She was a lush, autonomous isle.1
She was an Umayyad castle, in Syrian sands.
She was a cat, napping, in afternoon sun.
*
She took an interest in labyrinths.
She took an interest in natural forms.
She took an interest in cascades, and Neolithic cave art.
*
She took an interest in concepts like Spirit, Essence, Oneness, Grace.
Like Innocence, Love, Forgiveness, Desire.
*
She believed in connection.
She believed in being free.
Reconciling this paradox?
Was the essence of the vital.
*
She enjoyed drawing throughlines.
She was detective of her dreams.
She was bullish on the future of yoghurt drinks.
She was bullish on folk music, witch house, pectoral massage, and post-institutional patrons.
She offered unfiltered honesty to premium subscribers.
She was sometimes linked to the New Romantics.
She was an LA girly at heart.
*
She lived in the Age of Glass.
She lived in the age of screens, silica, fiber-optic cables.
She lived in an age of images.
She lived in the age of window-shop.
She lived in an age of mirrors and cameras.
Words were weaponized in covert conflicts.
*
She believed in Know thyself.
She believed in God both Personal and Universal.
She believed that others’ opinions were only ever funhouse mirrors.
She believed she had something to say to a sick world.
What was the world sick with?
Guilt, among other things.
*
She had gone down on herself in a dream.
She enjoyed the effects of estrogen.
She enjoyed sleeping naked in the sun.
*
She had grown up in an Enya household.
Her father was a Spiritualist.
Her childhood pulsed with witchcraft and high-ether magic.
She knew that Man was the dream of the Dolphin.
*
She was in Venice the first time she smoked from an apple.
Her high school iPod had looped “Return to Innocence” for hours.
She had tuned her attention to the unseen realms.
*
She’d never gone to college.
She made it through her twenties with Autonomy and Grace.
Being loose came easy to her.
She didn’t need drink to relax.
*
She’d developed a language with the invisible.
She was assisted by Don Miguel Ruiz, Ram Dass, Eckhart Tolle, Deepak Chopra, and Thích Nhất Hạnh.
She was assisted by Rumi, Shel Silverstein, and The Little Prince.
She was assisted by Alejandro Jodorowsky, Clarice Lispector, Milan Kundera, and Koren’s Wabi-Sabi (侘び寂び).
By a childhood bestie, and a high school sex-ed.
(Her teacher, a closeted syncretist.)
*
She observed the Four Agreements:
To not make assumptions;
To not take it personal;
To be impeccable with her word;
To always give her best.
*
She dwelt in the throes of exquisite pain and fiery absorption.
She had experienced ecstasies corporal, chemical, consecrated.
She set her handle to “sighswoon”—all lowercase—across her platforms.
She kept a careful ambivalence to the source of her pleasure.
*
She believed in possession by spirits.
She was a skeptic of the supernatural.
She searched for psychical mechanism.
*
She had been entered by God.
The moment was captured on film.
Heaving bosom, heavy exhalations.
Bernini’s Teresa.
Religion was tech.
Spirit was juggling air.
*
She took stock of her blessings.
She wrote poems to her teenage self.
She believed in the power of invisible whys.
*
She took cursèd walks.
She practiced Prospect and Refuge.
She believed in seeing without being seen.
She wore sunglasses, over-ear headphones, hoodie often up.
*
She watched her shadow.
She listened to music that made her feel like a fairy prevailing.
She found messages in curbside book titles, abandoned childrens’ toys, and sidewalk chalk.2
*
She began collecting Yu-Gi-Oh! cards, for use in divination.
She acquired Falling Current, Crystal Release, and Mirror Force.
*
She believed in hemispheric sleep.
She believed in sleeping with an eye open.
She took cold showers.
She strove to stay an open channel.
She followed Wim Hof.
She relished winter’s void.
She attended a school of seance and trance.
Someone had cured their tendonitis.
She was agnostic on the topic.
Of communion with the dead.
*
She dabbled in painting.
She pondered the void.
She studied Surrealists.
She had developed a sweet-tooth for phanerothymes.
*
Words were a kind of force.
They were the central tool of magic.
She brought her message online.
*
She got high off the morning’s first coffee.
She approached her work in a spirit of play.
She listened to her body.
She was all body, or:
Sometimes, she disbelieved she had one.
*
Sighing and swooning were stages of a shapeshifting arc.
The highest of highs?
Followed by thoughts of proceeded dying.
Work, like all things, progressed in slow cycles:
Mountain and valley; basin and range.
*
She was a young poet.
She read Rilke in the midst of pandemic, days before a 26th birthday.
*
She attended Urbit Week, in Lisbon.
Her fans bemoaned her rightward arc.
She watched KIRAC on a projector.
She wanted to clear their high bar.
*
She had retained her hippy sensibility—even in a warzone.
She scrawled out fears into miniature notebooks.
It was a means for affirming their smallness.
*
Culture was a series of word games.
One side won today; another tomorrow.
She posted in a spirit of wonder and love.
She knew the need for a message that torqued.
*
She authored a patchwork language.
She was eclectic at heart.
The words were ancient and cryptically new.
Her brain was a system of symbols.
Stories the language of mind.
*
Dating terms were profane—creeps and cancels—body count and icks; instead an astral chess, a quest, a chest, a chased to chaste, a castle; kerchief and a veil.
*
She wrote: “Make doctors healers again.”
She was thinking of sickness of spirit.
She was thinking of Keats, poet-physician.
Or James, the psycho-philosopher.
She was thinking of Céline, novelist-doctor.
Or Rabelais, medic and priest.
*
She gulped her water.
She used her loo for meditation.
Excretions of psychic waste chased.
Excretions of physical matter.
*
She channeled abundance.
She worked to recast her emotions.
She was grateful for salami.
She was grateful for hot guys in Hanes briefs.
She was grateful for black yoga pants, and the music of Modest Mouse.
*
Her life was soaked in warm & natural light.
She owned a gold-framed, ovoid wall-mirror.
She owned a standing full-length, tombstone-shaped.
*
She burned sage to fix her fridge.
She cast spells to evict a roommate.
It ended poorly.
She was punished for use of dark magic.
When she was young, she’d made a doll of a neighbor.
She had stuck pins in its feet.
She renounced such efforts at Other-control.
Self-control?
Was the only kind.
*
She ate apples and planted their seeds.
Seated she dwelled on new & needed futures.3
She rang a bell in clockwise motion, metal stirred in sets of three.
*
She objected to the label of “pseudoscience.”
All knowledge started imprecise and introspective.
She chose her symbols for their personal meaning.
Success could be a running water or a two-buck bill.
*
She believed in sowing friendships.
She believed in watering friendships.
She believed in showing thanks.
*
She believed in letting go.
She believed in disarmament.
Emotional, that is.
All of life was mere experiment.
Change was the only constant.
Even science was aware of its ever-shifting nature.
There were only ever Theories.
There was only Teresa’s breviary prayer.
Nada te turbe, nada te espante.
Todo se pasa, Dios no se muda.
*
Making love was an art of pure breath & nerve.
Authors were hypnotists, turning the eyes into spirals.
She kept a book of lightweight poems in her bag.
She kept a heavy one up on her table, morning café read.
She used colored pencils to annotate text.
“A pen is like a knife
and a pencil is an unkept promise
and a highlighter’s like a bucket of water.”
*
She developed a vocal fry.
She was the target of resentment.
Language was a system of spellcasting.
Her throat was her most active chakra.
*
The Web became her sketchpad.
The pattern of speech was mimed by other Angelenos.
*
She believed in talking to strangers.
She practiced stoop-sit.
She saw portals in ceilings and walls.
She gazed at the neighborhood from her watchtower.
She was addicted to perspective.
It was important to honor your madness.
She felt God in the quiet, when engines were off.
*
She ‘casted on The Guiding Light of Lao Tzu.
She quoted Heraclitus in her Tweets.
She published a light collection of poems.
She titled it Notes on Shapeshifting.
*
She studied her haters.
Everything was research.
Hating? Was a short-term high.
She was inspired by pop songs.
She practiced transmutations of spirit.
“Why you keep wasting your energy?
Never let them draw out the energy.
They just want you fall ‘cause their jealousy.”4
*
The social world a world of warcraft.
Social life, an inexact science.
She believed in the power of context.
She believed in getting to the truth.
*
Earth was a planet of spirits with a passion for theater.
All mirrors were funhouse.
The Net was a social sim.
“Never let others define you.”
She’d seen celebs spun out before by baseless critics.
Stories that made you smaller and weaker?
“That’s an attack.”
Ruiz helped her build her shield.
*
She learned to shoot a handgun.
Letters arrived in labyrinths and stars.
She filmed herself dancing immaculate-stoned.
*
She returned to the Mother Country.
She went full fannypack.
She drove through the jungle.
She wore a desert-camo cap.
*
She woke to watch the sunrise, and admire her hips.
She watched her shadow play in orange-pink, early a.m. light.
She watched her silhouette against a fawn’s splayed-spotted hide.
*
Her Father was a teacher.
She saw that now.
Her parents’ home was full of symbols.
A cross, a horseshoe, and a seahorse.
Colibri and Lotto receipts.
She ate arroz de feijão.
A bird cage swung.
Christian tins and melon abacate.
*
She saw the sun in an egg yolk.
Eyes in her afternoon onion.
New earrings changed her life.
She described her 29th year as “psychedelic” and “folkloric.”
She’d come to Earth to have nipples, eat mangoes, and get off birth control.
Shame was the lowest vibration.
*
She identified as clearpilled.
She identified as post-partisan.
She identified as a tumblrgirl and a cyborg.
*
She turned 30 in a hotel room.
She posted photos of herself in the bath.
There was a necessary narcissism, to the art of the Influencer.
When she stepped on the dance floor, it was purely for herself.
*
Edibles, eaten bimonthly, healed her.
Lasers removed the old tattoo.
She guarded her alone-time.
Being Herself was her Religion.
She listened to ABBA.
She ran experiments living offline.
*
She re-invested in Toltec wisdom.
She saw her words in Hilma’s pages.
She sought a timeless way of seeing.
Indians invented zero.
They were aware of the void.
*
Nothing beat the vibe of a boutique health shop.
She played “California” from Blue, flying back to L.A.
“Still a lot of lands to see… /
Oh but California I’m coming home.”
*
She was fiscally self-sufficient.
She lived by the grace of attention.
She was reliant on her fans.
*
She kissed the rain.
She did not want to carry the race; she had no need for child.
She wished to travel strange terrains, and swim and read and heal.
Her lover hoped to hunt and saw and hike around the world.
*
She had set a wordy seed in soil.
Now its stamen wooed the sun, so:
Someone, somewhere would remember:
sighswoon
As the sky took charge:
Relâmpago; murciélago:
A pastureland enfouldered.
*
The rain came fast and hard for twenty minutes.
Then it stopped, and stooped, and prayed.
*
…como un fruto
que madura hacia dentro de sí mismo
y a sí mismo se bebe y se derrama
el instante translúcido se cierra
y madura hacia dentro, echa raíces,
crece dentro de mí, me ocupa todo…5
Chesterton: “The lights of the city begin to glow like innumerable goblin eyes, since they are the guardians of some secret… Every twist of the road is like a finger pointing to it; every fantastic skyline of chimney-pots seems wildly and derisively signalling the meaning of the mystery... There is no stone in the street and no brick in the wall that is not actually a deliberate symbol—a message from some man, as much as if it were a telegram or a post-card. The narrowest street possesses, in every crook and twist of its intention, the soul of the man who built it, perhaps long in his grave. Every brick has as human a hieroglyph as if it were a graven brick of Babylon; every late on the roof is as educational a document as if it were a slate covered with addition and subtraction sums.”
“Rites required written incantation. / Gratitude was offered. / Statements of intent.”
Pa Salieu, “Energy.”
Octavio Paz, Piedra de Sol.
This was deliciously, cunningly satisfying. It was interesting to see her not only complexity but also change over the duration of the piece (even though a temporal sequence is not explicitly suggested). She oscillated between an image and a person in fascinating ways, and I also noted how I was totally on her side until the single line of her rightward drift, and then suddenly I turned against her even though nothing about her personality really changed—I find this reaction SO fascinating.