Home (A Quick Guide to Forced Displacement)

“No human being should be deprived of his metaxu, that is to say of those relative
and mixed blessings (home, country, traditions, culture, etc.) which warm and nourish the soul
and without which, short of sainthood, a human life is not possible.”
– Simone Weil

Let us rest a little. 

There is much to take in here. After a long process of disintegration, 
rootedness. The life instinct, exceeding bounds, gives off sparks

before it breaks free 
and burns itself out 
in a flashover. 

To break free 
will take a lifetime. 

A lifetime is a type of flammable cladding 
anxious to ingest the oxygen in cavity walls.
The blaze burrows through at length 
and eats away at it, 

as a blaze would. 
Memory is the conductor
as well as the meeting place. At the sharp end of the passage-
way        
          were they a substance 
                 in a vessel being filled

             the same memories would turn up the self-
      same passageway, again--
                               
you left to see how far you’d come--

looking back you were a navigational hyperlink, 
collapsed, light at nightfall the final sight to mark your progress,
all initial and ulterior installments of escapement 
born out of a mere change of direction. 

Flux.

Reflux.

[It’s why you are always starting over.]

Run motions of repetition to reach an entry point.
Foster, for what it’s worth, 
an image, 

            a destination…                        

You feel you are changing yet again. You’d like to ask 
what dead book fiction was used to shroud, to mask everyone’s spirit 
of discernment so completely,

is it true there isn’t a valve to shut off the flow of that blue smoke in here

the outlet pressure’s going to exceed 1000 kPa and someone may choke to death 
before they iron out eventual bugs and safety flaws 
and add new self-correcting features, 

plus that piece 
that has been lodged in you
                                                         internalized 
                                     
like a compression field around a nexus of events might, 
and why not, reveal a trace in a case of evidence without clues
as from a swift underwater explosion 
during which for a subject to be transformed 
it must be stowed at the center of its vulnerability, 

it, the subject,
and then propelled high into the air
so as to reflect upside down 

                                                                         in the flashing eye-ball in the sky                 
the seeing of events                                 as image, 

                                          as destination,

not the kind one feels confined to but a harbor of pursuit, 
a transplant of the will to believe no less desirous than habitual, 
habitually a size too large.

Because the first act of war is feeling small.

Hard to know when to stop, having arrived into the world head first, 
anonymously, the next place beside the last, so few crossing rafts.

Micro-Machinist 

How much further to keep on as to get over.  
What was got to is made real. 

                                                         The sound of the city waking up to life 
matched to the waking city’s unique sound print 

reveals 
a voice signal 
unaccounted for. 

The signal is a wave flowing through our bodies. 

When sounded clear it streams right through, lifesize, sonorant howl
hardened into everyday acoustics. Guards cash in each time 
it runs across checkpoints set up at every intersection

free to continue plaiting
fresh data strands unimpeded,                                          ununiform with the near- 
                                                                                                           daylight sweep 

so that we should access                                              information 
at a higher speed,                                                                  then become it.

Our thoughts are slow-navigating afterthoughts.

Everything takes place before us 
as if behind a screen we watch, 
memories pin us back every .4 seconds 
generating miles and miles of industrious erosion. 
Nothing that we choose sits still.

                                                               An investigation has been launched, 

is now ongoing, persists 
in the mirage 

configured/ 
reconfigured 
in the eyes of statues
we can’t escape around the rooms.

Saying, how is the thing felt 
when there’s no getting through in order to begin to feel at all?

Insofar as the nervous mind supplies the system’s orchestra,
life awaits the big homecoming 
cheering on

                        nothing but survival training 
with a deathwish: heroics crumble the alveoli 
on either side of the recruit’s heart--

Having come across the slow familiar missing of the soul, his own private micro-
machinist, all that commands him does not exist.

Click & Connect
​​

​At night tricks of light sleep at dark angles, 
unlived edges blend in 
and blow the design out of scale. 

The heart feels like waves gently rock you in the middle of the sea.   

Its action extends
and contracts 
the somatic parameters 
of an interbeing 
turned inward searching,  

                                                    sets for it a rhythm…

Less and less conscious, 
the rhythm is scalloped, rationalized
same as a destructive impulse.

Proceed by connecting the following statements:

You don’t yet KNOW yourself.
You drink down nature so she spits you back OUT.
You remain deeply UNHAPPY.
​​Daniel Nemo is an Amsterdam-based poet, translator, and photographer.
More info at www.danielnemo.com