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.