The Oblong Tally (Three Questions)

What if there was a way to tear everything everywhere in half? I can see superlatives shorn, and even the blue Pacific. The signs show and thighs are simple essays to smith on chocks of stone. I tap my fist in sundry dreams and land rolls away. All the shadows we go for, we use to rupture ourselves. I turn out to be monolithic man, born for the beginning. This is the fresh relegation of words you shack with, the many people we show our underclothes. To find rhythm is to gain evidence against slaughter and to prevent slaughter. I can see us cheer in the black dark, the box we grew into. That was not a way to end anything. I listen to the wall crack against my hand while I enact the force of waiting. Elsewheres are the habits we catalog when we touch what we don’t want. It’s only a problem when we do things. I feel the crud of all these we’s and you’s in the short term. Can I abandon the whorl of ago? What if time was just a way to chill? The cold people are in me and they dance when I see shards of ice falling off the trees.

What Of Action, Of December

It’s warm and our lights are out. The torch song unspools in the back. I sit and write to your grave center. There’s no mysterious thing. The particles that connected you came and went. We use heavy and heavier words and no map. Only falling avails us. This is some beginning, a frag of freak dream. All things in line, stable, like some pitch you made when we existed. I’m out of coffee and my veins don’t throb. I’m just sweet, checking the grey plastic in all the aisles of our dumb civilization. In every shack a computer, belittled lamb of sod. I write this thing damned near every day. Voices and music overlay. By whatever is useless, we tug the snow down. Trouble is for beauty and the dead.

Real Séance

Even though we’re not feeling it we try. Putting our hands up and through, we see a large man fold his finger in a quick way. They, we say, they. It is always like this, at the beginning, wearing fake beards and faces painted up with green bird signs. Yes, indicate understanding. Stand aside and see what little growing things vibrate in oases of the dead. Let’s end calling them graves. Everyone has ideas easily enough, but to grow something that pulses outward is kind of watching sleepy thoughts undo. Corks come forth and games all day. Them jumps in bite and time, and fray.

So Strange

The Bath Of Time

Everyone I know who says you can't go back to the past lives there. The sun is 865,000 miles in diameter. That means almost nothing, next to the depth of time. Your skin is flying off at just about the same speed that it grows back, until a little man with a bushy black mustache sneaks in your window, chuckles, and puts you to sleep. He takes off his hat and gloves before he goes to work. Goats bleat in the distance. No one feels the room go cold. No one listens for the snakes in the carpet. The blood in your throat tastes like rust. You wave and weakly wave goodbye goodbye. The soft skin on your hand moves through the air like an arc of water tossed from a bucket.