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Dear reader, I want you to try a little thought experiment with me.

Given the vast literature encompassing human knowledge, and all the teaching and learning that go on in the world, you probably take it for granted that the languages we employ keep up with the task of articulating, representing, translating, recording, and communicating all that we need to. In other words—now that I have articulated that thought—you probably think that language per se is adequate to the task of consolidating the reality of the world, and not merely personal partial realities, but a bigger, in principle total, understanding of the world. We take the time, make the effort, and the language does indeed ‘keep up’.

Or maybe you have already begun to smell a rat and are willing to imagine the opposite, to imagine that language is inadequate to the task. Well, that is the point of this thought experiment. Take that imaginative leap and consider:

What happens when the reality one is trying to negotiate pushes the language to the limits of intelligibility?

I thought I would ask Gilbert Adair,[1] a poet renowned for his ‘linguistically innovative’ work, to bounce a few ideas back and forth with me …

Gilbert. Hi. …

GA

When the reality one is trying to negotiate pushes the language to the limits of intelligibility …

When the felt pressure of a ‘real’ one is trying to discern does that—so that. 

Never forgetting that (to leech on Olson) what is not poetry is the will to make poetry (altho’ who could call that ‘primary,’ because, you know, society & language)—that last phrase being idiomatic & “to leech on” also, probably, & the lack of a question-mark a (voice-inflected) nother. We teem w/ references, key ones being experienced as (different kinds of) knowledge & many potentially movable up there in a moment of recontextualized “Aha!” that may afford both a concern for a poem or poetic project & a glimpse of the real that will now make its recalcitrance felt to verbal approach while also being contingent on random haecceities of the poet. Specifics I talk. Yes, once your madness has been absorbed by history.

A case in point: What might aesthetic investigation of the notion of pidgin lead to—once you realize that the scholarly acronym for one pidgin (HCE, Hawaiian Creole English) chimes w/ old Here Comes Everybody himself or themselves; & that you presently live on Kauai, northernmost of the Hawaiian islands, & have experience of both Singlish (Singaporean English) &, I suppose, Irnglish (various operations on English as it moved into Irish sensibilities & contexts); & now have a truculently arbitrary means of linking Hawai‘i & Ireland in a 3-part project called h c e.

A pidgin, of course, is much more than an idiom or even a dialect, closer but cigarless to a jargon. The word likely comes from the Chinese pronunciation of ‘business.’ A pidgin is an ad-hoc cobbled together to enable people of disparate languages, cultures, & ranks to function in a variety of work situations: mining, mercenary, trade, shipboard, plantation … a discourse to facilitate proto-imperial coercion from the start, it was almost as soon one of subaltern camaraderie. (When it outlasts a generation—when parents pass the ad-hoc on to their children—a pidgin becomes a creole, a language in its own right.)

I claim no fluency in any of the Hawaiian pidgins (minor variations island to island). As a poet, I’m more interested in what can be glimpsed or grazed, startled into apprehension, via the potentially heretical notion of ‘a pidgin of one.’ The first two sections, h & c, have, among many other things, built a vocabulary of repeating words for use in e (standing, at least in my own mind, for english—or extinction—or emergence—or elder tree, etc) in a variety of fictional work situations, beginning w/ a trial, or mebbe only a trial. When I first came to Kauai, I could understand perhaps 30% of what one of our neighbors said; now I’m at around 70%. & section e as I embark on it is much to do w/ finding means of crafting relative meaning-opacities, given our experience of rushing-in aspects of the world is rather musical (audible, visual, ‘furniture’) than verbal & bearing in mind another of Olson’s remarks, this from his Mayan Letters of 1953: “Joyce … did not improve on … the Irish of the time the Irish were the culture-bosses, what was it, 7th–9th century, or something: he tried to get at the problem by running one language into another … more relevant to commerce, now, than … to the aesthetic problem.” We do run words together, & we like doing voice impressions. & Leopold Bloom, like the hero of North by Northwest (1959), is in advertising.

PP

We hit the poetics from the outset. That chimes with me, with my disenchantment with aesthetics, aesthetics in Modernity certainly. To reprise Olson:

… every element in an open poem (the syllable, the line, as well as the image, the sound, the sense) must be taken up as participants in the kinetic of the poem just as solidly as we are accustomed to take what we call the objects of reality; and that these elements are to be seen as creating the tensions of a poem just as totally as do those other objects create what we know as the world. (Olson, Projective Verse)

With the focus entirely on how the poem is made, the undertow is irresistible, pulling us toward the ontological sense of poetics. What mind and breath can draw together in poetry is a distillation of something occulted already in the mess of the mundane. Say to me: “what is not poetry is the will to make poetry” and I hear the philosopher breaking wind. It can be that bad. The will to make poetry is bound into precedent, principle, pre-existing lines of thought, … it beggars heritage and that is not poetry, but it is the ghost of an ontological poetics: “the objects of reality … create what we know as the world” (ibid). Olson invokes a contrapuntal logic; this is no mere metaphor.

Hence we come to where—take a breath—ontological reserves trigger the production of syllable and line, and do so reflexively to “afford both a concern for a poem or poetic project & a glimpse of the real”—concern for the former in the interests of the latter. But is the motive warranted and is it a genuine prospect? This brings us back to the original question.

If “a glimpse of the real” is “a genuine prospect” the implication must be that in the last instance language is adequate. Yet its recalcitrance impresses itself at every turn; the more the poet pushes and pulls the syllables into breathable lines and the more the vivid specificities that inhabit the poet’s reality, and that represent its most substantial reserve/resource, are brought into play, the more there is that can be said and must be said.

Thus words do not reveal the real, they (ad)dress it, they make a reality of the little that they grasp by fashioning fascinators (as/of/for things). The “random haecceities of the poet” are thus particularly pointed instances of necessary illusion. Self-delusion is not involved; the poet knows full well that they can keep scratching away at the surface of things, that they are expected to do so. Usually the more work the poet puts in the fewer words are needed to make a poem. The clarity of a ‘this’ does not reside in the words used to point to it, but it can seem to when great economy of means is achieved.

The problem is that economy of means may generate monsters. The real may intrude in the guise of an elusive essence, but that is passé for the poet today. Who really cares anymore for another way to say … “I love you” or “goodbye” or “I fear death” or “nature is mysterious” etc, etc? The ‘elusive essence’ is from one perspective a distraction, perfect for play and for time-wasting, while from another it is, through iteration, reductionist fallacy and to be resisted. What matters now are our entanglements, that worlds are at odds with each other, living hells, and the poet’s address in this case defies the distilling trajectory of traditional “clearing” strategies. Babel beckons, the retrieval of an originary linguistic mode that promises a gateway to the real.

So, playfulness and resistance (equally purposeful) define the poet’s dichotomy and confuse the answer to our question: in the last instance language is (in)adequate … which is it to be? There must be more to say.

Post #2 … forthcoming

[1]     Gilbert Adair—born in Northern Ireland, poet and critic, coined the term “linguistically innovative” poetry. In London in 1980 he co-founded, and for the next twelve years curated, Sub-Voicive, a series of experimental poetry readings. His most recent completed project, Syzem, a re-visioning of William Blake’s Milton, was published in two volumes 2014 & 2019 by Veer Books. He lives and works on Kauai, Hawaii, and his current project is HCE, which mixes a mix drawing on Spenser, Joyce, Badiou, Zizek, exile ambivalence, a more nuanced exploration of Christian morality than simply as rationale for empire, and the sonic architecture of Hawai’i Creole English.

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Calmly Considering what Clothing to wear Tonight (Part 2)
By Jim Meirose

Someone sounded louder’n him, pulling up beside the building, crush’unching up the crunchy new trap rock ‘rive. Pig stepped out, opened the door, but, found that here also, there’s not a thing at all to see, buh, then turned to get his clipboard and dictation recorder, which gosh, crap—he had forgotten again that in every one of his last hundred or so procedures it had crapped out o’ ‘im, buh, since it ‘lways ‘d so when so ‘xtremely close to the en’o’ t’ ‘cedure th’t to get any closer woul’ b’ the very end, so. Never’d a moment’s been fully lost, but—as footsteps sounded, at the back entrance, he palm’d the device, asking himself why, after every procedure, I say I’m going to fix this, but, as soon as that’s said, it’s l’ways gone all gain’s only known whil’st being spoke not ‘fore, ‘fter, ‘r since. But; this time—no, ush, eck—oh. Hippo! Ess the open door birthed at Pig a blue suit of a thin tallman, which ‘nded him brittlely tight crisped ole’ paperwork, prob bubbly ‘bout the procedure he’d been summoned by some governmental body to do, but a glance, first of all, showed it up as a blank of a normal form, wha’ no one atoll ‘f the doz’ns of fields to be filled and boxes to be checked—just only at the bottom a scrawled illegible signature with large block letters after-ti saying, acting deputy in-charge prime minister with blanket authority for all and everything—and he chuckled within, as it ought to have said amen, but the tall blue suit spoke out, before he could say this form needs—or whatever. He said, This is a special case from the top, get it, fill this out with whatever you can make up, so it’ll fly if ever looked at, that good?

Those words had come at Pig over the sight of the blue suit of a thin tallman’s mandatory government nametag being covered with a tatter of a ripped-off grey duct tape—but as Pig opened his mouth to offer the one or two immediate objections, which popped him up quite frontally, they buried back in down and gone as the blue suit swing to the side as though finely hinged being actually not a man, but a door, and two others identical to him, ‘xcept for one’s taller, ‘n one’s shorter, slid in a white sheeted mass, on a gurney. Pig took this to be the subject of tonight’s emergency operation.

Three minutes later, in the procedure room the blue suited men pulled off the sheet from the subject, which Pig immediately knew had been on ice for a while—metafanfully spraching, of course—after suiting up in the standard safe white clothes, he stepped up to the plate, warmed up with a heavy inner bat, flung it aside, and to the roar of the crowd, he opened his eyes, powdering up the slugger he’d been handed by the bat boy, and saw immediately something needing to be said, about which was, This man has no fingers—and he palmed up the stiff arm by the wrist—this man has no fingers, and has been dead a long time. What is this all about?

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photo: @deeezyfree

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.

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Calmly Considering what Clothing to wear Tonight.

A new serialised piece of fiction by Jim Meirose

1
Out far in the future, from your last full stop, there comes reading back to you this description of an unusual event some several dozen years back, from even farther out, of a strange body, needing immediately examination, in room number five of Helmut Greene’s worldwide discreet autopsy and private twenty-four-hour emergency lawn care contracting concern. Motto—no questions asked, and no answers given—at least not out loud or in writing. Pup. Here is the writeup of this pertinent to us big bang.

Mediation objective goal; Immediate the presence of a large hysterical object das interior. Subjecteriorianne pap; formerly bright shine objection being, the climb up some political ‘ss.

Esquire!

Pig Humphry lay back in his cushy Brads only big spittoon, waiting for the delivery of the job to his station thirty, the last opening for walk-in’s today, and which would be so for the next few hour-sez as writing up by contract, for today. Who, where, or what they would not say, but; it’s unusual, more actually highly irregular, and somehow disturbing that three of her majesty’s very big princes must offal bee present as Pig slit down the front of the subject in question, whom, he assumed, must have fallen from some overtoweringly top-fatal, perhaps largest, and widest of any of all the diseases that be, infection or whatever. Of these, there are many wheezes; so, he did not spend the time ‘til Jess wandering, but; waited ou’ ‘s haunches off some powering down, to clear them all out, and the resultant crying and wailing and why the hell’d di’ddd ing, of every large sweep, but actually made on a budget, seventies style disaster movie.

B’.

Then, abruptly, he rose from his divan, and went to the window. There was nothing to see. There was nothing to see; his classmates began to assemble; and, there remained nothing at all to see, as he waited alone for the lab session to start, but, the time continued passing, the door opened, and Venisienne entered—already clad from head to foot in her trademark too-small baby blue, nothing to see still, nothing—rubber gloves. Hey, Pigman, she greeted him quickly, and he turned from the window, trusting there’d remain nothing to see, as; hell, the day was early, so he nodded also, but, said nothing, too. There was still nothing to ‘ee ‘cause, jus’ a’ third member of his way back when human anatomy twelve, lab group five, had to arrive for preparations to be fully complete, so, also. Hey, also. They said that ‘til the doorknock knobbed rattling eck, he is here; yes, ‘way team nuh’ b’ bringing today’s special job for Pig to do—though it’d be soon they’ll all be here, which. Which was important for the human anatomy twelve, lab group five, which had grown close, as did every of all ten lab groups working human anatomy twelve each

and every day, but s’ ‘ere ‘e comes; here comes Lavender Boy—the nick’ Venisienne teased all over him since his outlandish baggy pants day, some far back when time, which they jokingly called it to this very day, and Pig found it came to his tongue automatically, when he saw this Chester named boy enter the room, Hi, Lavender Boy, eh, we got to wait, so calm down, hang a few. Uh. That janitor didn’t come unlock this lab yet.

Okay, b’

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Jindřich Štyrský, Emile Comes to Me in a Dream, 1933

The novel is completing itself. 

I simply watch.

I remember the first time I put my face into a mass of pubic hair. 

            Too late… almost.

I am nineteen.

19.

Everybody keeps track of everybody. It is a nightmare.

The writer must… well… perhaps? I sink into jargon. Collapse under absurdity. I, Zig the machine. Rise, you human being! You big mistake. You beautiful mistake. We must conquer. What. Exactly. You lose your way. Breadcrumbs will not help you. Particles. Waves. Ariadne’s silk. A spiderweb of electricity ensnares you. Break free. Yes. Please. By whatever means & ways.

You are collider.

Her rump against your pelvic bone. You cry out. She giggles. The Cosmos echoes the giggles.

Sex is a conversation.

Zig lays there feeling the tone and texture of a blowjob. “Careful!” Zig whispers.

The fluctuating muscles of buttocks during a rigorous fuck.

The bright light of eternity is darkness.

A flicker.

Command-end. I see the page of oblivion. I scroll into nothingness.

Thoughts. Permutations of thoughts. Half-thoughts. Half-giggles. We are insane. The right response. Spirals. Parallelograms.

Predictability of reality? Shaping the repetition. Difference. What are we? Sometimes?

Keep going. Electric swimmer. Spermatozoa. Spermatozoon. Wiggles. Zigzags.

Intercept, a novel.

People walk around knowing and not knowing. City of unknown unknowns. Are people knowable? Are you?

I fell off Gaddis. I fell off the fucking page. That was a while ago. I am so elsewhere. 

I might be the only one. The only writer. The brain is just reporting this information.

I no longer trust language to say anything. [I] being [I]. She lowers. I’ll not forget. We lay bewildered. Almost happy. Waiting for change. Uncertainty. Anything can happen. A lot of noise is made during the act. Silence. Talking will begin soon. 

I think of this book as a hypertext. You need not read it in chronological order. You need not read it at all.

Everything is connected.

Nodes of existence.

Waiting for Mom to come home. Is she coming? Are you coming?

The house is an apartment is a labyrinth of unfinished chores. Everywhere we look, something lurks. Recycling bags of plastic bottles are to be curbed. Plastic bags of garbage, too.

10:22pm. Nothing is happening. 

I stare at myself.

Earth rotates. I tag along for the ride. Thousand miles an hour. I do not feel a thing.

Did you turn off your computer? Might devour your reality.

I am bombarded by particles of light.

Darkness at the fringes of the curtains. The fringes of the Universe. A panel truck is parked on the street. Beings there not at all. Intelligence agents inside gather intelligence. Listening. Murmurs under the eiderdown. Listening. Fast radio blasts in the far fringes of the Cosmos.

The agents are everywhere. They must be. Chaos and disorder. The System is under threat.

A novelist has no goal. The purpose is purposeless. Cannot be any other way. Uncertainty. 

The American experience is really something. Eh? Are you experiencing it? Do you live in Germany? Botswana? Thailand?

These damn elm trees. The quivering branches. Slanted light. Blocked in part by a hulking bridge. 

Tortillas in the fridge. Panties in the hamper.

Thirty-three degrees Fahrenheit. We are still in the HZ. The Habitable Zone. Nice planet.

Electronic rage. Kids want the machines. Kill for it.

Valentine’s Day. 4:44pm. Taking agency over my narrative. Her ass is a little bigger than perfect. In other words, perfect. She walks by on purpose. I can tell. Pretending to be interested in something. Not purchasing anything. Returning to her seat. Yeah. I notice. You wear glasses, too. It will be fun taking our glasses off, kissing and fucking. We will have to meet first, of course. Perhaps talk. I am silent. I remain silent. Makes conversation difficult. I must drink cucumber sparkling water. Sip coffee. Write furiously in my composition notebook. Distract myself from the nothingness on the fringes of my existence. I may never fuck again. Not like I used to. Every writer disintegrates. Dissolves.

Night keeps getting in the way of day. Day keeps fooling night. Everybody thinks it is an illusion. I know it is real. Everything. All of it..

She puts a bare leg over my hip. My big hand cups her right ass. She fellates my nose. Tells me I am beautiful.

It makes no sense. How can it?

A piece of writing is an attempt at understanding.

Every novel becomes a Cosmos.

Nobody beats Finland 43 times in a row. 

We used to be people. It becomes too fucking hard. We separate. Become animals. Eating & fucking.

The flavor of your life. What is it? Cucumber? Lime? Tangerine?

The wonder and awe of first sex. Buttocks clenching and unclenching. Cries of pleasure and disbelief.

I sip coffee. Thinking about emerging civilizations. Blinking in and out of existence. Somewhere in the Cosmos.

Expanses of time before us

we remove our clothes.

“Let’s get moving,” you say.

We do. 

I like books. Books like me. We get along in my apartment. Walls and walls of books. Eyeballs follow me wherever I go. Not even the kitchen is safe. Not even the lieu. I am a beggar of books. I borrow. I steal. Ideas are everywhere. The Zeitgeist. Reach your hand up into the stratosphere and grab a bolt of lightning. You must. It is your prerogative. You are a human being. A god. A goddess. 

The leader? Who is the leader? What is a leader? Is there a need for a leader? I don’t even know what to say anymore. I just stop saying. I just stop being.

Machine. Machine. Machine. I just need to say that. To remind myself. Progress is at hand. The mind is a labyrinth. Curving steel walls get in the way. Palm the surface. Push. Push. 

It begins and ends and begins and ends and begins and ends and begins and ends and begins

A string of zeros and ones bewilders us all.

Throwing our heads back into pillows. Laughing. Getting serious. Coming and coming.