Philip Sorenson

from Work is Hard Vore

reborn trash,
grow the bark on your back

flowering eyes: hollyhocks, black dahlias

snakes for innards
razor your teeth

haunt the hill
of hard work

the remains of everything was a work
and is now not a work but a hazard piled high and buried or evaporated

work needs a ground for its shape

and “the body has the same basic form as a house”
the body has a family inside of it consuming the work

the family must be suppressed at times to produce

the body can go to work and ignore the secret family
and the body can sit in the little space a blocked concept

blocked from other people but also “networked” so the workplace can work linked to the next in a series of wires and waves

writing a graphite tower built from a lost/hidden/suppressed chain

summer is a time for hell

to ring the golden tone a feather
longing condensed and bareness

so many brands crowd into the summer they cower under lamination

beg the skeleton to heal or insist a doubled consumer who works who is diligent is prudent and unmakes and makes a waste

we experience “colonization of the lifeworld”
the spectacular work

eye work/ measure work
metrics

swallow infants
come into lifeworld empties it of its contents

empties the continent of disorder
that is people made delinquent

machines are introduced into the space of the body
which used to house many prairie plants was an oak savannah

the body is made literal and there is iron piled on the shore
it is a body of iron

growing in its scintillating guts
spread to the line: “[the] problem of distinguishing the boundary between inside and outside.”

the core issue of poison is the core issue of property

Philip Sorenson is the author of two full-length collections: Of Embodies (Rescue Press, 2012) and Solar Trauma (Rescue Press, 2018). A shorter handmade work, New Recordings, was released by Another New Calligraphy in 2018, but it’s now out of print. He co-edits The Journal Petra with Olivia Cronk.