Structure

You know that

It exists

Whether we want it to.

Or not is redundant.

To the Reader: Shaw gone Wilde

I like the way my hand hurts where I made like Jesus and pledged myself,

Forgave my own sins. He wasn't sinless, you know. The radical act was blessing those

Who could not stop themselves. I wish sometimes I could be stronger,

I wish I could touch you when you're near. I can't. I see you now, reading.

How much is that?

My body is wracked with fever now.

I once thought my death would heal, and

Once again, I want to take you the way

My eyes can touch. In Wagner,

Amfortas has a wound that just his spear can heal.

Faith is not an argument.

The whole point of Pygmalion is that Higgins is gay. And in Wilde,

All of the characters want to dance. You, my reader, are all I have.

I cannot hurt you.

Dialectic

So honestly, let's talk: I cannot feel the way you do. But trust me;

There is something else that keeps the way I work alive.

And you and I, we work the way we want, but still restrained by solitary thought.

Prop. II

There was something. There is not.

Prop. III (Synthesis)

I stood and watched the stars that struck my eyes I wished

The way would blur away our ways and means

Of finding feeling deep in though we could have had found ourselves

Inside reality, and I know we cannot touch or feel.

Fear is what we have.

The fear before we meet, lips cross, the hopes our words

Are straighter than how

We are.

Is that all there is, the bird asked the flower? And

The flower did not answer, and could become

The structure of the dream because it cheated at

The stem of dreams. We live by waking. Our lives are struck

By blood, we move from spot to spot and from thought to

Feel.

“How could I,” I, I asked her, “not owe you any-

More,

Could I not give the worship of my feet,

Supplication of my though,

The blood of my voice,

To each passing breath?”

And she did not laugh, which saved my soul,

But would not bid me kneel.

Air as Metaphor

Ever since I broke my brain somehow

Some

Years ago,

I have not stopped from worshiping;

I sunk a knife into my chest and peeled

against yellow fat until I saw the muscle twitch,

Recoil from the naked air.

I touch statues sometimes alone in the naked air.

I cannot stand the feel of empty air against my skin and

Think that it is all

out-sides myself, where I occur,

but know it touches others, too.

The closest I have touched someone

Was breathing when she laughed. I

would have worshiped people then, if she had gave me leave.

I must touch the statues, come close, to eliminate

the structure of the silence of the air.

Excerpt

From Mark Twain's Autobiography:

"For many years I believed that I remembered helping my grandfather drink his whisky toddy when I was six weeks old, but I do not tell about that any more, now; I am grown old, and my memory is not as active as it used to be. When I was younger I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying, now, and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the latter. It is sad to go to pieces like this, but we all have to do it."

And we'll have a quorum in absentia.

The two together were set in dialectics:

What I wanted was the merger between.

I don't talk in riddles. The riddle is what's said and meant.

Were strong once, fit to try our strengths and now hard

against the strengths we found, and lost.

The touchstone of the dialectic is what it produces, what

we cannot know.

The song of the mandolin begins,

Violin quartets begin.