Forthcoming in Vestiges_05: Lacunae
Surveillance Recollected in Tranquility
Swept again by air-
born spotlights
while evolving
the expansive redundancy
of a walk to the corner
the words would
be if they allowed
my rights to pass
into the world with
half as much
solidity-unimpeded-
by-weight as adorns
the vaguely threatening
abstractions of planned
movement keeping
the police helicopter
tied to its circulating
tether like a memory
game made didactic
by the monetization of
time into habit’s need
to catch its ever-
receding end.
I think I have
a right to consider
confusion a brand
of clarity why can’t I
see it into an overture
of kind distance
where the day-quickening
compression of things
renders a reflective
opacity––not to see
yourself in, but to
realize you, as language, are.
Or are like––as rights
are metaphors for
an autonomy birth-
written in the sky before
the ground congealed
its own availability as streets
to be swept for culpritized
trajectories. Also I think
I have a right not
to brutalize my life
with jagged impulse
and to sit with salubrious remove
above the surfaces slashed red
with some conglomerate’s
exclamated variation
on a theme of a moralized timeline.
It’s for momentum’s sake
I lose myself, maybe borrow
you if that’s a right I can
manifest by speaking––
speaking here meaning
writing in the sense
that writing even in relative
silence feels loud
and resonant with a duration
metaphor wants me
to call breathing.
Though that wanting
itself is a metaphor,
every vivid footnote
concluding with an
open movement
concealed by repetition,
which increasingly
resembles conflict,
conjunction, a folding
back of locality
onto its appearance
and see here I am
confused having
arrived somewhere again
where the fissure you are
refracts a sound that feels
like a forgiven debt
Field of Voiding
Swept again by air-
born spotlights
while reproducing
a walk to the corner
and half as much
into an agreement
with pace I feel
like generating
consequences,
evolving an ever-
receding end
for a world
solidity adorns
unimpeded by
weight or circulation.
I think I had time
to tie the day to rendering
a culprit for the sake
of clarity or ability
as streets to re-
solve into opacity
in sequence or clearing
out the stops to find
your inner practical
bundle is missing a floor,
threatening a life
as an acquittal
of incorrigible swagger
slept or composed
as interim waging
space against windows
condoning metaphor
from one air into another
to field or void the question
To field or void
I had wanted to be
expunged of spacing
and all rights passing
into the world,
cornered to reproduce
fixtures, honorable
to be austere
but still aimless, no
wood to chop no
circuits to bend
into a tenure
a job a day a life
like swinging all
of empty space over
your shoulder
and bringing it down
to split the wedge
that exists between
you and it
––this expansive
redundancy of a walk
to the corner––
then swept again
with planned compressions
of movement
rendered in jagged
impulse and bartered
for duration, a sake
for the distance of wealth
with views upon unfolding
back to the point
of meeting security
through obscurity
While you call
that a day steps
from the manifest
disavowing mutinous
hinges, advised
to melt into a task
should content
imperfectly arise.
That our new functions
wait for better
distractions and love
unbreakable by
postponement––
possible stunts
of dimension, thought
in a full mood
backing into the backing up
to half-establish continuity.
Just here to make
an honest living
with sophisticated techniques
and a waning signature.
It’s true the rules
read like lineated weather
but why charge the line
why charge the line
when the line can’t pay?
About Looking
Looked at or
over, the year
was opening
vast and full
of angled things,
here-ish and
buffered by
layers of light
hovering. Leaning
into format’s
blank, blinking
the first line’s
slope to another
area’s care-
fully ravaged
brunt to buzz
a day’s half-
commitment
to jotting
remissions.
This was
the harmony I
wanted on repeat
for the rest
of my life, color
imparting a muted
yes to identity
as naturally
occurring filter.
It forms a room
you interstice in
to make visible.
And as it goes
I’m all corners
today, singing
documents to
forge occupied
space, laddered
through with
pastoral smirks
of content, pre-
histories of
prayer and sun-
burn felt as in-
formation’s twist
of impetus.
The walls say
we’re here to be
restructured,
forwarded and
awash in proxies
taking the inter-
personal heat
for our con-
figurations,
torquing whimsy
or dimension
to spread
discontinuum
for the eyes’
horizoning.
If I knew
what it meant
I would make
a home of it
then invite
you in to
confound
its rooms
with your
overlapping
and your
shadows
—
Jeremy Hoevenaar lives in a barrel with his beautiful family. He is the author of Cold Mountain Mirror Displacement (American Books, 2013), Our Insolvency (Resolving Host, 2016), and Insolvency, Insolvency! (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2017). Writing has appeared in The Recluse, The Brooklyn Rail, 6×6, Elderly, ‘Pider, Across the Margin, The Believer, and other publications. New work is forthcoming in Prelude and in the anthology Ritual and Capital (Wendy’s Subway/Bard Graduate Center). He’s currently at work on a collection of lyric essays about debt, thresholds, obsessive compulsive disorder, online shopping, and John Carpenter’s The Thing.