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Mild Peril

by Atlas At Last

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1.
I can flood this room with whatever volume I choose. Let my machinations spill from my sleep. Quiver falling shallow - “I don’t think he can breathe,” “His pale blood face resonates histamine.” Snaking through a membranous labyrinth; I called, but it was lost in a tangle of submerged root and the crash of gasping shoals. Stack the pebbles geometric that reflect the falling sky. Escaping to idyllic swaths, examine pointillism on my back. Bellows rush to my bellowing hushed, sprouting my lungs and making me blush.
2.
Fathom 04:05
In outliers lay lying beauty. Salt was thick on my tongue as we braved the gusts. I thanked the maelstrom for laughing along with us. My senescence sense of direction was giving way to wanderlustful navigation. To feel nothing but waves crashing mutiny against a creaky frame, And the breeze’s playful sputter-spray. On a day just like today, we caught ourselves making eye contact with the sun. They hoist me from the doldrums, threw overboard the deadweight, Ask me what I’m made of, as I continue to propagate. I am forty five miles of nerves, Compressed into voids and curves. Uneven distribution: the tragedy of a system so nervous. They said, “bemoan your meniscus indifferent; no one will measure subtle sea foam displacement.” Reckless in the abandonment, becoming out of body, hoping to drown. Dry, active, wet, passive, (silent).
3.
Thesis 01:24
You dilute yourself; ceaselessly spilling through the slats in casks. “The water will help to soothe your skin,” “But it burns where you’ve torn in.” And then you turn into ‘yourself’; a swirling vessel, red - not paleblood - but gore from gorging capillaries, turning into something that scares me. Connections were severed, you lost your footing, and Crumbled to a haphazard pile on the floor. The tempest, wailing their loudest, spewing oscillations, turning to face the eldritch he’s struggled with before, he’s struggled to ignore. Don’t go out past the moon. I’ve seen the way we both evoke worlds where we cut off. But what’s to be said of me? How far did I fall from your tree? And is this thing alive in me?
4.
Stoic 06:31
You’d think that he was kissing the Earth, buried face and limbs haphazard. The surf lapped at feet sore from the tumble and the crush. You’d almost think he wasn’t breathing, in a shallow wake, collapsing softly. But who am I to integrate the problems of the waking world? I could’ve sworn that he was smiling, craters and voids, palpitations so noisy you could hear, Teeth and tongue thrashing wildly about, oh my god. He has never been this loud, what would you recommend to quiet him down? Through the dark roof that swayed, a clearing for light that bore – Anomalous, tickled him and the conidiophore. A podium for the celestial emissary? Scrawled in granite, led misfortune astray. What does it say? I’ve never seen anything like this before. The canopy creeks as the ancient place settles and sighs, Dendrochonologically wise: concentric circles constructing parables of lost time. Have you heard the one that goes… “What are you, but me? An extension of my phylogeny. What am I but you, repeating?” “When we can choose, how will it be defined? In organic shapes or symmetrical lines?” What I saw… His body is rejected by the environment “They were this tall, they had gotten rid of skin. They could breathe in miasma and never get sick. They would flutter to the ground and slumber like death. They take the breath from the wind.”
5.
Flutter 03:02
Our hero’s journey: Through the tendril woven plane that hums at night, and keeps him up late. Down the howling hollow cobble path - they say it’s haunted at night. Gulp the fog, listen for his laugh, then it’s gone. Cross the mossy tree trunk, - Don’t look down – Where the rabbit hole falls to abyss. Where the shoots burst into flames, Licking at wounds or offering a kiss. I revel in delusions of swords across my back; lapses of time; superimposing. Why can’t you be part of my fiction too?
6.
Antithesis 01:50
You carved our niche into the rock of a mountainside, And regaled us the lore of the natural world. From boulders etched by the tide, You learned to rework the Earth. “You pour yourself over like you revel in drowning, And I am but a vessel, trying.” Where it bore into me and remains, Heartlessly mimicking my mouth agape. I considered that you were of a similar material: You striated just the same. But where it bore into me and remains… Consider nothing more than the taste of the wind, Sweetness from the honeysuckle bloom. A dissertation you still have a heart for, But the deeper the cuts, the deeper the cure.
7.
Crystalline compacting where rigor tends to settle in tetrahedron beneath my skin. Above, a licking from the chromophores, abundant and warm, in biting wisps they swirl and they swarm. When the crackling snow manufactures a mirror; The repeated use of a face dissolves meaning. Don’t trust in my ability to internalize your geography Trampled paws precede the thought of ever calling you “home,” And the bites to the stone, embedded in bone, leave a pulsing landmark. Don’t trust in my ability to internalize your geography, I am frozen from looking down, The nose on an axis; the axis on a tilt. Paradoxical undressing, terminal burrowing, your trehalose blood Paradoxical undressing, terminal burrowing, vasoconstriction.
8.
Stare from the hull whose eyes are ports sunken in like counting craters. Aged theories for bad behaviors – and to which are you prescribed? Blackest bile expeditionist turned to conquest. I keep counting my fingers. I keep counting one two three four, one two three, one two, one. Can we get a clean margin? Or is it radial in all directions? What are the means, and where are the ends? The Horror Vacui colors in my brains and my skin. Well, did I mention the atmosphere is sickly there, and non-existent here? Can we get a clean margin? Blackbody radiator, As told by the unreliable narrator. Blackbody radiator. You are so incandescent, From the not too distant lymphatic system, They were staging invasions all the while remaining hidden. Arriving via a time dilated vessel, At a routine check point in the cell cycle, they failed the first level. I can feel the nest in my trunk. It splinters from me in numbing shards and watches my every move. Trace the regression back. Diagnose the coordinates. Isolate the mutation. Suspend my animation. In the narrow-band… From in the narrow-band. Within the narrow-band.
9.
Synthesis 04:00
I miss the levity of the sky always falling. Of monsters being easy to define. Your teeth are sharp leviathan… but so are mine. Time bites into our telomeres gnawing holes into my wings. I'll suspend my disbelief, songbird, But you can still sing. Black box approximations of some natural world, Where the watercolor everything waits for my return. Dripping exosmosis I come home: Weathered veins, chest pains, bitten bones. Excitable, shaking, truth stretching thin cutaneous. Containing myself where do I end, how do I begin? They were so small, they held onto their skin. And their seizing paternal instinctive drowning response suspends their animation. Anthropomorphism is strictly a work of their fiction. Thetic, antithetic, synthetic. “Long ago, a withering wind roared across the ocean and became entangled in the limbs,” our unlikely hero begins, “a fracture at the axis facilitated the divorce, and, tossed to and fro with tremendous force, I became detached.” He continues, “the perilousness of becoming aware of your own unreliable existence is a feeling that’s hard to express with anything other than vacuousness.” The sliding from my sheath, The blade of my leaf, The peril of my body. Befell our crestfallen one with anagnorisis, revealing an arcadia where symptoms are asymptomatic, and descent to the abyss is impermanent. And so it is, and so it was, and so it will always be.

credits

released May 18, 2018

Atlas At Last is Jesse Catron, Nathaniel Hartten, Mike Radack


Recorded and mixed by Kenny Eaton at Mystery Ton Studios in Monrovia, MD
Mastered by Sarah Register in NYC


Artwork and photography by Mike Radack

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