RAYMOND DE BORJA

The Emergences, The Pause

The difficulty of narrating anything to you at all

This is we leaving the cinema

Feeling at the tipping point to fact

Mini-worlds will, as we are wont to hear, spin to a minimal music

Much of our afternoons filled with laughter and socialism 

The emergences, the pause

Between this sentence and the next takes years

In between, a cryo-frozen brain is linked back to a body

Which at first feels the need to yawn

Cut to another yawn

Then another

Until dailiness is a mouth

The musical equivalent of

We Write A Song for the Brand New Equipment

A derrick inscribed in a factory, inscribed in a body of water, inscribed in a letter. Factories in the work of interpretation; a letter arises from circumstance, manufactures without interruption. Dear Jean, the interruption above our heads like a sun, which the devout sees dancing, which Apollinaire beheads. Trough, to crest, to hear things with the same astonishment. Echo in eye, resonant among, last Monday, in the warehouse of missing parts.

What of Our Renewed Interest in Utopia

Dear Jean, you say that what my poems lack are people, so I people them. Then you ask to see their faces. Exposition is when appearance unfolds in language. The people walk past us, speaking with enviable clarity. What is exposed by their gaits? Agamben says there is a face whenever something reaches the level of exposition and tries to grasp its own being exposed, whenever a being that appears sinks in that appearance and has to find a way out of it. I want our poem to have a face. It needs a way out of it.

Then We Dream You Together

Arc to narrative arc subtends

You have the awe of someone who cannot remember

If the atmosphere imperceptible to actors
where a comma hangs
were we to pause in air

Where to change our way of speaking is to change our lives

To wake and find our speeches in the air

Trope by frayed trope
an account of morning

You have the awe of someone who cannot forget

Trembling before the marvels of industry

Then we dream you together
trembling with excitement

You have the awe of someone

Else, devoured by ornament
we change our lives

To wake and find us sutured to a place
and by waking tug the atmosphere
with our skin

Arch to arch subtends

You have the awe of someone else

Scissioned from your skin

To wake and understand you need this in your life
so speak it lovingly

You have someone else's awe
so speak it, lovingly

Trope by trope
our frayed speech

Before the marvels of industry

To wake and understand you need this in your life
so want for it a prosody

Where What We Feel and the Afternoon are Topologically the Same

Construction, Walter Benjamin quotes Sigfried Giedion in Convolute K, plays the role of the subconscious. Bright moments between an instant and attention. We seek immediacy by hewing as close as possible to design. Gesture means defective products haphazardly, daily, slipping past, forever, from our fingers. But gesture is a dream, and dailiness the sheen about our dream objects, about our longue durée.

Raymond de Borja is the author of they day daze (HighChair, 2012). His recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Apartment Poetry, The Capilano Review, ctrl+v, Entropy, Heavy Feather Review, Jacket2, The Operating System, Partial Zine, Posit, and elsewhere.