You see the problem. To separate the act from the thing. As if the parts of some moment in history might be interchangeable with the parts of some other moment. How could that be? - Cormac McCarthy

Late winter lessons in weakness:

An icicle will snap under its own weight.

Late winter and identity:

No too snowflakes are the same. The secret,

though,

is no one cares -- unless you try really hard, each

becomes another,

reflecting white glances of all you've seen before.

To see the similarity is to see through a lens of desire,

An inconstant urge to want to want not to want or just to want.

the way it whips along my windows shows

the way the wind has wants, to enter, penetrate and pull

itself as deeply as it will go,

dissolve into the air I hold in here.

But no matter how I breathe it in, I cannot hold it still,

It is not me, no more than you.

Cars

Slipsliding across icy

Streets

-backandforthandback-

and hard

bodies slipping

but never quite

meeting

into each other

Borrowed Books (A Memory Play in 1 Act)

This mutation makes the text habitable, like a rented apartment. It transforms another person's property into a space borrowed for a moment by a transient. Renters make comparable changes in an apartment they furnish with their acts and memories; as do speakers, in the language into which they insert both the messages of their native tongue and, through their accent, through their own "Turns of phrase," etc., their own history. - Michel de Certeau

I do not know what I should make of many borrowed books.

I hold them up against my face and feel the secret words you wrote

as if a you held young in time would meet me, and would speak.

We would meet in some non-place, and talk, and not know why,

Nor why our faces would be open, why you poured out words into my head.

You would not know, I know, just why you speak, or whose ears

Would drink in words, whose eyes would ask the questions you could not hear,

But we would speak on just the same, and trace a finger where words came alive,

Although I would know, if you did not, that they would change for both.

Each underline an artifact, each scribbled note a sign;

We would trace out bodies in the text, and part, and not hold that time

As any more than if we'd never spoke.

I read the first one first to last and only stopped for pause

To see what else I might have missed, a scripture in the margin

Giving shape to formless thought. I knew the glory of a priest,

And slept with it against my chest.

I have kept the others closed, wondering whether and what

Secrets they will speak, holding each next to my face,

In hope of hearing you.

Amusements

A muse

ing

though(t) carries w/ it

A muse in
spired

(spiring)

Springs

Forth in

A

maze

me(a)nt

to be so much lower

Than you but not, realizing,

A

lone.

Epistemology

1. Proprioception

If we are to steal, I pray that we may do so with our eyes open:

Seeing each action we take, embracing the quiet and the trackless walk

And take pride in the action itself. If we lose track of our hands,

Cannot feel our feet wander, we cannot touch a finger to a nose

With our eyes closed, and more still, could not reach to run a finger on an earlobe

And back again without keeping our eyes trained on the spot, and

That could make it very hard indeed to steal those things by which I survive.

2. Thermoception

I am keenly aware of the casually crushing back and forth

Waves of heat between our bodies that (see above) alter with the motion

and the eyes are closed and mouths won't work and we only connect through heat,

Using the crooks of legs and arms and necks to melt the still-frozen spots

And give way to release.

3. Nociception and magnetoception

Discovery A., subset 4:

If you take what it is for exactly what it is, give it no more, no less,

It becomes possible for the organism to push through pain, to gain

direction from something in itself. (Subset 5: stronger governing forces
may be gravity, or the sheer magnetic pull of something you can't see)

Look, pt. 2

So I saw the way the sun hit across the western sky

And shattered its light across the plains.

I was young enough to still think the way it hit was..

What was it?

beyond concept. The way you dance against an Irish air

And dance so that it would move.

Really, though, look,

I cannot tell you how the sunlight hits the western plains,

Gathers itself and breaks itself,

It is.. is its own entity. I want to show you with my mouth against your neck

Because that's all it would let me set.

Worst case, you'll never see.

Lemme describe:

The prairie grass turns to blood, hits red,

The sky seems larger than it should be,

And I ache so much to have you next to me

for no reason -- not sex, not reality --

that I cannot, will not, go beyond sanity.

So look,

I don't want to elongate the moments that should stand by themselves

Or take issue with things that are reality

But the thing is I know we stand against space,

I looked at the sky too long once when I was young and saw the stars

And think we could be there.

So, look,

You can't ask of me what I can't give because the truth is,

I'd give what I have for you, however small that is,

But the thing is, the war ended where I began

And I've never given up fighting it. And that's where

We can start to fight:

Because, look,

The sun hits hot for a few seconds every day against cement

And melts the snow that otherwise would linger

And that's how it is for me.
But the thing is, believe me, the way the concrete hits my eyes

Is against my face, the solid grey of those things is only illuminated

By the fact I can lose myself in your sparkle.