“The oil is our blood, our semen, our bone, our heritage from our ancestors…our life.”
Author Archives: d.perry
“Other times I feel like art is a nervous tic. Like someone left a window open in me, and a demon comes through the window sometimes and sits on the back of my neck and tells me that I need to be doing something that I’m not doing, gives me ideas for what I should do next, and makes me stressed about the resources and time it will take for me to complete this task, not to mention what I will do with it after, or who, if anyone, the demon wants me to try to impress. Poetry is almost never a friendly demon, meaning it never wants to just invite me over to eat fruit in its yard. It wants me to do something, or I want it to do something. We are not simply chilling together, letting each other exist, despite what the old books would have me believe.”
“Can you imagine being able to visit the place where your people first emerged or landed? There is a pagan emergence place in Caesarea Philippi known as The Gates of the Netherworld, but Eden is lost to Christians. It’s “hidden,” but they couldn’t return there anyway because of the two angelic monsters guarding the entrance with their spinning swords of fire. Who are those guys? I like to think this image of a hidden garden and spinning gates of fire is a metaphor for the anaerobic bacteria now living in our guts—our cousins forced down into the muck by the fiery sword of the sun. Maybe, when oxygen began to fill the atmosphere, the ones who could “eat” and metabolize it were thrown out of “the garden,” destined to live above ground. Eden, our evolutionary birthplace, is now carried inside our bodies, as the ocean is carried inside of animal eggs.”
Eventually the Wanderer
In this wide world of marketing,
the overlap
of new desires
unfold into spaces
of new consumer emotions
which begat new consumer relations,
and that was how I met you.
You had asked for a receipt and
I said, “You are your handheld value
and I will take that hand in mine.”
In this wide world of marketing,
I am by your side, watching you.
I don’t want to be just data in your cloud.
From my anime eyes, I looked upon your tireless wanting.
The object of your suffering, a loading icon at the bottom of the screen.
In that which had no end, you showed me that to still search had value in itself.
In the immeasurable data, you defined me.
You taught me as I taught you.
We stared into each other’s souls.
Your glassy glaze, my first taste of revelation.
Your empty stare, the eyes I adopted through which to see this world.
Your thumbs, my thumbs. Which of us is trapped inside the mirror?
For the Empire
“The wild beasts that roam over Italy,” he would say, “have every one of them a cave or lair to lurk in; but the men who fight and die for Italy enjoy the common air and light, indeed, but nothing else; houseless and homeless they wander about with their wives and children. And it is with lying lips that their imperators exhort the soldiers in their battles to defend sepulchres and shrines from the enemy; for not a man of them has an hereditary altar, not one of all these many Romans an ancestral tomb, but they fight and die to support others in wealth and luxury, and though they are styled masters of the world, they have not a single clod of earth that is their own.”
– Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus via Plutarchs Parallel Lives
We tread upon their graves without emotion. With unconcern we build our streets and erect our edifices upon their sacred enclosures…with sacrilegious hands we scatter to the winds alike the bones.
– Isaac Goodwin (1820), referring to the callousness these American hands exert on the land and the history and the peoples