[2]

Unidentified Feeling Obelisk

(a sequel to Unidentified Feeling Observatory)

© 2015 by Logan Ellis

[3]

unidentified feeling:

1. an intangible & unnamed emotional response to a stimulus, inexplicable yet always

prodding, often characterized by birds that fall from flight, half-cooked and still charging

their wings like cell phones plugged in the sky’s outlet

2. a culmination, a belief, a starfish attached to the underbelly of the world

3. a memory scorched into your left tongue

4. beneath the skin, crawling in a machine’s body, travelling inside

[4]

[5]

Foreword to another Epilogue

Footprints are an unnecessary remembrance. A tempting turnabout. You drive away from the

point of abduction, making thousands of footprints and leaving the ones you imprinted in the air,

in space. Something dust can’t pretend to resurrect. Whenever you take an elevator, you pretend

it’s made of glass and that you’re looking out over the footsteps you’ve taken to this point, via

airplanes, taxis, piggyback rides. That pad-footed trail. Once, you climbed a cell phone tower,

said you believed in ghost music. Once, you climbed a tree and found a house—always a

daydream. Inside were all the tools you’ve ever needed to build & a safe full of missing teeth—a

dream thing, an ambiguity. When the rain came, everything dissolved—like a bird into night. If

you’ve ever felt a gunshot, it was deep in your sleeping tibia.

A bone. A name. An overwritten memory. A dream.

A bone a name an overwritten memory a dream.

aboneanameanoverwrittenmemoryadream

[6]

This feeling is

a certain level of chemical instruction, the silent type,

extraterrestrials breaking the ice with animals

in trees and burned-out buildings outside your room

while you, from your cradle of silence, memorize the way

their lips move, translate their culture into cobwebs.

All those favorited web pages marked by stars

brighter than the halo of explosions beestung

to floating discs in the sky; all those superstitions

you let tell you who's more alive,

leaving you dumb and unprepared for

the cocooned insects underneath billboards that break

forth with questions about life and disaster.

Yes, you’ll give them a line, let someone else finish

the definition, and then tell them that's all it is, really,

a beginning that's handed off like hand prints

for millions of others to finish until the final inventor

dies with everyone's smiles job-shadowing a conglomerated face.

The insects just laugh

and go back to sleep.

[7]

This feeling is

static-echo in clamped mouth,

an inarticulate peace,

this fabric whirlwind caught at a stand-

still in the shallow tracks of your corduroys,

a voice flying from a body bag being dragged through the desert,

saying: "where is this going? the number 7

is the most popularly ingested form of luck

while 4 has tangled our narcissisms

independently.”

[8]

This feeling

isn’t real,

can’t be

happening,

electrical cords

twist tied

around your

tongue as your

grammar

is dismembered

and placed,

twitching, on

a funeral pyre

in small glass

boxes,

a contemporary

art exhibit

in a ghost town for

bodiless children to

laugh, learn, adapt—

to find their lips.

[9]

This feeling

got nothing special,

got lips loose enough to resurrect

the lips of dead machines, got wrists

and ankles and every bone that

connects how we lift, land, rotate,

got a face like your hometown (and who

doesn't still live there?), got

that torque effect of

repeating yourself versus getting over it,

the superpower of conjuring fog—

all arrows shattering like home,

all blood types just sinkholes beneath

calm places.

[10]

This feeling is

walk-in cardiac bypass,

grave-digging,

eyes plagiarized &

hoping to meet the coma of you,

the specter of you,

a silent explosion

caught in the ground and

dozens of fingers approaching the sky

while mine stay rapidly still behind my back with a nail file, working

at the dead wings of a thousand butterfly knots.

[11]

This feeling is

inspiration unearthed

from your chest’s ancient Indian burial ground,

duly underlined and highlighted beneath the eyes,

power lines snipped with shears

and the chilled teeth you’ve been saving

in the back of the freezer thawing

like poverty.

It’s

the too-many knuckles

of a single fist rapping against your nicotine cheek.

It’s

a finger dragging

across the dust on your skull,

making a clear path for you to follow.

[12]

This feeling is

a school bus with its back hatch

swung into the fist-grip of morning,

one teenager tumbling out for each

bullet-in-bone clunk of gas prices lowering

cent by cent—

another gunshot whiplash,

another girl lost to self-discovery and acupuncture,

to a cavern of adulthood.

[13]

This feeling is

mermaid dead in the highway, scales

peeled to ribbons like burst tire wrapped

around limbs from the tree trimmers above

who’ve hacked into another

universe, one with mercy

and a weak stomach for the limelight.

[14]

This feeling is

a thousand burned-out stars

hanging in an elevator, waiting for

a power surge, hungry like a

centrifuge w/o the urgency or

a cannibalistic moon, one that

avoids the questions we buzzcut and

broadcast from our heads

and instead rolls treetops into

tight packages

and

false teeth.

[15]

This feeling is

twin heads blooming

from a dry puddle of night,

a long rose balanced between their teeth,

the utterance and grin of romantics

half-alive and half-aware like glass-piece

secrets: the roach in your ventilation, or

money in the pocket, worn in the wash.

The rest of our perils curtsy into a furnace.

I waltz with my hands closed.

[16]

This feeling is

marriage

with a hair

net, an exposed

skull-nest

of hummingbird wings

sutured tight

onto your neck by

frayed-soft

shoelaces.

You spoke to

me in the all too open sound

of sneaker squeaking,

& I

craved the

smell

of burned rubber.

[17]

This feeling is

a secret baby tooth for

the poison as loose and volatile

as an ocean stone

in your mother's hand,

disposed safely by

the tooth fairy

who moves like a smoke-filled room—

a scream in your throat upon waking.

[18]

This feeling is

every awakening

shaking dust from your nose,

a bottle of water

bedside

flavored in nightmares,

the ghost-white of a doctor's glove

maneuvering your chest, turning

every organ into glass

coffins swishing

on the inside with tiny

pieces of the Dead Sea,

tiny girls floating farther out.

[19]

This feeling is

sweet fix—

another baby

born with a

tongue as silver as

its new car,

parental wallets

empty

like a miniature cardiac

arrest.

[20]

This feeling is

bilabial click: strict on the cusp / of tongues split / cleanly in half; /

construction site misdemeanor: rolling / stop and a cat / call from a wolf's / whiskered mouth;

always horny: concrete / split by / jackhammering—

keep going kee p go in g

[21]

This feeling is

sweet, like a dog's

heart open beneath masked

fluorescent lights, like candied amusement park

sweat, like scissors running with

child hands, lifelines sharp enough

to stab them blind if they trip.

[22]

This feeling is

over 99.99% accurate; sea salt;

crooked cranes vomiting above

a convention center for forklifts

foraying and flaying apart

mannequins of last week's lost

word, the one not even a

Walmart cart of hand

mirrors could refract,

colorless, from your mouth,

the one that took a single hand

and pushed itself farther into you.

[23]

This feeling is

spikes in the pores

catching loose skin and spinning it

into sweaty ocean jewels,

a seaside secret tooth beaming

bright like the picket

fence metatarsals reaching from the

sand-skull of ivy,

all the beach umbrellas crying,

“Amen!”

[24]

This feeling is

best said by Childish Gambino:

“The only dinner for two.”

[25]

Is this feeling

balding formaldehyde,

speedreading a nail in the wall that

has lost its painting until it collapses

into rose water?

Is this feeling

spiderwebs in the clothes rack

catching fingers and spinning them into price

tags, chilled and throbbing?

Is / this / feeling

how we revel

like prepaid gas pumps, how we spend

our college funds on perforated words and hand

them to one another in slow motion—

dad, mom, home?

[26]

[27]

Intermission (with an exception)

Whisper: Wait. Will you tell? I can’t

give away the receipt of this burden.

Can you tell? The urge to vomit when

asleep. The urge to wake up and pull

the steeping teabag from your throat.

The urge to shut the window when it’s

already shut. The urge to turn off your

phone during a call. Don’t you know yet?

This breeze? I can’t tell. I can’t tell.

Shout: IF IT’S NOT THE CYMBAL

THEN IT’S THE CRASH. IF IT’S

NOT THE FLIGHT THEN IT’S THE

HALF- EATEN BIRD HEAD IN YOUR

HAND. IF IT’S NOT THE HEXAGON

IN YOUR SKULL LIFTING AND

FALLING, FLAPPING IN A LEAD

BREEZE, THEN IT’S THE ALIENS.

IT’S THE NOWHERE NEAR.

[28]

This feeling is

condemned houses waiting

to burst like a chrysalis without

the shine, as colorfully and carefully dead

and uplifting as a plank-bridge in a cemetery,

underwire popping into flesh becoming the new

fashion high—an organ per dress,

a smirk of lightning and blood.

[29]

This feeling is

ass-end,

unconventional,

a paradox boiled down to its basic, dusty elements

of

a spray-paint bottle in the hand

&

graffiti of a naked woman underneath a country bridge,

X's in all the wrong places.

[30]

This feeling is

a window into

the secret part of tomorrow,

loose teeth fondled

under the pillow of a sleepyhead

who has slipped into a desert coma—a

dreamscape painting on fire—and is sinking

slowly through the skyline of a buried-alive city.

Meanwhile, the popcorn ceiling

above his head laughs,

lodging a kernel into the fan,

choking on the entertainment.

[31]

This feeling is

transferring the thorn

from hand to foot,

from nose to eye,

from funny bone to ass cheek,

as delicate and obvious as

a sonnet’s Volta,

the binary volcano

split evenly, the block’s new church

open for business

and their clever billboard psalms

preaching to a truck’s tire tread,

the worn knuckles

of an abrupt sky of wheat

rapping on our flayed heads

to wake up and realize

the names on our bookshelves.

[32]

This feeling is

walking towards you

on the water, dressed

like Jesus wearing

water shoes, open

palms heavy with

chattering removable teeth

devouring hungry birds.

This isn't a philosophy;

eventually all your days will

dwindle on ropes in place

of puppets and a hair

writhing through your

food will become a miracle,

a road sign of hope.

[33]

This feeling is

a cover band of horses mutilating guitar strings

for a ripe-tomato-and-latte

audience—

applause in each hum, neigh, and sip,

the background’s final tambourine hiss

conjuring a snake's dentures.

[34]

This feeling is

the slashed tire of my lips

bleeding rainbows

on the wet asphalt,

our fractured organ of technicolor

intermediary, a run-on,

like the first announcement

of the newest war

and that moment when

everyone looks at each other's

facial muscles and finds

mutual words

tucked in each cheekbone.

[35]

This feeling is

a serving platter of your

nerve endings, cooling

slightly in the air, wriggling

like fish on a hook in the sky,

gobbling all the numbers

and alliteration we’ve thrown

up and didn’t ask to come

down until our umbrellas could finally erupt

and serve as bouncy houses of the brain.

[36]

This feeling is

learning to cartwheel

below a line-up of

symphonic planets who’re all strumming their teeth and deciding

which of your legs kicked them

from your delicious dream last night,

which leg they can tear

into orbit—

a victim in every off-beat;

a thief in every rhyme.

[37]

This feeling

ain’t the smell of fire,

ain’t wildlife on exhibit in tame fists, nor

gentle love, a rocking chair, floral

wallpaper, a smock pocket

filled with “in case of a sneeze” napkins.

This feeling ain’t underneath

the fingernail, ain’t something that

can be dug up,

too short for the teeth, ain’t the offering

of a kitchen knife. This feeling

ain’t here to accuse, forgive me,

ain’t peppered or waving from

a costume on the side of the road. Ain’t

recorded—ain’t a soul

who’s tried—ain’t innocent

at the bottom of all that dust,

the weight of water,

ain’t fighting back, coming back,

it is

relaxing into that coma, handful of

flowers, a nurse and his poison,

respirator quieting into a shot of technicolor; it is

how you discover there’s paper beyond

the sky.

[38]

[39]

Prologue in Reverse

You were always here. But don’t worry about how much longer you’ve got. You’re aware of

how your own body abducts you. Your belly has brought rocks. Another walk with fog for feet,

your mother in every doorway behind you, advancing from skins of what has been left behind.

And the work ahead is too dark to see. A medal for “jumping too high.” A metal or a medal. That

word like a metal in your mouth. Another threshold. Too many instructions in life, subtracting

into a channel of sloppy doorways, hands to memorize. Another entrance.

[40]

This feeling is

monarchy’s head

split for dissection,

a cadaver in a cabinet

left in the aftermath of

the world’s end,

two moons colliding into

a Venn diagram, and,

in the overlapping shadow's seam,

a voice just as dark

and drunk, saying,

“please, leave.”

[41]

This feeling is

diamond catapult in a

field of unnamed flowers,

our ankles

caught tight in the

television-static gray

back at home, torpedoes

of blood in each

nostril, the

velocity of blast from the past

producing sounds

of popping knuckles &

maybe

poetry slam finger snaps,

the beret kind.

[42]

This feeling is

a fish in the sky,

silver lines cast into

its gasping, acute mouth,

the sharp corner of reeling

that takes more

forearm than bicep,

more skin and sweat

than the texture of patience,

and, when this miracle has

broken down through the skyline, this

feeling is spinning your

fingers around its intestines

in the kitchen sink, crying

because no one has taught you how

to gut, because your lifelines wore

bloody moats.

[43]

This feeling is

Christmas trees stitched

into a circus tent, protected

from winter rain, how we train

them to forget their roots, how

a bead of sweat reflects

our world on fire like a swamp

reflects a poltergeist.

In which we are grateful for the pipes conversing behind our walls.

In which we forget where we dug up the grave.

[44]

This feeling is

waiting.

(your eyes the weight of a tip jar)

waiting.

(fork-tuned hallelujah)

waiting.

(a burned-out house glimmering in the rain and fog trails,

atom bombs in every closet corner)

&

waiting &

waiting

(gravity braided between our toes,

hands braided between our heart

muscle lattice)

& waiting &

waiting &

(our senses uncorked,

bruises like a participation ribbon,

sinking sunlight into the basement concrete)

[45]

[46]

Prologue with an Interruption

Another entrance. Too many instructions in life, subtracting into a channel of sloppy doorways,

hands to memorize. Another threshold. That word like a metal in your mouth. A metal or a

medal. A medal for “jumping too high.” And the work ahead is too dark to see.—

((You have a device planted in your brain. I’m telling you this because it’s true. Believe

me. Believe me? I’m keeping the man made of other men a secret. No, you do not know. Believe

the hocked part of me. Me? Plan for your house to be taken + Plan for your head to be taken =

Plan for the house in your head to be taken. We only have so much sky to puncture through; we

only have so many floors, so much gravity & grounding. I’m sorry this has happened to you.

Let’s make amends: I’ll break the bread, you pour the grape juice.))

—Another walk

with fog for feet, your mother in every doorway behind you, advancing from skins of what has

been left behind. Your belly has brought rocks. You’re aware of how your own body abducts

you. But don’t worry about how much longer you’ve got. You were always here.

[47]

This feeling is

an optional sweep

of the mansion:

the left wing unfolding like televisions,

the right wing curled around

a leg less child, the attic

and basement two halves of quicksand,

portals to bone, every opportunity,

from the door to the window to the

welcome mat, hammered shut

or otherwise darkened, kissed to death,

every wall fresh arms of a beatnik

strumming away, counting chin hairs,

and the lonely occupant, broom

still in hand, knowing there’s nothing left

to clean but the wall of text

eating him from the inside.

[48]

This feeling is

prodigy on all fours, popular

until proven guilty,

abstract love like traffic cones around

a pothole, one that mirrors

the upside-down mushroom cloud

bottoming out your gut, making

nothing grow but

reverse bones, your

grandmother’s quilt, a cold

place warmed by hands

in motion.

[49]

This feeling is house on the tip of a flea’s fingertip where I open the window and shout, Nice

view! and no one hears, where I take a picture of the sunset and no one cares, where I lock

myself out and there’s no one to call, where I try to climb down and slip and no one catches me,

where my body grows its own chalk outline and no one sees it on the news, where wolves eat my

head & hands & feet and have children bearing my resemblance for some reason and no one

takes a photo, where I leave many faces behind in each beveled window and no one forgets.

[50]

This feeling is

half-assed cartwheel addict,

the last known wanderer taught to scream,

a well amount of fur patched to

the inside of our chests, waving like seaside vegetation

to the savage call-breath barreling through

our esophagus sarcophagus,

lock and key lost to the quicksand balanced

at our lips.

[51]

This feeling is

sleep crawling up the wall

in a sleek, water-black wet suit,

stopped by your eyes, reminding

you of

a pull string, of how you

could easily peel away her darkness

inch by inch to

see the colonial cockroach, see the many

prisms in her eyes, kaleidoscopes

that empty into reversed thresholds, into

the prettiest secret in the whole motherfucking world. But

I didn't

tell you that.

Sometimes

we all have imposters.

[52]

[53]

Prologue after the Prologue but before the Epilogue

to mean where does something begin? to mean there’s a point in everything, a list of segments

waiting inside like a shadow for the right time of day. we want and we want and that feeling we

want to wear that feeling like an inside-out skeleton we would like to purchase that feeling for so

& so for the cost of one arm bone and one leg bone or maybe the mice that hide inside them but

maybe I’ve been thinking about light all wrong, maybe it’s not something you can turn on and

off.

[54]

"Don’t walk away from me."

“This feeling is the light inside a silhouette.”

"You know why I’m upset."

“You are repeating

and repeating.”

"You keep pushing me away."

“I’m simply pushing candlelight with my fingers.

A thousand shadows with open mouths. Baby birds

burned to their nests.”

“I’ve been waiting behind for so long.”

“Isn’t silhouette is a funny word?

Silhouettes in place of windows. Posing through

flaming hoops. And my wristwatch is on fire.”

"Can’t you just try to try?"

“I’m sinking with the weight of how I’ll make this

up to you.”

"You’re just so stupid."

“All I can see are wooden angels, and they’re

lighter than the sea.”

[55]

Standing alone in

your bedroom's dark,

the sharp edge of it, this

feeling of bending the window blinds

with your finger to see

a rabbit dressed

like a wolf outside on the lawn,

still obvious in shape

and size, in how it cuts its teeth

on every blade of grass and

pretends to hurl howls at the moon, but

still somehow confident in its disguise.

You try to be the same.

show me

You try to be an adult locked in mother's womb.

show me

You try searching for something else to jinx.

You roam for it.

You run for it, far

into limousines of night.

This way, you learn how to protect

yourself; you learn how to blacklight

your own mopped-up crime scene.

Perfect (show me)

in every pixelated (show

me) kind of

[56]

way.

So, if

you have it figured out, bring

me up to your room,

sit me on your bed,

and show me

how to be the same

as you, you as the rabbit.

[57]

This feeling is

a light splitting from the scar under your left nostril,

rough-skinned whispers of everything you've

touched throughout the day erupting from your hands:

a movie ticket, a PlayStation controller, a knife, text coldly

cut from magazine pages in a waiting room where

you listened for a noise, the sound of the door

opening or hitting sunlight for the first time in days, a sensation

that you always knew was there

but couldn't face your window to prove.

[58]

This feeling—

Margarita savvy & clutching

the knees, tear

ducts, aqueducts,

duct tape over your mouth in

a room cut from outer space,

anything that rhymes with

the sound of sobbing and

clicking fingers, beautiful things

rotting in buried treasure

chests, proud in their

hide and seek holes of earth.

[59]

This feeling is

quick-dilating

Eurekas, bells grown

from the teeth you used

to collect as a kid and jingle

before the fairy of your adolescence

made them rattle like the ocean, and

you began crying

a lot

in a land of honey, a

Pangea-comb, a misspelled

guttural gun show, billboards

forgotten in the air like gods

you prayed to with all your silent goddammits.

[60]

This feeling is

blank verse conclusions,

a conversation

between two walls

of aluminum foil. I measure you

in all grins, I trap your voice

in a jar and watch it

spot-glow against the glass.

I sleep with it folded between

my arms like a mother

with no children. I wake up

and it has grown away from

me, the sound of a dream

being filled with rainwater.

[61]

This feeling is

bee suits worn against

every sensation that drools across

your fingertips / a window of

televisions broadcasting the same

melting teeth of a man on fire / running from

the cannibals in the woods

behind your childhood home, every

tree reorganized, every boot-beaten path

rearranged, a murder of

crows overwhelming fence posts

telling you no trespassing

on the private property of welcome back.

[62]

This feeling is

underlined with sleep,

arms linked in bold typeface &

rewound through scratchy static, into the

opening credits of Heaven,

the world as a different kind of story,

one that you bark louder to hear.

[63]

this feeling is

summer poking its eye through

the glen where we slit

our tongues for romance. red-

den

-ing.

blink, eat, matinee our attention deficits

into a new noon

sliver sliver sliver (s)

r/e/d

inandforwhat.

today, the ghosts have been busy,

comma splices in each wrist

as they

dismantle the shadow of our house.

we open the door and see a stretch of forest,

the buzzing silence

and stillness of it,

r

e

d

[64]

and, like an ouroboro, you eat yourself tail first

as I run away with my legs twisted

in a tourniquet, a knife in my forehead slowly splitting my body

into a door, darkly cut and cropped to reveal

me and all of myselves

dancing around an effigy, too aflame to extinguish and

too charred to distinguish—penultimate.

[65]

This feeling is

a headful of jungles,

everyone you know as an animal stepping gently

from the magenta bush, shaken into

black outlines as they press their foreheads

to each sincere gun in all of your

one-thousand hands,

the barrels like dark telescopes to a white

constellation of teeth.

Somewhere, there is

waterfall applause telling you

to shoot every one of them

dead.

Somewhere, another revolution ends,

fireworks bottom out the moon onto happy battlefields,

arms are kissed with lips crisscrossed,

but you are away from it,

keeping one heart

open and the other tightfisted, singing

your mother's hymns and standing

still, still,

still,

trying to look intimidating enough

as you look into your animal's frozen eyes,

not shooting, and knowing

that you never will,

you won’t.

[66]

Another Epilogue

Possibility is a fine-toothed dagger. You reach into a fish bowl filled with strips of shredded

documents, always pulling the enviable question: “Who gave you permission?” You put a hand

to your side and notice the thousands of confetti’d ribs. Nobody has told you how much the

world means crawl. Crawl into, crawl out of, a cage behind your face swung open, bones of your

mouth emerging from the sands of a beach faraway. And if we run out of words to use can we

still say “Amen?” Stint the graphics. Keep your body dotted and moving moving moving

forward into the adjacent angle of a wall’s locked kneecap. Listen to the command. Just. Just.

Keep driving and forget how to look back.

[67]

Logan Ellis is the leftover fog at a melancholy punk concert, rolling into your hair and tagging

along in your left shoe until you get home. He is the morning hubbub and the afternoon

hullabaloo. By harnessing the calm breeze at the Zen temple hidden in his head, he has received

his Bachelor’s Degree in English, creative writing, and Linguistics, and is currently enrolled in

the MFA Graduate Writing Program at California College of the Arts. He has plans to work as an

editor/publisher while also colliding and remixing poetry and fiction. He thanks you for reading

this e-book and encourages you to drop by his blog, www.unknowmenclature.tumblr.com with

some good vibes.

© 2015 by Logan Ellis