if history of a person:

(>>>>>)

A request to move closer, always ignored.

(>>>>>)

If history of a person:

: if history of a person, then when the cells divide, the time spread (>>>>>), the opening of fingers, making history, moving through it, making it? Through a catalogued space, a series of located times: a history? Space, never existing, but dying at one second intervals, never existing again: a moment, a moment: just this.

:if history of a person (>>>>>): if history of a person.

If history of a person:

:then it would feel like this on the fingers (>>>>>), scales and indicators, it would give notice of things coming, cataloguing, stowing away. If history of a person:

1) Sleeping in a van in winter, can't sleep and shivering. Wanted this.
2) The severed man, raising his arms, soon gone.
3) The clouds foul with stirring, tornado coming to murder, flatten.

etc. endless, or expanding:

American Midwest. The warehouse flooded since the roof didn't get finished in time and the rains came persistent and early. The sun had not come up yet, and not for another hour. But the reflection of the steel structure doubled itself in the black rainwater, soaked shadows angling across steel. Sped through it all, dangerously fast and alone in that vast doubled cushioning dark. (And thinking: I'm so tired, and I'm never able to sleep. This work does this. This work.)

Or later, in summer, watching the tall golden weeds splash in the winds across a noonday sun. A quiet and I closed my eyes. I felt a history. I felt a history.


(>>>>>)

A memory.

Brevity, like all memories, tipping over, like all memories, so delicate, so faint. A laugh in the dark, I will keep it there in that perfect dark, that dark, keeping it.

Sad and Cigar

Let me tell a story. And this one might be true and the I being I. Or maybe it's best not. Let's just say the nothing and say the story because we want it out. A funeral. Let's maybe make it the one of my grandfather. And a father, drunk and alone, left alone, mourning in a deep colour that showed on his face, sad, vengeful somehow, mocking his mother, the widow, by shifting the coffin, open around in the room. Moving his dead father around the room. Can this have had really happened? And perhaps then taking him outside around the side of the funeral home, if raining it was icy and hitting at him until some blood came out. Dragging him back inside and cleaning ourselves up in the small gaudy bathroom. Sitting him down, now silent and sobering and dabbing at his nose with a dark handkerchief. A sick shuffle and scuffle, and, perhaps, I witness and teller of a story for no reason other than to say: in the end, I am sad for this and smoking cigars for all of them, the now many dead and the at last mad.

I want to be made felt better.

I enjoy the company of strangers--we always find each other whenever in need, you always accept my brutal silences that neither ask nor care. I have recorded the twist of your eyes particularly, and how they say that something that strangers always say. There is lonesome in your glass.
Of course I've felt the drafty rooms where strangers try not to meet, something always moving in, something always on the way out, sliding out. Nothing truly belongs, strangers in coats but no forms, but it is so silent and dead and perfectly empty: warm, tumbling and happy.

Reticence

Bang! Bang! Is this what we name it? Surely some kind of assault? Stuttering, faulty, reticent? No amount of theory can restore me here. Observing the ruins.

A waving hand in the winter cold/street light and the word "apocalypse" she said, driving. My memory is perfect under these conditions, can cut through those kinds of ashes. Dashing back and forth. But I can name the best detail. The Colour Brown, momentary flashes, idealized and prescient.

One: full sun; two: full dark. Dark always fares better.

design

The supreme advantage of excessive re/design: this is my world after all, no tolerance for that breed of mayhem; opting out. Vocalized in spectrums: from the light: how it colours things not meant for new impressions, the water, the snow, the glare in the windows; to the rare silence that belongs only at this time, a face glowing with that low, compact hum. Oscillation, yes, but fidelity across the width.

I know what delicious means; I have hands to find it and eyes to produce it. Belonging: belonging: belonging.

Falling Leaves

The leaves fall and the sentiment blushes a red melancholy. It's in the piling of sediments, the layering of past actions, living things. It's in the chill in the air, forcing us to huddle, keep still and grit our teeth, to stumble into the grave of survival. It's a mourning for the momentum of a summer body, but now, settled and still. Things fall back into place, the arc of motion seems absurd. We are all now in the process of raking the leaves up among us, in the spaces where time was moist with voices and determined limbs, where fires were to dance around, to broach the subject of how we appear naked--not to devour history in shameless disarray.
I don't know what this means, but I'm suddenly dressed against the cold, and the smoke.

Dark.

Pulling the covers over. Sewing myself into the dark. An act of self-defense that converts me into an insulator of space, a material to keep the drafts out.

Renovation

In the snow, pulling down the walls, exposing old wires, standing still, shivering, staring at the moon. No one else around for miles, except the waters silent in the distance.
--"This is not the way to do it" sayz she.
--"Says who?" I sez.
She gives a impatient huff in the cold air, a shifty cloud disappears in front of her face. She walks away to stand in another dark. But I own this bit. Mine, my personal little cold-land. I continue to tug at the panelling, resigned and breathing.
****

Something about the colour of the place, abruptly altered, shockingly distant already. I watch the activity, separate. Suddenly uninvolved and struck with amazement about how a place can so cruelly betray me. And on the walls, that familiar sunlight seems sadder, not the property of travelers in whose number I now belong. There is no music so bold or delicate, no dancing limbs; no rain to wash away that something in the trees stinging me in my heart.

Caveat Lector

Let's begin: we have to begin somewhere, a mouth beginning to part, lips moist for a kiss or a voice warming for speech. What does the voice say? How is it said? How much distance, longing in the tone of the voice? How does the voice cut through that longing, sever it at last and finally, that bitter longing, hanging like a sheet in the dark? The box of the larynx, the home of Maxwell's demon at last, two bodies in tandem, entropy mere trash in the lexicon bin, never coming forward to haunt the beyond, the place where forgotten voices go.
To hold that candle up in the temples, to perform those rituals forgotten to all but the bravest, walking to mass alone in the dim winter snow, a beautiful desire, the hum of voices in the seasonal air: deep, resonant, rich in its succulence, snow binding in the sound, softening it to something closer to a true heart beating. Voices saying love, in unison.
Voices: projecting images on the wall, successive, insistent, the perfect film every time. Voices across from one another, familiar, playing upon each other in a joyous intimacy, saying over and over again: you, you, you. The infinite voices of lovers, with a vocabulary of one.
In the dark, the voices are soft and sanded like smooth, cool stone. The reception from stars, interfering, attaching light and history to the words, generating force to the hearts behind them. There are voices here, those that I know and those that cannot be recognized, I lean forward my fingers, an urge to touch, mold, outline, seduce; behind the banner of the erotic come the legions of voices: they can do so much.

Image:

No, let's really sit down and think through this, and let it not make sense. Come forward, you ambiguous, you answerless realm, the best direction to something. I seek you.

First, a hand reaches into a dark box and produces a photograph. In the hand: a tissue of something we designate a reality, but at a [remove]; somehow lacking in something, restrained from an experiential potentiality. The photograph is now pushed into my hand. I can look at it, describe it, write about it, it can illicit an emotional response in me, I can engage in it in many ways, save one--the reality of the photograph does not surround me. I am not present spatially/temporally. Either the image or I am a corpse, out of sync with the clock, motionless. I cannot alter, manipulate with the real subject of the photograph, nor can it do the same to me. I cannot touch the shallow waters and stir ripples, I cannot pull the posters from the wall. Only phantoms, without all sense. I hold in my hand a translation, an echo of what reality appears. I am victim to this tyrant. I gnaw on these dinosaur bones.

Or, counter-intuitively, does the photograph hint at a greater potentiality? The experiences produced from photographic image-engagement are merely projected towards a different vector. But are the experiences really different between the thing and the image of the thing? After all, isn't everything we experience image? Are we then all at a remove from reality? Suppose our reality is mere image; what, then, is a photograph? Just another element of that image, meta-image.

Moving forward, into celluloid, quickening the pace of the still, even closer to the experiential world that surrounds us. Motion pictures, a series of images moving at great speed: how are these not reality? The time traveller sees into a past: "real birds" "real children"--how is he seeing? How are they to be called "real"? Images pour out and mix.

How do we define reality? How do we define image? Consider that all we have is image: all five senses are image-based. Lacking image, we are not only blind, but devoid of all other abilities. Image is the grammar of the mind, the fundament; even the word is subservient to it. Language is our best method of image-translation, of picture-communication. An examination of language in tandem with image is the best way to come to an understanding of language, thought and the nature of reality. Here comes forth an awareness of the contingencies of language, human thought and our relationship with the "outside" world. Amazingly enough, the humble, unassuming discipline of composition navigates best this direction--invites philosophy in the most profoundest sense, asks deep ontological and epistemological questions, and overlaps into disciplines as foreign to English departments as theoretical physics and neuroscience.

I pause here at the devoid point.

August 16, 2008.

A forecast of rough work, rough beast, the scaling chisel of the bones. The vanguard dusts of something momentous are bursting through the air; sawdust, sand, chalk, blood, the consummation of the ancient wastes and the cosmopolitan streets. Old soils, new dirts and stains: painting into something to become so beautiful and perfect.
Looking, uncovering, excavating: a liver-light in a collapsed corner of a forgiven city; promoting a confession between citizens, looks between lovers, eyes, hands, mysteries: touches with only sight. The clasping hands of strangers, always with that special vigour, to keep the chance contact from turning wholly to vision, the desperation of that tenuous lust. Back to dust, always back to the dunes of sand spinning in the wind.

My jaw is red, a colour i don't recognize until i come to understand the tincture of my own blood, a burst mouth, a wounded voice. The sound coming out of me is new and it frightens me.

Cities

that i enter into, signing the contract, doing the business, watchful eyes. things follow: one after another--past then present then future, but then mix: mashing out the present irrevocably. Building or dismantling, that is this present, where these streets rule, mouths of streetlights, alley-puddle moist, reflections and winds.

Things, maybe in the shapes of animals, move slowly on the plain, insisting, coming forward, not belonging. This, the difficult thought that comes before the thinking begins, the image mouthing out the knowledge, scraped out hollow in the letters. The cities, streets mere carvings, decor in this living room. A citadel of words, electricity and speech. I write this city out: it comes out, I make it happen.

Photos

every last one torn apart by furious determined hands, leaving nothing behind, cutting your hair and changing your name, crossing a sea and beginning again, tearing up even the photos left around the heart, and the cold wind in your lungs. To be half-ghost, to die a mimetic death, to suffer the insurmountable mercilessness of it; ashes in the eyes that never wash away.

Maps

Finding direction where the paths of old ways and new ways meet, crumpled in the glove box of a forgotten car full of names, fallen sick off the road. light of a distant carnival ferris wheel, laughing screams on the wind, lovers wandering. here, in the dry dark, under a blistered tree burdening the weight of time, watching the sun come up, and falling helpless beneath its wheels.

Tuesday June 10th 3:34 am

Fire in the gardens. Electric light reflecting on the undersides of leaves, producing a florescent flickering of green, delicate veins silhouetted in the heavy contrast of darkness.

Someone hidden in the brush is shouting to put out the flames, and the rusted pinch of a squeaking pulley comes out of the trees, louder than the sounds of fire.

Secret wells, black water in the dark. Bucket handles passing through the palms of ghosts.

The wind moves and so does my memory of things. Images of the past disperse, bringing history to the present, all pasts entirely available, reconstituting themselves, following his hands as he raises them across his face. A masked man, no name, a presence that skims beyond the eyes of the curious in the dark, fires and waters; a man, instead, embodying all of history, a gate in an inaccessible hall, a shape of a thing named human.

Walking along a river, fire, water, red and black, damaged memory and the bickering of ghosts in the robust weeds.

Saturday April 05, 2008

Here we have the beginnings of a spring sun; the pavement is warm on my palm pressed down, pressed down; the light through the glazier's trade, the stiff chill of waters, some above, some below, way below. {And S. talking about New Orleans and ghosts, and again ghosts, thinking about a dead man there again, who I loved like a brother. Way down south, coffin alone now I guess, corpse solitary and soaking, spread out along the waters, loose perhaps, out in the Bay. Those were, perhaps, the days.} (Back to work)