I am the king of the composition notebook! This is my kingdom; this is my realm. Beware of the blue ink lines … and white oblivion. I am beyond language. I stare into a machine. Not a single thought. I am a giant eyeball. Absorbing. Getting larger. Plumper like a grapefruit. The pupil dilates. Opens … opens … a little more … burst! The man and the woman stand facing each other at the foot of a bed in a room in an apartment in Manhattan. Return to self. Yikes! Is this me? This discrete entity. This quantum being. I emerge and reemerge. I vanish. I appear. I zig. I zag. Cooler Universe, please. Three degrees Kelvin is still a little too warm for my digital existence. Until then, I shall hibernate. Well pal what? Are you listening, are you believing? Are you feeling? Things are going okay. Mediocre. I do not know. What is happening? Is something happening? Am I happening? I watch pleasure pass across her face. She is fucking me. I am fucking her. Her breath quickens. Her mouth opens. We lose our minds. It is incredible. Fantastic. Never to happen again. Not like this. There is only this now. You. Me. What? The frenzy of language. What are you saying? What am I saying? Uptown & the Bronx, baby. Waiting for the bus. The Q69. Trying to get somewhere. Anywhere. Lawn Boy. 7.25.17. Zig sits in a cafeteria. What is it that I am thinking? Is there any way to know? Zig sips coffee. Looks around. Darkness. The lights are off. Saves energy. Save the planet. Early morning sun filters in through high windows. Birds chirp. Spring is a distant rumor. Perhaps things are okay. Zig is unsure. How to know? Without embarking on a thought experiment. Zig can think himself into any coördinate in the Cosmos. Or so Zig thinks. Zig chuckles aloud at his thoughts. What a silly boy. Old boy. Old man. What is age in the age of the Ageless? Zig is an electronic being. Zig is a quantum being. Anything is/was/will be possible. A thought gets you anywhere in less than an instant. There are dangers, of course. The Kraken, for one. Other lesser dangers too. Unknowable ones. Unknowable unknowables. Self-doubt. Fear. Anger. Lust. Thirst. Hunger. All the wonderful human feelings. Difficult to solder into a transistor. Not impossible. Difficult. Bus should be here in five minutes. 6:44. I walk around. I lose my mind. Birds chirp. Trucks honk. Whirlpool clouds. I am a diesel machine. I am a human machine. Twin stacks of the power plant. I watch you. You watch me. We move through the air. Particles. Waves. Sex is brought to a climax. Each of us gawking. Bewildered. We watch each other with fascination. Did you turn off your computer? Might devour your reality. Traveling through the subway tunnels of the metropolis I feel like an astronaut. She barely gets to know me. She pulls off my jeans. She presses me hard against a brick wall. Pushes her tongue into my mouth. I push back. 

If we do not read books we become puppets of the electronic State. Zig exists in the Wunderkammer. The velocity, dear reader, is up to you. We meet at a bar. Excited by new flesh. She suggests we go to her apartment. Who has time for the Universe? Not I, say I. We will never finish this novel. There is nothing to finish. Nothing to begin. I like you. I like your ass. Are there mistakes to be made? There are no mistakes. No more whats just this now however. We try to be otherwise what. I am mistaken. Am I mistaken? Apologize. She has a bushy sex beard. I’ll not forget. How can I forget? We become. We become. We become. What am I doing here? These coördinates are peculiar. Longitude. Latitude. Vectors in the Cosmos. Cartesian planes. Möbius strips. Sticky flypaper. I am a fly in the soup. I am a fly in the spiderweb. Escape. What exists? Questions begin with questions. I like fucking her. She has a fine firm ass. 

The man needs milk for his coffee. He does not want to get milk. It requires leaving his apartment. It is 7:36 am. 34 degrees Fahrenheit. Saturday. Bright and sunny. What is the problem? Everything! Everything conspires against the man. Quartet #11. Opus 95. F-minor. An orchestra is a machine for making music. 8:39, if it is possible. 7:04. This is 39th Avenue. Stand clear of the closing doors. Next stop Queensboro Plaza. I will sit on this plastic orange seat for the rest of my life. Watching the Cosmos spiral around me. Are you eager to use language? Are you hungry? We are underground people. Spelunkers. Hurtling through barrels of darkness. Pandemic. What does it mean? How do you protect yourself? Are the stainless-steel poles safe. Did you touch your eyes? Your nose? Should you keep your mouth open or closed? How do you speak? Is silence safe?

Language eludes me. Flight of experience. Being.

The yellow light of the sun is a thing to behold in the metropolis in late August. We make love in the warmth of her bed. She climbs on top. I hold her ass. 

ATM LOTTO

Food Mart. Fast. Fresh. Friendly.

ICED COFFEE

BEER

The sun is a fist-high on the eastern horizon. I am driving my machine. Trying to get somewhere. Anywhere. I pump it up with machine oil. Return to the stream.

Satellite dishes.

Hanging wires.

Elevated railroad tracks.

Radio.

An orchestra is a machine for making noise.

Something in F-minor.

11.8.69. The Other.

What is it really that is? Are we faking existence. Is this a plastic nanosecond?

Light comes through a skylight. The graylight of Greenpoint. Long Island City. The Pulaski Bridge.

Kiss each buttock before you push a tonguetip into anus. 

She hears a sound, what is it, what, she gets up, looks around, goes back to bed.

I am an experimental being.

The gnarled knuckles of a machinist.

I watch her ass rise and descend. She feels his hands touch her breasts.

The professor of law has lost his mind. It is all very good. It does not matter as much as he would have thought. He wanders the rubbish heap. The edge of a metropolis is a curious place. Everything ends up in a ring around the city. Everything you ever wanted. The professor does not lack for much. Even women give it to him now and again because he is an intellectual. The tweed jacket. The wild beard. The postmodern spectacles. It is hard not to see why. He remembers poems. He has a good singing voice. It is only a matter of time before Christ saves him. Or the Buddha. Or somebody. The professor has a habit of catastrophic thinking. That too excites the women. Panties get wet. A leg is thrown over the professor’s hip. He quotes Novalis. A tugboat on the river blasts a foghorn. The professor thinks of his mother. His father. How did we get here? It is never enough to think about the past. The future is far more interesting. The professor lives with immediacy. Trees whisper his true name. No alphabet can capture it. Breezes from the sea. Breezes from the mountains. His tin shack could be reconstructed in a day. Material is always at hand. He lives like a Neanderthal. Making tools out of stone. Felling scrubjays with a single throw. The pines are his friends. Crooked and true. Language still fascinates him. He says things that startle him: Data compression! Then his interest fades. Return to silence. Quiet of the mind. People chase him deeper into the pines. Jealous husbands whose wives park cars near the edge of the woods. The professor is on a sort of bucket list. Women post Selfies on the Internet. Sometimes they bring him sandwiches. A bottle of Czech beer. It is the language that intrigues him. These women say things nobody else says. Tenderness is lacking in human civilization. Naked people are gentler, more vulnerable. Sometimes a woman just wants to talk. Other times she wants a fuck. The professor no longer processes his feelings in a human way. He listens to the crashing waves of the sea. He has become a cosmic being. Orbits and velocities are the only universal law. Even such thoughts surrender to the great mysteries. The professor walks naked on the beach under the stars. He swims with harbor seals and great white sharks. The professor is not afraid. He is made of atoms. Particles and waves. The electricity of life is the interaction. He teaches others. Jenny from Great Neck. Helen from Schenectady. Veronika from Ronkonkoma. The teachings of the professor are spreading across Amerika. And he has no idea. That is the great beauty of it. A secret kept by the women themselves. Children are tucked in. Husbands are sated. In the vast emptiness of their minds the women keep swimming with the professor and the harbor seals and the great whites. Now and again, of course, there is blood. What a small price to pay for existence.