Hythe+ #1 THE WHOLE ETHIC OF NORMAL SLEEPLESS EVIDENCE by Lotte L.S.

… hope this finds you not on fire?

the discrete borders of the feeling wrapped
themselves around the other feeling…
things happen. those who could not bear
their heads in no way has it been fully proven
I have actually left my own nowhere not
in search life or past. today—
what a mocking word in those days
we stayed wrapped up light gradually omitting
the eyes lichen stitched over the lids

it was as if I was always waiting for real life
to begin

otherwise this tenth-rate movie
otherwise “speak soon” otherwise
the same photograph of a shelling
passed out at propaganda meetings on separate sides
otherwise sceptical
of everything but the sceptical

utter darkness swarms the pupils

russian dolls unfasten themselves the bigger ones
climbing into the bodies of smaller ones

looping airtime ads for security systems

I listen to what I can
leave out

the other senses return to heightened existence

where I try to break the
rock with my head

everything else is just current events

subjects choosing to give themselves electric shocks
rather than be left alone

if not the certainty of change
then the uncertainty sustained

formerly touching each other in the busiest aisle

while seagulls cannibalised
other beings with wings
in the waiting room outside

I couldn’t tell the difference between those long days and these short days the light lasted
24 hours oh my god angelfire lunar landscapes exposed 36 times before reload recall how you fell
into your own shadow I saw this.

Nobody said funerals. Nobody said dying. Nobody said they were up
for sitting on the beach at two minutes past sunrise.
Nobody sleeps on the sofa with all the blinds left ajar
and the radio full blast. Nobody does it to

whatever! just attend to the spreadsheet’s equation ———

I just hope you felt alive
in its dismantling

how a hundred heads turn
two hundred birds

fly from the tree

[...]

the blind mice drift away

it’s not traumatic did I say it
was
not traumatic

how desperately I want to smack my head against the rocks
bright blood on the slippery surface
matte and fantastic
tulips at the front desk of every supermarket
fluttering little violences

it’s happened so many times I couldn’t even remember that guy

impossible to speculate the state
I passed fourteen days
circling inside the sadness of work

escaping to crawl back inside my mother
I’m still alive
barely forcing capitalism to innovate
wanting only to repeat things that are determinedly unpleasurable

or is it, pleasurable

no literal memory of
mastery over my mother’s womb

wish I was able

want only to be

want only to be windowfloating
and ordinary

difficult to talk of anything that is not poem

the guilt of its failure

This is how things are they can’t be any different. last sunday there were cows screaming in the carpark of B&Q and the radio was playing don’t leave and the phone rang and when I picked up there was a beautiful sound something like the smell of pavements after rain and I was so glad I had ignored everyone’s calls just to get to this one moment

to hear this silence

the faces of marigolds slowly turning toward my face
it is smiling and unthinking
it is pleasurable sometimes to remember nothing

observing mutually responsive movements:
pocket watches, alarm clocks, pendulums

—and other modes of individual deterrents
that remember the dead can be just as easily co-opted

is there a way to talk back at it?
to it?

when the price demanded to reinhabit the world has always been silence

all but babies abandoning sense
the acquisition of language possible only through an act of oblivion

prolonged stillness
quiet
vacant
a crawl space emerging from a tunnel
to fill mouths that make little ‘o’ shapes
reaching attempt for sound

satellites mimicking orbit in the nightless sky
the click of someone picking up the phone

[...]
—hello?

did not
was not
can not

as if whether the seatbelt buckled or not
is even relevant

still failing to ask: what is the line
between resilience to go on
as normal, and stupidity?

and: the leisure to ponder collapse?

utopia just another name for loneliness
the loneliness of song felt in a crowd
most certain only when in motion

But now I can’t

a. remember
or
b. find your name

ANYWHERE
does anyone out there know? hushwing? anyone?

only it’s heard we’ve been sought with telescopes just waiting
without intent to desert

and the day is dark again

Note: The title is an adaptation of the name of a blog post by Lauren Berlant, from 24 September 2011. It’s still possible to read up at their blog, Supervalent Thought.

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Lotte L.S. is a poet. Her most recent pamphlet, A town, three cities, a fig, a riot, two blue hyacinths, three beginnings, five letters, a "death", two solitudes, façades, four loose dogs, a doppelgänger, a likeness, three airport floors, thirty-six weeks..., was published by Tripwire in June 2021. She keeps an infrequent newsletter, Shedonism.

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The moral right of the author has been asserted. However, the Hythe is an open-access journal and we welcome the use of all materials on it for educational and creative workshop purposes.