The Spirit and the Animal

Poems read at Annie Bloom's Books during a feature alongside Stephanie Strange and RJ Equality, on March 24 2026.

1

Howdy howdy. My name is Tau, short for Terra Augustus Utopia. I'm feeling a little under the weather so we're gonna take this easy. Remember to mask up appropriately, folks. Today I have a series for you loosely titled, "The Spirit and the Animal."

Do you ever wonder why you wake up?

I mean, do amoeba wake up? Do they dream? At what point of biological complexity does what we call "the mind" emerge, and what is its mechanism? What is the physical process of consciousness, and what sorts of creatures possess it? What is it?

I can only really speak for myself but, when I wake up, something looks through my eyes, and that thing looking is distinct from my body, even though both are me. They – my animal body, and my ethereal spirit – exist in dialogue and collaboration, but they don't always get along. Like any relationship, it takes work. Their unity is me, but they are, in their own way, individuals too.

I'd like to share some poems about this duality. First:

I ask my body: why did you summon me?

To dance.
To chance
Upon existence
And others
And vistas
And lovers.
To weather
The trials
And rigors
Of miles
And jitters
My flesh does
Not recall.
Immortals fetishize
The anguish of being.
They never realize
The pain of forgetting.
Though the spirit never dies
You will miss living.

2

The spirit and the animal have different goals, or motives. Neither has an obvious purpose -- they are both, in their way, accidents of the nature of the universe -- but their distinct perspectives color how alien they are to each other. The spirit comes from somewhere else, somewhere timeless, while the body emerges from Gaia's sacred cycle of decay. What can they learn from each other, by being us?

This one is called:

Student at the Threshold

I teach my body
The contours of eternity
Like a nanny to a child,
Erratic, confused, distracted.
It has spent millions of years
Eating and sleeping
Fucking and dying
Crying and fighting
In ways that seem trivial
To a being of a trillion lives.
It doesn't understand belief
Beyond some red hot anguish
Or love's sun-like warmth.
The pull of the ineffable,
The push of the system;
My sacred mysteries,
No more than fetters for fools.
Come and eat, the child says.
It's warm in the daylight.
Even sleep tastes good.

I teach my body
To cross the veil beyond decay
So that I may utilize it
As a clipper across the ocean of the real.
I raise ethereal roads and ghostly aqueducts
And the invigorating waters of my pantheon
Flow like manna into my body's mind.
I flex its hand and feel heaven's designs,
But the body just feels weird.
It looks at the veil with hollow wonder,
Stupid and stupefied.
It reaches out to touch it,
To grace the curtain of possibility
With mortal digits, mortal curiosity.
I come upon it as we dream,
My student at the threshold,
Watching other selves teem infinite,
Loving people that almost came to be,
Cherishing a slightly kinder world
That never quite happened.
Come away from there, I say.
Nowhere in Creation can your flesh
Survive that crossing.
It never does.
We awaken from the dream sobbing,
As everyone who loves the body most
Was never real in a way that mattered.
I watch the body cry, distantly.
I will recall it forever
Like words carved on a page of stone,
Negligible among the endless possibility
Of everything that could ever happen.
But to my companion,
It is only real once.
It is the only real thing at all.

3

That one was sort of a downer, wasn't it? I wrote it after a very upsetting dream, where I was madly in love with my childhood best friend, and he loved me back, and also was just totally fuckin' ripped like he has never been in life. In dreams, the body will tell you what it wants, and sometimes it seems like nonsense -- but it feels so real, too. So excruciatingly real.

This next one takes a turn for the spooky. Have you ever faced a sleep paralysis demon? It's pretty common, and virtually every culture has some mythology about it. Typically, it happens when you've messed up your sleep schedule pretty bad. So, when I happened to encounter the Evil Tongue Lady at 4am a few months ago, I said, OK, OK, I'll stop ignoring my bedtime reminders.

But it leaves the question: who is this outsider, this visitor?

What if they're you, being called back to the body as your brain awakens in fits and starts? Maybe it is:

The Spirit Returning

I crawl back to you from eternity
Because you have the audacity
To once more summon me.
I wriggle and writhe toward flesh
Toward embodiment and death.
I shape my self to the shape of you.
The grim outsider stumbling, you rue
To recognize as humanoid, a void
Of absence and wrongness;
Limbs too many, eyes too few, witness:
I crawl back to you from eternity
Bonded from birth to death, you see
Because you summoned me.
The monster shuddering toward you
Inspires such horror and dread you
Seize up, freeze up, paralyzed, you
Find your muscles immobile and gripped
As vapor-like I slip through your lips.
As I seat myself in your mind at dawn,
I begin to taste the terror you have drawn,
The nightmare you consider me to be
Though you had the audacity to summon me.
Embodied again, I feel myself screaming,
So by closing my mouth upon waking
I halt your riot and render you silent.

4

Spooked? That's the idea. Besides poetry, I'm usually writing horror stories. Or, essays about labor politics and decolonization.

Do I have time for one more? OK, OK, cool. Let's go.

Recently, I had some facial surgery as part of what's called gender-affirming care. That means, it was a pretty big deal, I wanted it to happen, and the state of Oregon was kind enough to pay for it. It also meant I spent most of January on a ton of painkillers. Because I had just had very sharp tools very close to my brain, I worried whether my cognition had been affected. To prove my noggin was still kickin', I answered every impulse to write poetry.

A few days after the operation, in the middle of the night, I rolled over and grabbed my phone, and wrote this:

Waking up at 2am a few days after surgery

The body summons me, worried.
It asks: Why am I in pain?
I feel like a planet fell on me.
Well, I feel like I fell on a planet
But that’s just what it is
To be summoned.
We wanted this, love.
Becoming hurts, sometimes.
Remember crying for the first time?
Remember grieving for ten millennia?
Remember touching galaxies of love?
That is why we become.
You summoned me to help you
Cherish all that surrounds you,
Especially and including you.
The body insists: it hurts.
Well, that’s why the doc gave us oxy.