I like to move while the sun sets.
It lowers in the sky and golden light glitters
in a few strands of hair blown across my eyes, coating everything in slow-changing color
that fades out mutely
and dies along with the details of the landscape,
which seem dusted in a sinister charcoal powder.
It’s a bit startling for me to realize that seven years have passed since the publication of Sunsets Working, a 24-page poem I began writing in fragments around 2013. The book itself – with a reflective black foil-stamped cover image based on an ink drawing by me – was designed by Erin Wrenn, with calligraphy by Nathan Antolik, and it was published by New York gallery and imprint Bodega in 2015.
Why did I think my mind was defective?
I was so viciously, viciously moving, all the time,
into despair like dipping into a cold, still pond;
a private winter while the sun warms the air that wraps around me,
strange and welcoming.
Indeed, even at night here, the dark holds the heat of the earth.
In the almost-decade since this piece began to germinate, its dark seeds have blossomed into potent fleurs du mal whose perfume lingers like a phantom over what I create today. It was written during a period when creativity was much more difficult for me, and it was an act of endurance to see it through many steps to completion.
The poem was both a record and an invocation of energies that I sensed in and around me and which felt both threatening and liberating. Even when the poem was finished, I didn’t really have the words to describe what it meant to me. It’s only now that I see the fits and starts of my current dark artistry, cropping up alongside bones long buried in the past.
Soothing, delicate music licks the sky, notes plucked by some reassuring evil.
I am filled with complete, overwhelming hatred.
I see my destiny drop like a stone, and watch myself dissolve into light,
a single pure pitch.
Illuminated like the peak of an immeasurably heavy mountain,
fracturing the shell of heaven, I live a weightless inner life,
tethered to bulky actions in the world.
Wading in creaturely muck, I burn up and soar:
liberated, incandescent and featherlight.
In evening’s quiet candlelight I curse my appetite, my demonic expenditures.
Momentum flounders and things collide.
A will of my own forms in faces drawn near me.
Addled with worry I am hounded by energies urgently striding into my fingers,
trembling to strangle my innermost hopes.
I am driven by an impulsive determination,
a seizing damnedness shooting up from within,
an inner struggle that makes me float, so light and sick and coiled.
Sunsets Working can be purchased from Derosia here.