A Personal Guide to Forced Displacement

“No human being should be deprived of his metaxu, that is to say of those relative
and mixed blessings (home, country, traditions, culture, etc.) which warm and nourish the soul
and without which, short of sainthood, a human life is not possible.”
– Simone Weil

Let us rest a little. 
There is much to take in here. After a long process of disintegration, 
rootedness. 

         The life instinct gives off sparks

flashover of pure form
before it breaks free without recall. 

Art is the conductor–

across space and time
and life and death. 

To break free 
will take a lifetime. 

A lifetime is a form of flammable cladding 
growing anxious to ingest the oxygen in cavity walls.
The blaze burrows through 
at length 

and eats away at it, 
as a blaze would. Art is the conductor,
memory the meeting place.

Tilted at the sharp end of the passage-
way        
         were they a voiceless chorus 
                 in a vessel being filled

                                            the same memories would turn up the self-
same passageway.
                                
Send in all personal inquiries and sit tight, it’s just a matter 
of investigative procedure.

And wait and wait,
for nothing to happen.   

Channels open 
in the membrane
of the nerve cell.

Human breath 
collection apparatus 
in sensorial space–

I’d like to ask moreover what dead book fiction 
was used to shroud, to mask everyone’s spirit of discernment so completely–

Is it true there isn’t a valve to shut off the flow of that blue smoke in here

the outlet pressure’s going to exceed 1000 kPa 
and someone may choke to death 

before they iron out eventual bugs and safety flaws 
and add new self-correcting features, and whatever that piece is 

       that’s dislodged in me might, 
                        and why not, cant round chasing after whom to blame      
                                                                                                                            
bordered in 
again                      

internalized, for all intents and purposes,           
like a compression field stretched across a nexus of events.



Time’s up, foster a rapid decision. 

                                             Foster, for what it’s worth, an image, 

                   a destination. 

Not the kind one feels confined to 
as in a stray subway car 
buzzing round an unlit tunnel 
darkly packing hours 
deep inside the hourglass

but a harbor of pursuit, a transplant of the will to believe  
no less desirous than habitual,                                  
habitually a size too large. 

Because the first act of war is feeling small. 

Crawl-spaced and halved by borders
and not so infrequently punished 
for crossing borders. Flux.

[Reflux.]

Can you hear me. 

It’s just like old times.

I left my self in the old quarters, 
a boy gliding in and out of the brickwork
forever ushering new tenants in, hanging on for dear life,
having only been taught hate. 

I left to see how far I’d come–

When I looked back I was a navigational hyperlink, 
collapsed, light at nightfall 
the final sight to mark my progress,

all initial and ulterior installments of escapement 
born out of a mere change of direction

not unlike an experience 
not fully formed yet– conjoined at the root 
by their own function or, perhaps, 
lack thereof. 

Which brings to mind the story 
of the dissident poet with bad teeth surviving prison. 

‘His teeth survived prison?’ 

‘Finis vitae sed non amoris,’ he’d say, soon all things perish 
as approximated

simply to reveal traces
in a case of evidence 
without clues

as from a swift
underwater explosion 

during which for the subject to be transformed 
it must initially be stowed at the center of its vulnerability, it, the subject, 

and then propelled, albeit later than ever, high into the air, 
ridiculously majestic– 

                                          Into making a farewell appearance

on a narrow ledge
surrounded by its counterparts, pain
and beauty–                       

To see the object of universal contemplation
in the flashing eye-ball 
in the sky                 

reflecting, upside down,                                          the seeing of events,
                                                                                 the natural enemy territory   
the sweet guillotine mends dreams 
for the unloved in. 

Hard to know when to stop, having arrived into the world head first, 
anonymously, the next place beside the last, so few crossing rafts.

---

Micro-Machinist 

​How much further to keep on as to get over. 
What was got to is made real.
 
                                                  The sound of the city waking up to life
 
matched to the waking city’s unique sound print
reveals a voice unaccounted for.
 
An outflow of yellowness across every inch of tunnel,

checkpoint 
for a longstanding 
hunting season.

The guards cash in each time they let the hunters through

free to continue 
plaiting fresh data strands unimpeded,                           ununiform with the near 
                                                                                                           daylight sweep 

so that the rest of us
here      transit breaths pushed on by gusts of idiopathic hypersomnia
should access                                                         information at a higher speed,

                      then become it.

Thoughts are foldings-over, after-thoughts. 

Not fully independent of    
to what extent 

and why 

    these almost instant overfolds tend to remain still even as we try to speak, 
or speak & act out post-truths all at once, 

an atrial flutter one beat every .4 seconds                   generates miles
and miles of industrious erosion. 

                                                An investigation has been launched, is now ongoing, 
meaning, despite reports themselves being permanent and darkly 
growing more collapsed 

from the mirage 
of constant changings, 
transformations, 

we’re configured/ 
reconfigured 
in the eyes of statues 
we can’t escape around the room.

What, at this very juncture, isn’t weighed down by the circuiting breakage?

Insofar as the nervous mind supplies the system’s orchestra,
consciousness awaits the big homecoming 
cheering on

                      nothing but survival training 
with a deathwish. 

The ungainly way made is visually transposed: 
homelands melt between 
the cypresses

dimming distance 

with the birth 
of a neo-century of maiden spirit.   

Duplicity is fetishized.        

The sediment of doublethink crumbles the alveoli on either side 
of the recruit’s heart 

and compounds
a vast continuous presence.

Having come across the slow familiar missing of the soul, his own private micro-
​machinist, all that commands him does not exist.

---

The Skylark
​

The poet sees the lark burning 
like a candle for the birds who disappeared–

Its song teaches words 

to love inside 
and outside 
the poem–

I see it too
and see him 
look at it

we both 
look skyward
like conical 
reflectors. 

Through the dark
a gap filled with half-light opens up.        



Note:
The poet sees the lark burning like a candle for the birds who disappeared – 
in reference to "For the Vanished Birds", by Marin Sorescu

---

Click & Connect
​​

​At night tricks of light sleep 
at dark angles. 
The heart feels like waves
gently rock you 
in the middle of the sea.   

Misdirected acts of kindness.    

Proceed by connecting
the following statements:

You don’t really KNOW yourself.

You drink down nature 
so she spits you back OUT.

You remain deeply UNHAPPY.

​​Daniel Nemo is a Stockholm-based poet, translator, and photographer.
More info at www.danielnemo.com