how to write a poem: a guide for the perplexed

1. Hallucinate vividly, outside every sense and register. This is untouchable, lost to any medium. There is no medium to live in.

2. Approach the vision like a wild animal. Like a screaming child. Like a spent lover, asleep. Find a way to hold it.

3. Drop it. You could never have held it. Find a way to feed it.

4. Starve it. You have been grain and meat and ground. Offer. Withhold. Receive. Supplicate. Starve yourself. Language is cream and fat. Apply it to your palms and your eyelids. Rinse it from your hair. Waste it. Wail and praise at the shapes that split and fall, never to cross lips.

5. Braid words together. Pelt them at the sky. Bury them. Hide them behind your ears and shiver as they glitter downwards, sliming over your shoulders. Huff them from a burning paper bag. Whisper them to earthworms. Listen back, carefully, to any echo the world throws back. Steal it.

6. Gather spoilage and new seed, indiscriminately. Gather salt, plastic, radium. Gather fade, rot, growth, specter, timelessness.

7. You thought you could write with matter? Strew your failure around you. Do not speak of it. How could you speak of it. Ignore it. Forget it entirely. You are not the master of your memory. The event irrupts as an ember behind your eyes, as a clot in your most beloved vein. There is dousing to be done, undoing. Do it. Save yourself.

8. The world is birth and murder. The word is love and disavowal. You will be torn and remade between them. Few will hear the song behind its bandages. Fewer will believe you.