Unidentified Feeling Obelisk
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Transcript of Unidentified Feeling Obelisk
[2]
Unidentified Feeling Obelisk
(a sequel to Unidentified Feeling Observatory)
© 2015 by Logan Ellis
[3]
unidentified feeling:
1. an intangible & unnamed emotional response to a stimulus, inexplicable yet always
prodding, often characterized by birds that fall from flight, half-cooked and still charging
their wings like cell phones plugged in the sky’s outlet
2. a culmination, a belief, a starfish attached to the underbelly of the world
3. a memory scorched into your left tongue
4. beneath the skin, crawling in a machine’s body, travelling inside
[5]
Foreword to another Epilogue
Footprints are an unnecessary remembrance. A tempting turnabout. You drive away from the
point of abduction, making thousands of footprints and leaving the ones you imprinted in the air,
in space. Something dust can’t pretend to resurrect. Whenever you take an elevator, you pretend
it’s made of glass and that you’re looking out over the footsteps you’ve taken to this point, via
airplanes, taxis, piggyback rides. That pad-footed trail. Once, you climbed a cell phone tower,
said you believed in ghost music. Once, you climbed a tree and found a house—always a
daydream. Inside were all the tools you’ve ever needed to build & a safe full of missing teeth—a
dream thing, an ambiguity. When the rain came, everything dissolved—like a bird into night. If
you’ve ever felt a gunshot, it was deep in your sleeping tibia.
A bone. A name. An overwritten memory. A dream.
A bone a name an overwritten memory a dream.
aboneanameanoverwrittenmemoryadream
[6]
This feeling is
a certain level of chemical instruction, the silent type,
extraterrestrials breaking the ice with animals
in trees and burned-out buildings outside your room
while you, from your cradle of silence, memorize the way
their lips move, translate their culture into cobwebs.
All those favorited web pages marked by stars
brighter than the halo of explosions beestung
to floating discs in the sky; all those superstitions
you let tell you who's more alive,
leaving you dumb and unprepared for
the cocooned insects underneath billboards that break
forth with questions about life and disaster.
Yes, you’ll give them a line, let someone else finish
the definition, and then tell them that's all it is, really,
a beginning that's handed off like hand prints
for millions of others to finish until the final inventor
dies with everyone's smiles job-shadowing a conglomerated face.
The insects just laugh
and go back to sleep.
[7]
This feeling is
static-echo in clamped mouth,
an inarticulate peace,
this fabric whirlwind caught at a stand-
still in the shallow tracks of your corduroys,
a voice flying from a body bag being dragged through the desert,
saying: "where is this going? the number 7
is the most popularly ingested form of luck
while 4 has tangled our narcissisms
independently.”
[8]
This feeling
isn’t real,
can’t be
happening,
electrical cords
twist tied
around your
tongue as your
grammar
is dismembered
and placed,
twitching, on
a funeral pyre
in small glass
boxes,
a contemporary
art exhibit
in a ghost town for
bodiless children to
laugh, learn, adapt—
to find their lips.
[9]
This feeling
got nothing special,
got lips loose enough to resurrect
the lips of dead machines, got wrists
and ankles and every bone that
connects how we lift, land, rotate,
got a face like your hometown (and who
doesn't still live there?), got
that torque effect of
repeating yourself versus getting over it,
the superpower of conjuring fog—
all arrows shattering like home,
all blood types just sinkholes beneath
calm places.
[10]
This feeling is
walk-in cardiac bypass,
grave-digging,
eyes plagiarized &
hoping to meet the coma of you,
the specter of you,
a silent explosion
caught in the ground and
dozens of fingers approaching the sky
while mine stay rapidly still behind my back with a nail file, working
at the dead wings of a thousand butterfly knots.
[11]
This feeling is
inspiration unearthed
from your chest’s ancient Indian burial ground,
duly underlined and highlighted beneath the eyes,
power lines snipped with shears
and the chilled teeth you’ve been saving
in the back of the freezer thawing
like poverty.
It’s
the too-many knuckles
of a single fist rapping against your nicotine cheek.
It’s
a finger dragging
across the dust on your skull,
making a clear path for you to follow.
[12]
This feeling is
a school bus with its back hatch
swung into the fist-grip of morning,
one teenager tumbling out for each
bullet-in-bone clunk of gas prices lowering
cent by cent—
another gunshot whiplash,
another girl lost to self-discovery and acupuncture,
to a cavern of adulthood.
[13]
This feeling is
mermaid dead in the highway, scales
peeled to ribbons like burst tire wrapped
around limbs from the tree trimmers above
who’ve hacked into another
universe, one with mercy
and a weak stomach for the limelight.
[14]
This feeling is
a thousand burned-out stars
hanging in an elevator, waiting for
a power surge, hungry like a
centrifuge w/o the urgency or
a cannibalistic moon, one that
avoids the questions we buzzcut and
broadcast from our heads
and instead rolls treetops into
tight packages
and
false teeth.
[15]
This feeling is
twin heads blooming
from a dry puddle of night,
a long rose balanced between their teeth,
the utterance and grin of romantics
half-alive and half-aware like glass-piece
secrets: the roach in your ventilation, or
money in the pocket, worn in the wash.
The rest of our perils curtsy into a furnace.
I waltz with my hands closed.
[16]
This feeling is
marriage
with a hair
net, an exposed
skull-nest
of hummingbird wings
sutured tight
onto your neck by
frayed-soft
shoelaces.
You spoke to
me in the all too open sound
of sneaker squeaking,
& I
craved the
smell
of burned rubber.
[17]
This feeling is
a secret baby tooth for
the poison as loose and volatile
as an ocean stone
in your mother's hand,
disposed safely by
the tooth fairy
who moves like a smoke-filled room—
a scream in your throat upon waking.
[18]
This feeling is
every awakening
shaking dust from your nose,
a bottle of water
bedside
flavored in nightmares,
the ghost-white of a doctor's glove
maneuvering your chest, turning
every organ into glass
coffins swishing
on the inside with tiny
pieces of the Dead Sea,
tiny girls floating farther out.
[19]
This feeling is
sweet fix—
another baby
born with a
tongue as silver as
its new car,
parental wallets
empty
like a miniature cardiac
arrest.
[20]
This feeling is
bilabial click: strict on the cusp / of tongues split / cleanly in half; /
construction site misdemeanor: rolling / stop and a cat / call from a wolf's / whiskered mouth;
always horny: concrete / split by / jackhammering—
keep going kee p go in g
[21]
This feeling is
sweet, like a dog's
heart open beneath masked
fluorescent lights, like candied amusement park
sweat, like scissors running with
child hands, lifelines sharp enough
to stab them blind if they trip.
[22]
This feeling is
over 99.99% accurate; sea salt;
crooked cranes vomiting above
a convention center for forklifts
foraying and flaying apart
mannequins of last week's lost
word, the one not even a
Walmart cart of hand
mirrors could refract,
colorless, from your mouth,
the one that took a single hand
and pushed itself farther into you.
[23]
This feeling is
spikes in the pores
catching loose skin and spinning it
into sweaty ocean jewels,
a seaside secret tooth beaming
bright like the picket
fence metatarsals reaching from the
sand-skull of ivy,
all the beach umbrellas crying,
“Amen!”
[25]
Is this feeling
balding formaldehyde,
speedreading a nail in the wall that
has lost its painting until it collapses
into rose water?
Is this feeling
spiderwebs in the clothes rack
catching fingers and spinning them into price
tags, chilled and throbbing?
Is / this / feeling
how we revel
like prepaid gas pumps, how we spend
our college funds on perforated words and hand
them to one another in slow motion—
dad, mom, home?
[27]
Intermission (with an exception)
Whisper: Wait. Will you tell? I can’t
give away the receipt of this burden.
Can you tell? The urge to vomit when
asleep. The urge to wake up and pull
the steeping teabag from your throat.
The urge to shut the window when it’s
already shut. The urge to turn off your
phone during a call. Don’t you know yet?
This breeze? I can’t tell. I can’t tell.
Shout: IF IT’S NOT THE CYMBAL
THEN IT’S THE CRASH. IF IT’S
NOT THE FLIGHT THEN IT’S THE
HALF- EATEN BIRD HEAD IN YOUR
HAND. IF IT’S NOT THE HEXAGON
IN YOUR SKULL LIFTING AND
FALLING, FLAPPING IN A LEAD
BREEZE, THEN IT’S THE ALIENS.
IT’S THE NOWHERE NEAR.
[28]
This feeling is
condemned houses waiting
to burst like a chrysalis without
the shine, as colorfully and carefully dead
and uplifting as a plank-bridge in a cemetery,
underwire popping into flesh becoming the new
fashion high—an organ per dress,
a smirk of lightning and blood.
[29]
This feeling is
ass-end,
unconventional,
a paradox boiled down to its basic, dusty elements
of
a spray-paint bottle in the hand
&
graffiti of a naked woman underneath a country bridge,
X's in all the wrong places.
[30]
This feeling is
a window into
the secret part of tomorrow,
loose teeth fondled
under the pillow of a sleepyhead
who has slipped into a desert coma—a
dreamscape painting on fire—and is sinking
slowly through the skyline of a buried-alive city.
Meanwhile, the popcorn ceiling
above his head laughs,
lodging a kernel into the fan,
choking on the entertainment.
[31]
This feeling is
transferring the thorn
from hand to foot,
from nose to eye,
from funny bone to ass cheek,
as delicate and obvious as
a sonnet’s Volta,
the binary volcano
split evenly, the block’s new church
open for business
and their clever billboard psalms
preaching to a truck’s tire tread,
the worn knuckles
of an abrupt sky of wheat
rapping on our flayed heads
to wake up and realize
the names on our bookshelves.
[32]
This feeling is
walking towards you
on the water, dressed
like Jesus wearing
water shoes, open
palms heavy with
chattering removable teeth
devouring hungry birds.
This isn't a philosophy;
eventually all your days will
dwindle on ropes in place
of puppets and a hair
writhing through your
food will become a miracle,
a road sign of hope.
[33]
This feeling is
a cover band of horses mutilating guitar strings
for a ripe-tomato-and-latte
audience—
applause in each hum, neigh, and sip,
the background’s final tambourine hiss
conjuring a snake's dentures.
[34]
This feeling is
the slashed tire of my lips
bleeding rainbows
on the wet asphalt,
our fractured organ of technicolor
intermediary, a run-on,
like the first announcement
of the newest war
and that moment when
everyone looks at each other's
facial muscles and finds
mutual words
tucked in each cheekbone.
[35]
This feeling is
a serving platter of your
nerve endings, cooling
slightly in the air, wriggling
like fish on a hook in the sky,
gobbling all the numbers
and alliteration we’ve thrown
up and didn’t ask to come
down until our umbrellas could finally erupt
and serve as bouncy houses of the brain.
[36]
This feeling is
learning to cartwheel
below a line-up of
symphonic planets who’re all strumming their teeth and deciding
which of your legs kicked them
from your delicious dream last night,
which leg they can tear
into orbit—
a victim in every off-beat;
a thief in every rhyme.
[37]
This feeling
ain’t the smell of fire,
ain’t wildlife on exhibit in tame fists, nor
gentle love, a rocking chair, floral
wallpaper, a smock pocket
filled with “in case of a sneeze” napkins.
This feeling ain’t underneath
the fingernail, ain’t something that
can be dug up,
too short for the teeth, ain’t the offering
of a kitchen knife. This feeling
ain’t here to accuse, forgive me,
ain’t peppered or waving from
a costume on the side of the road. Ain’t
recorded—ain’t a soul
who’s tried—ain’t innocent
at the bottom of all that dust,
the weight of water,
ain’t fighting back, coming back,
it is
relaxing into that coma, handful of
flowers, a nurse and his poison,
respirator quieting into a shot of technicolor; it is
how you discover there’s paper beyond
the sky.
[39]
Prologue in Reverse
You were always here. But don’t worry about how much longer you’ve got. You’re aware of
how your own body abducts you. Your belly has brought rocks. Another walk with fog for feet,
your mother in every doorway behind you, advancing from skins of what has been left behind.
And the work ahead is too dark to see. A medal for “jumping too high.” A metal or a medal. That
word like a metal in your mouth. Another threshold. Too many instructions in life, subtracting
into a channel of sloppy doorways, hands to memorize. Another entrance.
[40]
This feeling is
monarchy’s head
split for dissection,
a cadaver in a cabinet
left in the aftermath of
the world’s end,
two moons colliding into
a Venn diagram, and,
in the overlapping shadow's seam,
a voice just as dark
and drunk, saying,
“please, leave.”
[41]
This feeling is
diamond catapult in a
field of unnamed flowers,
our ankles
caught tight in the
television-static gray
back at home, torpedoes
of blood in each
nostril, the
velocity of blast from the past
producing sounds
of popping knuckles &
maybe
poetry slam finger snaps,
the beret kind.
[42]
This feeling is
a fish in the sky,
silver lines cast into
its gasping, acute mouth,
the sharp corner of reeling
that takes more
forearm than bicep,
more skin and sweat
than the texture of patience,
and, when this miracle has
broken down through the skyline, this
feeling is spinning your
fingers around its intestines
in the kitchen sink, crying
because no one has taught you how
to gut, because your lifelines wore
bloody moats.
[43]
This feeling is
Christmas trees stitched
into a circus tent, protected
from winter rain, how we train
them to forget their roots, how
a bead of sweat reflects
our world on fire like a swamp
reflects a poltergeist.
In which we are grateful for the pipes conversing behind our walls.
In which we forget where we dug up the grave.
[44]
This feeling is
waiting.
(your eyes the weight of a tip jar)
waiting.
(fork-tuned hallelujah)
waiting.
(a burned-out house glimmering in the rain and fog trails,
atom bombs in every closet corner)
&
waiting &
waiting
(gravity braided between our toes,
hands braided between our heart
muscle lattice)
& waiting &
waiting &
(our senses uncorked,
bruises like a participation ribbon,
sinking sunlight into the basement concrete)
[46]
Prologue with an Interruption
Another entrance. Too many instructions in life, subtracting into a channel of sloppy doorways,
hands to memorize. Another threshold. That word like a metal in your mouth. A metal or a
medal. A medal for “jumping too high.” And the work ahead is too dark to see.—
((You have a device planted in your brain. I’m telling you this because it’s true. Believe
me. Believe me? I’m keeping the man made of other men a secret. No, you do not know. Believe
the hocked part of me. Me? Plan for your house to be taken + Plan for your head to be taken =
Plan for the house in your head to be taken. We only have so much sky to puncture through; we
only have so many floors, so much gravity & grounding. I’m sorry this has happened to you.
Let’s make amends: I’ll break the bread, you pour the grape juice.))
—Another walk
with fog for feet, your mother in every doorway behind you, advancing from skins of what has
been left behind. Your belly has brought rocks. You’re aware of how your own body abducts
you. But don’t worry about how much longer you’ve got. You were always here.
[47]
This feeling is
an optional sweep
of the mansion:
the left wing unfolding like televisions,
the right wing curled around
a leg less child, the attic
and basement two halves of quicksand,
portals to bone, every opportunity,
from the door to the window to the
welcome mat, hammered shut
or otherwise darkened, kissed to death,
every wall fresh arms of a beatnik
strumming away, counting chin hairs,
and the lonely occupant, broom
still in hand, knowing there’s nothing left
to clean but the wall of text
eating him from the inside.
[48]
This feeling is
prodigy on all fours, popular
until proven guilty,
abstract love like traffic cones around
a pothole, one that mirrors
the upside-down mushroom cloud
bottoming out your gut, making
nothing grow but
reverse bones, your
grandmother’s quilt, a cold
place warmed by hands
in motion.
[49]
This feeling is house on the tip of a flea’s fingertip where I open the window and shout, Nice
view! and no one hears, where I take a picture of the sunset and no one cares, where I lock
myself out and there’s no one to call, where I try to climb down and slip and no one catches me,
where my body grows its own chalk outline and no one sees it on the news, where wolves eat my
head & hands & feet and have children bearing my resemblance for some reason and no one
takes a photo, where I leave many faces behind in each beveled window and no one forgets.
[50]
This feeling is
half-assed cartwheel addict,
the last known wanderer taught to scream,
a well amount of fur patched to
the inside of our chests, waving like seaside vegetation
to the savage call-breath barreling through
our esophagus sarcophagus,
lock and key lost to the quicksand balanced
at our lips.
[51]
This feeling is
sleep crawling up the wall
in a sleek, water-black wet suit,
stopped by your eyes, reminding
you of
a pull string, of how you
could easily peel away her darkness
inch by inch to
see the colonial cockroach, see the many
prisms in her eyes, kaleidoscopes
that empty into reversed thresholds, into
the prettiest secret in the whole motherfucking world. But
I didn't
tell you that.
Sometimes
we all have imposters.
[53]
Prologue after the Prologue but before the Epilogue
to mean where does something begin? to mean there’s a point in everything, a list of segments
waiting inside like a shadow for the right time of day. we want and we want and that feeling we
want to wear that feeling like an inside-out skeleton we would like to purchase that feeling for so
& so for the cost of one arm bone and one leg bone or maybe the mice that hide inside them but
maybe I’ve been thinking about light all wrong, maybe it’s not something you can turn on and
off.
[54]
"Don’t walk away from me."
“This feeling is the light inside a silhouette.”
"You know why I’m upset."
“You are repeating
and repeating.”
"You keep pushing me away."
“I’m simply pushing candlelight with my fingers.
A thousand shadows with open mouths. Baby birds
burned to their nests.”
“I’ve been waiting behind for so long.”
“Isn’t silhouette is a funny word?
Silhouettes in place of windows. Posing through
flaming hoops. And my wristwatch is on fire.”
"Can’t you just try to try?"
“I’m sinking with the weight of how I’ll make this
up to you.”
"You’re just so stupid."
“All I can see are wooden angels, and they’re
lighter than the sea.”
[55]
Standing alone in
your bedroom's dark,
the sharp edge of it, this
feeling of bending the window blinds
with your finger to see
a rabbit dressed
like a wolf outside on the lawn,
still obvious in shape
and size, in how it cuts its teeth
on every blade of grass and
pretends to hurl howls at the moon, but
still somehow confident in its disguise.
You try to be the same.
show me
You try to be an adult locked in mother's womb.
show me
You try searching for something else to jinx.
You roam for it.
You run for it, far
into limousines of night.
This way, you learn how to protect
yourself; you learn how to blacklight
your own mopped-up crime scene.
Perfect (show me)
in every pixelated (show
me) kind of
[56]
way.
So, if
you have it figured out, bring
me up to your room,
sit me on your bed,
and show me
how to be the same
as you, you as the rabbit.
[57]
This feeling is
a light splitting from the scar under your left nostril,
rough-skinned whispers of everything you've
touched throughout the day erupting from your hands:
a movie ticket, a PlayStation controller, a knife, text coldly
cut from magazine pages in a waiting room where
you listened for a noise, the sound of the door
opening or hitting sunlight for the first time in days, a sensation
that you always knew was there
but couldn't face your window to prove.
[58]
This feeling—
Margarita savvy & clutching
the knees, tear
ducts, aqueducts,
duct tape over your mouth in
a room cut from outer space,
anything that rhymes with
the sound of sobbing and
clicking fingers, beautiful things
rotting in buried treasure
chests, proud in their
hide and seek holes of earth.
[59]
This feeling is
quick-dilating
Eurekas, bells grown
from the teeth you used
to collect as a kid and jingle
before the fairy of your adolescence
made them rattle like the ocean, and
you began crying
a lot
in a land of honey, a
Pangea-comb, a misspelled
guttural gun show, billboards
forgotten in the air like gods
you prayed to with all your silent goddammits.
[60]
This feeling is
blank verse conclusions,
a conversation
between two walls
of aluminum foil. I measure you
in all grins, I trap your voice
in a jar and watch it
spot-glow against the glass.
I sleep with it folded between
my arms like a mother
with no children. I wake up
and it has grown away from
me, the sound of a dream
being filled with rainwater.
[61]
This feeling is
bee suits worn against
every sensation that drools across
your fingertips / a window of
televisions broadcasting the same
melting teeth of a man on fire / running from
the cannibals in the woods
behind your childhood home, every
tree reorganized, every boot-beaten path
rearranged, a murder of
crows overwhelming fence posts
telling you no trespassing
on the private property of welcome back.
[62]
This feeling is
underlined with sleep,
arms linked in bold typeface &
rewound through scratchy static, into the
opening credits of Heaven,
the world as a different kind of story,
one that you bark louder to hear.
[63]
this feeling is
summer poking its eye through
the glen where we slit
our tongues for romance. red-
den
-ing.
blink, eat, matinee our attention deficits
into a new noon
sliver sliver sliver (s)
r/e/d
inandforwhat.
today, the ghosts have been busy,
comma splices in each wrist
as they
dismantle the shadow of our house.
we open the door and see a stretch of forest,
the buzzing silence
and stillness of it,
r
e
d
[64]
and, like an ouroboro, you eat yourself tail first
as I run away with my legs twisted
in a tourniquet, a knife in my forehead slowly splitting my body
into a door, darkly cut and cropped to reveal
me and all of myselves
dancing around an effigy, too aflame to extinguish and
too charred to distinguish—penultimate.
[65]
This feeling is
a headful of jungles,
everyone you know as an animal stepping gently
from the magenta bush, shaken into
black outlines as they press their foreheads
to each sincere gun in all of your
one-thousand hands,
the barrels like dark telescopes to a white
constellation of teeth.
Somewhere, there is
waterfall applause telling you
to shoot every one of them
dead.
Somewhere, another revolution ends,
fireworks bottom out the moon onto happy battlefields,
arms are kissed with lips crisscrossed,
but you are away from it,
keeping one heart
open and the other tightfisted, singing
your mother's hymns and standing
still, still,
still,
trying to look intimidating enough
as you look into your animal's frozen eyes,
not shooting, and knowing
that you never will,
you won’t.
[66]
Another Epilogue
Possibility is a fine-toothed dagger. You reach into a fish bowl filled with strips of shredded
documents, always pulling the enviable question: “Who gave you permission?” You put a hand
to your side and notice the thousands of confetti’d ribs. Nobody has told you how much the
world means crawl. Crawl into, crawl out of, a cage behind your face swung open, bones of your
mouth emerging from the sands of a beach faraway. And if we run out of words to use can we
still say “Amen?” Stint the graphics. Keep your body dotted and moving moving moving
forward into the adjacent angle of a wall’s locked kneecap. Listen to the command. Just. Just.
Keep driving and forget how to look back.
[67]
Logan Ellis is the leftover fog at a melancholy punk concert, rolling into your hair and tagging
along in your left shoe until you get home. He is the morning hubbub and the afternoon
hullabaloo. By harnessing the calm breeze at the Zen temple hidden in his head, he has received
his Bachelor’s Degree in English, creative writing, and Linguistics, and is currently enrolled in
the MFA Graduate Writing Program at California College of the Arts. He has plans to work as an
editor/publisher while also colliding and remixing poetry and fiction. He thanks you for reading
this e-book and encourages you to drop by his blog, www.unknowmenclature.tumblr.com with
some good vibes.
© 2015 by Logan Ellis