It all begins with a vibration. An imperceptible movement that accelerates minute by minutes. Wind, along screeching whistle, a lashing hurricane, a torrent of faces, forms, line. Everything falling, rushing forward, ascending, disappearing, reappearing. A dizzying evaporation and condensation. Bubbles, more bubbles, pebbles, little stones. Rocky cliffs of gas. Lines that cross, rivers meeting, endless bifurcations, meanders, deltas, deserts that walk, deserts that fly. Disintegrations, agglutinations, fragmentations, reconstitutions. Shattered words, the copulation of syllables, the fornication of meanings. Destruction of language. Mescaline resigns through silence—and it screams!

—Octavio Paz, from from his Introduction to the Miserable Miracle by Henri Michaux, New York Review of Books, 2002.

The way we

The way we might in minutes

The way we might be shattered in minutes

The way we’ll stop and take it

We’ll go inside, fly

The vibratory room

Cross this line

We’ll wash our whole aura, our body, our musket of protection

The mask we’ll wash and dry and wash again and dry

And again wash til the hands disappear

The dangerous lift, you feel it?

The power, don’t come near me

On knees, you are invisible ally, a torch, a persuasion

What can you drive more into a nail than your tiny head

Crying for the medicine to treat the invisible bubble, the pebble,

Seep into the crypt

The dead code hovering around the cave, a rocky cliff, all upside down

I remember now the liberation then, how we’ve never do no harm then

Young in the maze,

Then, and now?

Cry for the medicine in the crook of your arm

I remember a myth was closed against all words

All words becoming every word trembling with damning light

Words, words

Because you sat on your cloud, but come down come down

Words

You are words only now, what else have you, poet?

Come down from that cloud

In the maze that was protection but we did harm

And the seal came off the prophecy for the human

One more time.

Alystyre Julian, Outrider film