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 exceeds bounds and gives off sparks

flashover of anti-form
before it breaks free 
without recall. 

To break free 
will take a lifetime. 

A lifetime is a type of flammable cladding 
growing anxious to ingest the oxygen in cavity walls.
The blaze burrows through at length 

and eats away at it, 
as a blaze would. Loss is the conductor,
memory the meeting place. It helps evade immunity to what inhabits old sensations. 

At the sharp end of the passage-
way        
          were they a sound wave chorus 
                 in a vessel being filled

the same memories would turn up the self-
same passageway.
                                
                                   Send in all personal inquiries and sit tight, it’s just a matter 
of investigative procedure.

And wait and wait,
for something to happen. 

… Time’s up, foster a rapid decision. 

                                             Foster, for what it’s worth, an image, 

            a destination. Run motions of repetition to reach an entry point …

You left yourself in the old quarters       a human breath collection apparatus 
                                                                    in sensorial space 
gliding in and out of walls 
forever ushering new tenants in, hanging on 
for dear life, having only been taught hate. 

You left to see how far you’d come--

When you looked 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.] 
You are almost always 
starting over. You feel you are changing yet again.

Furthermore 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, and 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 the subject to be transformed 
it must initially be stowed at the center of its vulnerability, it, the subject, 

and then propelled, albeit later than ever, high into the air,

                                into making a farewell appearance                       

on a tin lifeboat
surrounded by its counterparts, pain

and beauty, to see the object of universal contemplation
in the flashing eye-ball 
in the sky                 

reflecting, upside down,                                          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 unaccounted for,
 
checkpoint
for a longstanding
hunting season.
 
The guards cash in each time they let the hunters through
 
free to continue
plaiting fresh data strands unimpeded,                           ununiform with the near-
                                                                                                           daylight sweep
 
so that the rest of us here transit breaths draggled
by gusts of idiopathic hypersomnia
 
should access                                                                    information
at a higher speed,                                                                  then become it.
 
The signal is a wave flowing through our bodies.  
Thoughts are foldings-over in a system of values of symmetry,
slow-navigating after-thoughts mapped and encoded.
 
Not fully independent of    
to what extent
 
and why
 
    such almost instant overfolds tend to remain muted even as we try to speak,
or speak & act out post-truths all at once,
 
an atrial flutter                                        every .4 seconds generates miles
and miles of industrious erosion.
 
Images within images hatch fractals.
Memories follow us back.  
 
                                          An investigation has been launched, is now ongoing,
 
grows more collapsed
from the mirage
of constant changings,
transformations
 
configured/
reconfigured
in the eyes of statues
we can’t escape around the room.
 
What, at this very juncture, isn’t weighed down by the circuiting breakage?
 
Insofar as the nervous mind supplies the system’s orchestra,
life awaits the big homecoming
cheering on
 
                      nothing but survival training
with a deathwish:
 
pitch bends the axis
and architecture of synapses,
ungainly frequencies are visually transposed.
 
Homelands melt between
the cypresses
 
dimming distance
 
with the birth
of a neo-century of maiden spirit.
 
The sediment of doublethink crumbles the alveoli on either side
of the recruit’s heart
 
and compounds
a vast continuous presence--
 
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. 
The heart feels like waves
gently rock you 
in the middle of the sea.   

Misdirected acts of kindness.    

Proceed by connecting
the following statements:

You don’t really 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