,
that climactic days of a day
murky sweet strawberry milk water
ebbs and sways
around, surrounds, and surmounts you

Your body the dumping ground
for pretty poppy seeds
seep, steep
seeded somewhere deep

as

synthetic stinging metaphor rain
pours on your mistreated singing skin
spotted, dotted, synaptic rule
akin to lemon poppy seed muffin tops
your head- a top
spins round
and mimics
never-ending bath drain whirlpool

ambulances and ambivalences soundtrack
this nocturne
night of a morning
mourning already
my poor lost sister
a little less than intact
lost in her head
I'm loosing her

and she's nodding

            and she's nodding

                          and she's nodding

                                    and she's nodding
and she nods
and grumbles,
fumbles for words that aren't there
four words that aren't there
forward isn't there

because what do you say
about matters
when your high
and breathing last breaths overlapping
in humble showers
in heart crumbling nakedness
your faithlessness trapping
murky sweet strawberry milk waters.

You weren't sure when you knew it. You weren't sure where it came from. But sooner than later it enveloped you. It was your calling. No words, nothing written. Just a sense, a feeling that permeated your being. And finally you knew. No ambiguities, no uncertainties, no ambivalences. Just truth. It was intuition. No manuals, no table of contents. No advanced degrees required. It was your life, the rest of your life. It was the reason you were born. It was the reason you were on Earth. It was your destiny. There is nothing more to say except to follow it, your calling.

TOD HOWARD HAWKS

In the singularity
perfectly good poems
are being written by laughing
and crying machines
washing machines and dryers
about their daily tasks
and ambivalences
which will be indistinguishable
from those of future
farmers and philosophers.

In the singularity
evolution can be said
to be the master sorter of data
as in the factories
of the suns
where protons are smashed together
and unusual weather patterns
make consciousness a candidate
interesting for its complete dependence
on the substrate of the brain and body.

In the singularity
everything anyone once did
always remains current
as if invented yesterday
for an immediate purpose
such as curing cancer
although that may be unnecessary
to achieving immortality
i.e. the happiness one feels
the day before thanksgiving.

Jenny Xie

Never mind the distances traveled, the companion
she made of herself. The threadbare twenties not
to be underestimated. A wild depression that ripped
from January into April. And still she sprouts an appetite.
Insisting on edges and cores, when there were none.
Relationships annealed through shared ambivalences.
Pages that steadied her. Books that prowled her
until the hard daybreak, and for months after.
Separating new vows from the old, like laundry whites.
Small losses jammed together so as to gather mass.
Stored generations of filtered quietude.
And some stubbornness. Tangles along the way
the comb-teeth of the mind had to bite through, but for what.
She had trained herself to look for answers at eye level,
but they were lower, they were changing all the time.

From Eye Level (Graywolf Press, 2018). Copyright © 2018 by Jenny Xie. Used with the permission of Graywolf Press.

That’s my take on life.

It’s like finding a beautiful old diary in an abandoned house, only to realise…it belonged to someone who died tragically.
It’s like accidentally stumbling on something morbid (say this poem haha), that hopefully, ends up changing your perspective in an oddly fascinating way.
In an oddly, maybe, for the better way. For the experiences you’ve made. For the possibility to reflect. Grateful for the transformation nonetheless.

Serendipitously morbid, that’s my take on the world…and I am starting to think that’s alright.

I AM NOT advocating for a bleak view of life, please DO seek out its joys, for they stay scarce sometimes. What I am advocating for, is the quiet beauty, hidden in moments that ache.

I am advocating, to not too quickly blame ourselves for having those morbid thoughts or for being pessimistic sometimes. That it’s alright to not see the endgame sometimes.

At least that’s what I think. I think acknowledging the constant tension of both extremes and learning to accept the ambivalences of life (in their truest, overwhelming forms) is simply seeing it for what it is.

Seeing it for what it is, in my opinion…is the beauty in finding the will, to want to see it through. The beauty in believing in a higher Power, in love, in happy endings and most of all learning to believe in Yourself.

We are thrown into this world, with no idea whatsoever of; what is to come, how to go about going there or where THERE, even is. The world just continues to run its imperfect course and no one has the script for it.

To be completely honest, I really like having scripts for things.
TIS(-m) the way I have functioned most of my life. So, I too am learning to adapt to the ambivalences of this Serendipitously Morbid life. Learning to revert from the B&W thinking.

Yours in brighter days,
Namib Dusk