Construction Site, an approach to therapy by TheHungerArtist, literature
Literature
Construction Site, an approach to therapy
I'd rather be pouring concrete. If only
to wake up mornings with a simple answer
for every ache—to separate
this day's body from the last.
To dismiss the myth that we survive
our sleep.
The wooden form is reassuring.
Itself a stabilizing, a holding in of weight
only to be knocked away when it becomes
merely a holding on—when the wood's strength
becomes the weak home of termites
colonizing the crawlspace.
In Glasgow, Charles Rennie Mackintosh
built a school of art of concrete
polished so smooth that you'd swear
it was marble.
Inside, he built a library
from a forest—a garden enclosed
in concrete. A second
The Anarchist plays God by TheHungerArtist, literature
Literature
The Anarchist plays God
The Anarchist has stopped using words.
For fun, she now builds towers,
miniature replicas of Babel,
and plays God
smashing each one
Gallagher-style with a sledge. The shrapnel,
now a collection of artifacts, are then mounted
on paperweights to commemorate the day
we all became strangers
and furthered our association
with terra firma, cast down as we were.
God must have foreseen the good this would do
for the hospitality industry--
with the xenial act reestablished
as the root of all kindness.
Maybe Zeus had finally avenged himself,
she thought, for being mythologized,
and God figured he better take
the credit to reassure
Blueprints for Babel by TheHungerArtist, literature
Literature
Blueprints for Babel
It's an old truth that all towers fall.
Everything we build, we build from rubble.
Even the first stone was fractured from a child
of a star. With our fingernailed hands
we placed it on the altar of the world.
This is the root of ritual: to build a religion
of work. Babel's foundation is laid first
in the mind. A design translating the world
into terms we understand, into heavy things
we cast out into reason's borderlands.
We built with these stones of the mind,
laid with disciplined precision, with wills bent
toward a distant and unseen goal. Perhaps
our great sin was not in our attempt to reach God
but in foolishly imagining h
If I dressed for the job I wanted, I'd be wearing a spacesuit
When I grow up, I want to reach enlightenment
on the summit of Olympus Mons,
meditating on the words of Arthur C. Clarke
"there are no mountains on Mars."
This is what imagination risks.
Exploring we discover not that our knowledge is flawed,
but that we do not dream hard enough.
Even in the beginning, God expected us to name the world.
And we could only utter stumblings in that Ur-tongue,
inventing the invention of ideas.
Even before we tasted the tree,
even before we knew that we could ever be wrong,
we clung to the referential alchemy of language.
This world we
Help Wanted
There's a man on my roof.
Perhaps a boy, the angle is strange,
the light bends like a gymnast.
But I can see in the curve
he's curled up against the chimney,
crying? He's so still he must be
listening to the wind twisting
and polishing the edges of shingles.
He crawled up the lattice slowly
like ivy, so I took no notice
until I glanced through the hidden path
in the hedge. I borrow the neighbor's pool
when they leave
it lying around their backyard.
You don't see me lounging about on my roof.
I'm thankful that someone is.
A freelance chimney sweep?
Maybe he'll clean the gutters.
All I know i