LIGHT ENERGY STRATEGY


In the dream I was on your cracked flip phone running underground in between train tracks being
chased by a fluffy gray man of a cat with a cheshire smile. He wanted something from me even
though I was clearly busy on your cracked flip phone. Then he lay down like a pillow and sent
me to an astrology space that looked just like the one on st. marks and first, the guy running it
wore the kind of cream linen suit that let you know a whole empire is behind him. Can’t
remember any of the astrology.

In the same dream, baby, I met spontaneously with you, your fashion ever better while I felt like
sporty spice. We didn't recognize each other at first and then we said, at the same time, are we in
some fake world? This doesn't feel real and you don’t look like you.

For love of a friend and a one night stand blacking out on the gig of a heartbreak. Bedazzled by
an aggressive light in the moment that it becomes soft, its existence is there to obscure, to
conceal gentle vices meant to heal the ravages existentially still of the interior. When you can’t
see everything coming your way but understand that however you react is what keeps the energy
moving, now already in twenty-twenty hindsight. Heart beating ten beats per second, vibrating
outwards, irrepressible and made of joie. In the dark I think, life feels so good it’s worth dying
for.

Save the surgeries for the big screen. The casting director asked me for your name. Then said it
wouldn’t work out because we kept looking at the audience instead of acting for the camera. She
disappeared but her voice kept on talking. The blindspot is what I miss seeing when I’m looking
for a self-reflection of my own prejudice.

I don’t feel like making anything real, you said. What would be real? Material and tangibility are
anyway usually dishonest. Everything in my life is working right now except the zipper on my
backpack. I planted some deep stakes to grow high plants before I found out they were meant to
remain babies. Nothing to poke holes in because there is nothing real there anyway. Work with
materials that hurt, bleed in bed for days.

Play a trick on the mind’s eye. Be blindsided in a split second. Some call it betrayal. But it is also
a moment of reception. Remember, vulnerability is only a temporary opportunity. Feel it when
you can. Avoiding blindsidedness is stasis. You can always be blinded even and especially when
there’s light. You can see aurora borealis in Vienna. They say it’s a geomagnetic storm! Cosmic
dust erupts into the cool dark sky, ecstatic and charged, tricking the nervous system while it tries
to resist the mythology of the trickster.

Energy moves like conductors to shock the system, kinesis tracking through the body to push
stored momentum. Sight unseen, refracted in a mute dream, baby, broken, only its semblance, its
shadow. A fine edge becomes increasingly thinner, yet never vanishes. There is no zero point,
just more divisions.

Standing at the edge of a deep waterfall holding a giant glass paper weight in the shape of an
egg, staring down into it where people are swimming at the bottom, we were trying to take a
photo. Trying to keep from slipping off the edge, captivated by the idea of what it means to hang
on. We dropped the weight and it bounced instead of breaking into a million glittering shards.
Completely chill, and then fearless with full commitment, we followed, slipping down the
waterfall which suddenly became a solid pool at its basin, holding us on its mirrored surface,
reflecting our positions back up at us from the perspective of our footwear. We were being asked
to join the nocturnal life, to find a rhythm and make it our own.

We got the green light. The green screen let us know it would be okay, against it a grid could
form, within which objects resembling life took their place. Then, what before could only pass
for mere objects turned out to be something much more life-giving than that. Semblances of
structure, to move through in empty spaces. And at this point no need to poke holes. Giving up a
state of being because there is a right time for abandonment. Fall in love to walk away coolly.
Enamored only by thoughts from the last hour, which can only take shape over a lifetime.


-Cecilia Bien, 2026