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Hope is Weird

Nora Treatbaby

Hope is weird. Becoming and forming. Each hope is its own utopic receding. 

[The mind acts as a location for gathering an image into form 

as it is becoming. Unstable and without memory, the image

must attach its composites to the empty spaces image produces]

Futurity is born in the catalogue of the not yet foreclosed upon. How I have hoped through this hope. Future is losing emptiness. Impossible to set anything down somewhere other than uncorrupted event. Massifying towards a dot in a work of becoming. To use the natural languages in an event like this when their relation to origin is now entwisted with a world in total transport is why I return to this world Earth. I have measured my hope by thinking of utopia as a probability of occurrence. I am still responding to the call of physical laws as if I could carry and protect my images in a pouch held together by visible stuff and little real things. I am visited by the physical laws and they error me with the truth that as Earth life hurdles towards a more certain outcome, the present moment becomes increasingly distal to time’s middle. My thoughts end always through a bloom. Once transformed, they fall apart from inexperience as collapse is the becoming of form as a permanent situation. The mind is hoping across a canyon.

Hope is weird.

It is like folding laundry 

on the surface of the ocean.

It is a [pleasant memory] engine.

Tomorrow is a freshly minted coin.

I can’t wait to find out 

what we spend it on 

[I can’t wait to spend it].

You have placed in my hand a smooth opal

megaphone. I am supposed to scream [I must

admit it disgusts me]. I get so sad thinking of

monkeys and babies in the future. The machine

continues against my vote.

Hope is to be inclined to 

produce more world. [Personally, I want it].

I am drunk in unmeaningness.

Condos are reposed 

into the city’s 

receding froth

[I can’t hear more world].

It is the time of year I dip my nipples in

champagne. [I feel like the feeling is owed 

to me]. Bring me my feelings so I can sign 

my contract with the future. I am

singing beautifully in the last mall.

Hope is just your inner life 

[that’s where it can’t get out of].

One feels like an edge, roaming.

I don’t want to be chased by goals af.

It’s a good thing clouds can’t

fail at what they do.

Looking through a kaleidoscope of the traditional

nostalgias. Of all the feminisms I want to feel

like a woman before they turn you into one.

I am lost in the word aura. [Unwillingly] it is just

itself no cut diamond or sexual zone

Hope. Look! 

It’s New Jersey.

Hell is inside me.

Time will feel like a joke feels as it is being 

told. An azalea will briefly catch you

[neither you or] I will sit with it as it dies.

It was brought here to frame the image of society,

which is a photograph of my dad.

Hope is like staring into a warm mirror.

[Sometimes though it is a February].
My enormous eyes are closed.

Reference protects our most 

aimless prognosticators

a pool of thought dripping

into its subordinate. It is

so rewarding to be wrong [right now].

What happens to a tool once it become useless?

[This is a USA USA kind of day]. Why won’t the

atmosphere learn to code? We are holding disaster

at a distance with the bare facts but you are not

headed towards death as much as collapse has

been placed inside you.

Hope is the liquid entrance 

to outcome.

It is an act of pinkening.

[It is the ruse of blush].

I am compelled to pronounce 

what happens to me. I wish I could

keep it draped in blue velvet.

Another word for event is time-item. 

I am compelled to produce new 

experiences [it is very irritating]

it is all porno.

Hope is the category of time 

that produces more time.

I could cry these days. 

There will be pleasant

weather in the future.

What are we to do with the time that is

given to us? When I walk backwards

through the door of the world the sky will

spill off the earth, value will blink and the

particles of each object silenced. [The world

is stable if it isn’t]. 

Nora Treatbaby is a writer. Her work is featured or forthcoming in The Weakly, Shotgun Paper, Sublevel Magazine, and Nighboat. She does not spend her time. 

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