Some editing difficulties.
First the image of the text in the layout I wanted, then the text.
You can click on the image to see it large enough to read.
See my comment on the post for an explanation of my intent with the layout.
Waking
confused by the break of one world and another
all our objects without context
We might choose the butterfly
or
sudden trauma
gasping like fish
while our bodies
cease function
or
disengagement
our bodies strong
while we forget them
or resent them
all the parts of us are barely linked to will
and fingers may grasp for food while the thoughts eat dust
and what will lay us low?
today and in the coming days, and all the days
and at the moments of our individual ends
which moments are the making of collective ending
our hives and tribes and planetary organs
what will it be
which consequence of thought or action or of stillness
might cast us beneath those sands
over whose grains and composite body tread, even now,
the feet of the spirits of observers unborn:
the ghosts who haunt us most faithfully,
who will remember "Who will remember"
as we walk under arches of broken Rome
or Pueblo Grande
as we pore on our own archaeologies, letters boxed and booked,
we inhabiting as in dreams as in possession as in haunting
those ghosts who we haunted
when they cast us
in their own prayers
and we answer them
too late
as we will be answered
or unanswered
and knowing this -
The layout here is born out of something I've been thinking on for a few years, where the lines are arranged so that they can be read in different directions, different structures which are part of a whole but where the mini-structures comment on one another or the whole,
ReplyDeleteand I think this is the most success I've had with that layout, in that this can be read typical across-fashion, including all lines as though the spacing were not present, and the right-displaced lines can be read as a piece which contains the larger body, and the whole piece can be read as though the right-displaced lines were not present, without the lines losing sense, but losing some content and gaining other. I'd like to play more with it but disciplined exploration isn't usually my MO, so we'll see.