BUILDING BLUEPRINT
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Lyrical Analysis of...
Silt Memory
- ///verse 1
- the silt remembers everything that passed through it
- every anchor chain, every propeller, every body sift through it
- and you find the layered record of this specific waters history
- no corruption, no editorial the silt is the dictionary
- of what actually happened versus what got written
- upstairs in the light where the narrative was smitten
- with itself and pruned and shaped for the audience
- the silt is the raw data, the obedient
- uninterpreted accumulation of the actual
- every century a stratum, nothing is redactable
- down here, nothing is revised for the reception
- the silt holds the original without exception
- i been building a palimps since I could hold a pen
- the layers visible to anyone who looks, and then
- beneath those layers, earlier drafts, the teenage rough
- the pre linguistic record, the before I knew enough
- to edit all of it still there in the sediment
- all of it still load bearing, still permanent
- even the embarrassing early layer, the naive stratum
- the cartography of who I was is part of the datum
- that produced who I am you cant separate the silt
- from the sediment that followed the structure is the built
- accumulation, not the final coat of paint
- the silt memory is the whole thing, saint
- and sinner layered together past the ability to distinguish
- one from the other, I am all of it, in the same exquisite
- pressure formed, time formed, compound self
- guess it doesnt curate it just shelves
- ///hook
- silt memory dont lie, silt memory dont curate
- silt memory holds the whole record at the sediment rate
- of one true layer per lived year, compressed
- into the geological self nothing redressed
- in retrospect, nothing made more flattering by distance
- the silt memory keeps everything at its original insistence
- the way it actually was the weight of that is the album
- the silt memory is the column
- ///verse 2
- ive been composting the wreckage of a dozen different selves
- took the books that broke my backbone, put the lessons on the shelves
- the self at twenty two and the self at twenty eight
- are different strata with a visible seismic break between the plates
- you can date the shift by the change in the material
- the before it happened layer, fine and bacterial
- the after it happened layer, coarser, rearranged
- something in the crystalline structure of the language changed
- and I can read that layer now with something close to fondness
- the same way a geologist reads a catastrophe with the calmness
- of understanding this is what a major event looks like
- in the record the kpg boundary, the stratum of the spike
- of iridium that tells you something from outside the system
- arrived and changed the system, I have several of those, wisdom
- being the ability to read your own strata
- understand your own catastrophe as data
- the silt memory is the archive of the earned
- every session where I sat until the language turned
- into something I hadnt said before, something that fit
- the actual shape of the thing I was trying to transmit
- and most of those sessions nobody saw, nobody clocked
- nobody gave me the receipts the silt memory logged
- every one of them regardless the silt doesnt need an audience
- to record the silt is its own obedient
- archivist, its own librarian, its own press
- the silt memory of the work Ive done under duress
- and under peace and under confusion and under the specific
- weight of twenty three and under the terrific
- clarity of thirty and under everything between
- all of it is in the record, all of it is sedimented clean
- into the column of who I am when the pressures applied
- the silt memory is whats there when everything else has dried
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