excerpts from Mineral
/ /
check yes to accept
the terms of exhaustion
the cigarette weather
my electric blood
the choice architecture that arrives encoded in a dream
in space no one can hear you disastrously mismanage a crisis
if this is definitely the fucked up multiverse timeline
tell the bosses I simply do not exist here
/ /
work calls me to walk into the morning
ghosts accumulate there
all the locks say haunted
the way is shut
the imperial coin
/ /
cambered to vision
at the angle of all of
the names have flown out of my head
every molecule
reconfiguring
a genre of prophecy
you were a million gemstones
falling down the stairwell
/ /
a fine crystalline dust falls
from all this sunshine
the days ahead
the days behind
a shimmering yet
real as reefs
static
the mineral sky
the accounts of
disregard
/ /
or perhaps
to risk sincerity
that care is the only belief
in a place like this
where the contralogics catch in our refractions
the echolocations of a bat circling the eaves
the natural history of a lichen
a stand of trees anywhere
their arcades and galleries
of leaves translating currents into chorus
the lightning inside a molecule
a place to be alongside you
in the struggle
that will create
the requirements for shared
liberation
where the tending will make the commoning
a truly we where we might carry
ourselves to the place where only we can save us
a counter absorption
a reminder to never accept
the conditions of the logic of extraction’s abstraction
the memory that we are each the teeth
/ /
hope is speculative
but it’s always been
/ /
notes
“ghosts accumulate” is from Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet
“the way is shut” is from Return of the King
“a million gemstones falling down the stairwell” is from Chad VanGaalen
“to care without belief ” is from Dark Ecology
“the natural history of a lichen” is derived from Anne Pringle in Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet
“a counter absorption” is from Lauren Berlant’s “Slow Death”
excerpt from Mineral
the present conjecture
offers its rupture
a mesmerizing advance
its sum of solitudes and illusions
that force whose achievement is the present
a place that was built
made to exist in your labor only
in a loop
in the ghost hour
in a loop
me walking around all day talking
to myself
saying
things like
I reckon that’s you trying to assuage your guilt
tonight I’ll watch all the movies I’ve already seen spin by
flowing like the rivers where water once was
tonight did you film yourself
tonight did you exist
tonight the buildings
tonight left to rubble
tonight a rag
a haunt
the mathematical
remains of capital
a story put together and sold as the only thing
the all day stayed inside of
the boundary told
to be kept myself
to forget to remember to rejoin you
the fuck
that there even is
an influence and access industry
an administration
of vastness
Robert Balun is an adjunct professor at the City College of New York, where he teaches creative writing and literature. He is the author of the poetry collections Acid Western (The Operating System) and Traces (Ursus Americanus Press). His poems have appeared in American Poetry Journal, Prelude, Barrow Street, Apogee and others. Robert’s first collection of scholarship, An Ethics of Thinking and Making in the Anthropocene: The Aesthetics of Disruption, is forthcoming from Routledge in 2024. He is also a union delegate for City College and a PhD student in English at Stony Brook University.