Absence unshadows its own agenda. What is used as a tool of listening besides ear, what is the architecture of thought, what if an internal haptic sensation found an outside to articulate itself in? To denote timbre of voice as a measurement of time; to use the landscape of different timbres to construct time outside of itself.
Things are always happening “at once.” At the end of her introductory note to The Weatherman Turns Himself In, Leslie Scalapino remarks “the designated parts are not characters, but rather ‘interior’ conversation (‘seeing’ one’s own thought), speaking outside and viewing inside. Viewing text itself.” An attempt at, in her words, “speaking…as actual social action”
The Orchids were a Glaswegian band founded in 1985 who had a series of singles on Bristol-based indie label Sarah Records, named for the song of the same name by London experimental/psychedelic/industrial band Psychic TV, which appeared on 1983’s Dreams Less Sweet. The album art depicts an electric green and white orchid with its reproductive organ pierced in the manner of a human genital piercing.
I first heard The Orchids’ buzzy, melancholy single “It’s Only Obvious” on a Sarah Records compilation in college; then, a Califone cover of the aforementioned Psychic TV song on their 2006 album Roots and Crowns. Tim Rutili, “frontman” of Califone, once told me outside of a show at The Bell House, that the next Califone album would be entitled Diaper House In Autumn (it wasn’t).
This poem is an attempt at the Sisyphean tendency of the human mind to actualize connections, and that internal voices acting as “limbs” actualize real measurements of time which call for their own public. “Walk up to the same snake, get bit, die.” And then get born again.
Ryan Skrabalak most recently wrote National Lube (speCt!, 2024) and The Technicolor Sycamore 10,000 Afternoon Family Earth Band Revue (Ursus Americanus, 2024), among other chapbooks. He lives in “Kingston, New York,” where he runs and edits Spiral Editions, a poetry press.
