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4/22/09

Ric Royer

from She Saw Ghosts

She hears. And she wants to hear more. There she goes, walking slowly backwards and stretching her arms forward, then back, then up up up, creating an enigma of forward progress. If she is too clumsy she will kill herself, so concentration is crucial. A lightning rod, she will be a lightning rod for messages from elsewhere. Lightning, contrary to how it looks in photography books, moves like a snake, day in and day out. Along the field, up the trees, jumping from branch to branch.

Electricity is some type of knowledge, the secrets, the tissues, the secretions, the soul going electric, the body becoming liquid, vaporous. The knowledge may appear in a visitation of white fire that leaves the area on the body where the bolt enters cold to the touch.

The lightning it will not strike those who are afraid or standing in a hole in the ground at least three feet deep. She will stand on the precipice of sanity for her whole life to receive this white fire, the natural spirit. This is her ambition: to believe and hope, to love to believe and hope.

Bodies (also known as “the unknown”, “the transparent form”, and “the airy dream”) can fall apart so easily. There are no voices for bodies, only air. Air is life, with or without it. It hangs all around suspending different types of bodies, fixing them in place or spinning them around in play with gravity. The same air that holds the universe together, that reaches to heaven, is the same air that goes up our noses. And like air, the bodies of our world can be written about as if magic or prodded as if nothing special. Very few existing languages have phrases that even attempt to describe the tenuous nature of animated corporeal form.

Quello estato un bacio molto dolce. (This is a sweet phrase.)

La mia casa è la mia casa di carte. (This is a portentous one.)


Ric Royer is a “writer of strange performances and performer of mysterious writings.” Here is his blog and here is a really nice review of Time Machine, his latest chapbook (just out from Slack Buddha Press).

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