Do we use moon poems as a conduit for touching?

Sometimes the touch is an erasure. Another feint. A hiding in plain sight. Tap in, tap out. Figures that only exist in the electronic interstices.

You couldn’t see me among the mirrors and the steam and the sliding between platforms. I could never see you, were you ever really anything, you feel like nothing to me.

Surely Valentine’s Day is the Day for Amorous Discourse?

Do we use the moon as a conduit for touching?

What are they doing there? What am I doing there? Are we looking for each other?

[ ]

Sometimes the touch comes too soon.

The mirroring of bodies now repeats in posts. Your text echoes mine, draws a line in electronic flutters. Or does it?

The sound of notifications on, so you don’t miss the one that you are desperate to hear from. The sound of notifications off, so you miss the silence of the one you are desperate to hear from.

A lull in the weather. And so we begin again in a fresh register. The edges of two bodies. Moons which still seek to touch. Private tightropes and public tightropes. What operates as a rope?

We will return to the violences of looking. The violence of image making, where subjecthood bursts from the eye. She knows he watches from a distant chamber.

Look. Don’t look. Power struggles. But don’t forget I’m paying the most attention when I’m looking studiously away. Just because you don’t catch my eye doesn’t mean my eye isn’t there to be caught.

Watchful silence. A silence brimming with implication. You are the one who waits / I am the one who waits. Looking without speaking / the loved object never speaks / prepare to speak.

What am I doing here at 3am? What am I ever doing? Waiting for a sign. A flicker. A corresponding light.

She writes that… He writes that… They don’t write to each other. They write to me.

She writes that… He writes that… They don’t write to each other. They write to me.

The Moon that touches me, also touches you. Though it may not be this moon, and it may not be this night.

A silence that isn’t a silence if you know how to parse it. A silence of holding one’s breath, where the sound of oneself is exponentially magnified until it drowns almost everything, this is the sound of waiting for your lover alone inside your mind.

A pair of deletions in one place, an indifference that’s impossible to maintain. An echo of a sentiment elsewhere. A door slams, if a green light is a door. Tears. This is where online doesn’t mean not real.

Waiting waiting waiting waiting waiting. They arrive in a glare of green light. You flee, immediate and guilty. You’ll be back though.

You leave a light on for me, when all the other lights in the house have burnt out. It’s barely perceptible. I choose not to see it, yet there’s a corresponding giveaway lick of incandescence from my window. I keep my curtain shut.

I see what you’ve done, and I respond by withdrawing. You can’t see me now. Where there is nothing read that I love you.

The loved object does not speak, is not a speaking subject. We flit from platform to platform searching for refusals of the connexion.

our entangled wakes  linger - surveillance breadcrumbs, footprints to follow

An unsolicited delivery of text messages, and yet another platform with its implied etiquettes. A rain of texts, a haze of allusions, slipping between languages, between modalities. What response is there to make? the texts need fully translating first.

we still pulse intermittently within each other. The city is a tinderbox of possible encounters. You are at the bar next to my gate. I am at the tiny museum across the street for the single hour of a specific event. Metadata contrails.

Sometimes the touch is an erasure. Another feint. A hiding in plain sight. Tap in, tap out. Figures that only exist in the electronic interstices.

Sometimes the touch comes too soon.

We will return to the violences of looking. The violence of image making, where subjecthood bursts from the eye. She knows he watches from a distant chamber.

A lull in the weather. And so we begin again in a fresh register. The edges of two bodies. Moons which still seek to touch. Private tightropes and public tightropes. What operates as a rope?

[ ]

Everything between [

Watchful silence. A silence brimming with implication. You are the one who waits / I am the one who waits. Looking without speaking / the loved object never speaks / prepare to speak.

An unsolicited delivery of text messages, and yet another platform with its implied etiquettes. A rain of texts, a haze of allusions, slipping between languages, between modalities. What response is there to make? the texts need fully translating first.

The sound of notifications on, so you don’t miss the one that you are desperate to hear from. The sound of notifications off, so you miss the silence of the one you are desperate to hear from.

A pair of deletions in one place, an indifference that’s impossible to maintain. An echo of a sentiment elsewhere. A door slams, if a green light is a door. Tears. This is where online doesn’t mean not real.

A silence that isn’t a silence if you know how to parse it. A silence of holding one’s breath, where the sound of oneself is exponentially magnified until it drowns almost everything, this is the sound of waiting for your lover alone inside your mind.

You leave a light on for me, when all the other lights in the house have burnt out. It’s barely perceptible. I choose not to see it, yet there’s a corresponding giveaway lick of incandescence from my window. I keep my curtain shut.

We surrender. We feint. We suture. We concede, or not. We gain ground, or not. We impress the idea of the weapon as the weapon. Into focus you come, then, let’s see what makes you.

Here, in the erotic fractures — temporary, permanent, we don’t know — we also co-opt the languages of war, of visibility and acquisition and power.

But, if the ground shifts, their punitive sousveillance shows, their image-function empties out. In the electronic residue the eye slips, and vision is frustrated. In short, where you look for me, you see only notes on a colour palette. And it serves you right.

Step to how those playful promises are undercut with something less easy to consume, less easy to sigh over, less easy to own, become where certain violences are enacted.

Patterns repeat, one correspondence mirrors another. So far, so romantic, but step now with me, if you will, into murkier waters. Step to what the algorithms will let you see.

I see your moon, I raise you a sun. You touch my sun to a new star. Back and forth between visual idioms from platform to platform. This is the game now. Hunt.

Do we use the moon as a conduit for touching?

The Moon that touches me, also touches you. Though it may not be this moon, and it may not be this night.

Only a libidinal investment could make a story of slipping electronic pulses thrilling. But you can pick a meme, an image, a goodnight song and detect a new figure, a new narrative.

The mirroring of bodies now repeats in posts. Your text echoes mine, draws a line in electronic flutters. Or does it?

You couldn’t see me among the mirrors and the steam and the sliding between platforms. I could never see you, were you ever really anything, you feel like nothing to me.