Eyes Offline

Eyes Shade, Throats Graze

Transfer Density

I was six when the ground took my eyes. Twenty feet from a treetop to flat on my back, and the first thing to go offline was sight, then breath. I lay there belonging to the tightness that shook me, unable to see or pull air, my body in its own shock. What lingered was the air around me and my throat working short stinted breaths to pump me back into the living world.

I do not know how long I was gone. When I came back my mother was standing over me. A neighborhood kid had run to get her while I was out. What a sweetheart. I heard voices before I saw faces. Only a youngster, already grown an unaccountable trust in my Eustachian tubes.

We perceive signal when the eyes go offline, likely because it is a rest that transfers density to other senses. Not romanticizing sightlessness. Stroking what the dark wants to do. When we kiss we shade our eyes with their lids and let our mouths do the perceiving. Inhibiting vision here, feeling future there. As if the quality of information stops translating words and starts speaking matter.

Tasting Dimensionality

Eyes lightly horizon shut, curled up in the lap of a loved one, heat radiating off their palm hovering over my back. I shoot up. Those are reiki hands. I say how I long to learn reiki. My eyes now wide with wonder, leaking over the resonance. A recognition whimper.

I cannot recall a time before having expensive taste. Not in a luxurious way. In a quality, folk-like way. In the sensation a thing carries. The aroma of an experience, the one your thumb and pointer finger rotate to figure out. I like life dank. Doused in a pinch of here and there, posturing at a slant my head aches to tilt for. The reverent culmination of those detour flavors brought me here. To this page, to illustrate a third, fourth, maybe even fifth angle. Now we are dimensional.

Mirror Offline

When I opened for Beverly Glenn-Copeland, the lighting team took our color scheme to heart, pinks and turquoises, and gave us a pitch dark audience. Not one face was visible from the stage. At soundcheck I held a scalding tea, anxiously curious how I would sound in the room, especially unable to see it. Six inches from the mic, I sounded my first vocal and threw my luck back to my throat. What came out astounded me. A rounded room took the shape of a void-like night sky and licked a natural reverb onto me that fed back tenfold. Did not even need a wedge. No amount of looking in a mirror gave me the confidence to see myself the way I heard my voice that night, perceiving through my throat and ears.

Flesh Factor

We are falling apart to build together. Somehow love fragrances sweeter in the ruins of Empire. More delicate. Less devouring. More worship. Less petulance. I spent most of last week crying about how tender it is to love in a harsh world. So sincere, everyone kept remarking. But truly, still feeling fleshy with corpses hanging from wifi tethers is crazy work.

Perception Vehicle

Can you believe what you see? AI, an amorphous black hole, a joke we tell to reconcile the things we did not want to happen. As if the difference between real and not real is the inside and outside of the same skin. Low-vision me is early to a reality we now all share. I find myself pointing toward a salacious crack. Like, what is that? A sliver of fringe making wind sound and smelling of manure.

Some of us would do anything to win. To get ahead. I notice my eyes sink in, go numb, scanning for vibe-coded purple. The guttural desire to “make it” swallows the essence of the thing you want visible in the first place. I do not see my eyes in the sunken place. I imagine them bulging out of my skull, in disbelief of what I am seeing because it is that enticing. AI is distinctly unable to entice. Its ways are designed to default flat. So while you deliberate whether to raise your productivity with AI and generalize your voice, or refuse it and stay carved, here I am broadcasting from the throat with a third way.

Long before the eye was trusted to report, there was the throat, an instrument that carried not only words but also the dialect of wisdom. The carnal scented breath in between. The rumbling bones with food stuck in their seams. Where the world is not built for you, you architect another way to perceive. That is older than me and larger than us. The oracle does not look, they sound. I am not the first to graze the future this way. Disengage one sense to plug and play another. A strategy. We will just have to wait and perceive.

Below the belt you will find guidance toward the ears and a living prompt called Lid Fast.