Ah, the simple life. At least, in a way nature intended. Well, that’s trademarked, but you get the sense.
I spent all day, my day, it was my day, falling about a store, I fell about a store. I was too there. It was awful - they kept trying to put me there, they tried putting all of me, right on in there, right inside there, squeeze you right in, like there’s some kind of me left outside that I didn’t really know about, but that, you know, I vaguely recollected, and how foolish, goddamit it’s freezing out, of course it is, it always is in Boston. They have climates where I left, where I left some of me, there, somewhere, and there are no climates where I became the rest of it, but there were many signs, for sure, of course, there were signs all around, and that is how I knew that I was there, or how else could I know, I couldn’t, and that is how I knew then that the rest of me was not there. But not anywhere either! Well, in any case, certainly not anywhere I could have guessed, but that’s quite a diferent story altogether, and don’t get me started on it please. Anyway thank god that it isn’t here, here on this fine fine afternoon, when we are escaping the gods, our ancestors, ancestors and gods we immortalize, fear them, we do so in the shape of a japanese bauble baby, grotesque and prepresent like the circling of a man, the circling of the sun, like a vulture - it is probably getting closer, isn’t it, and closer still, sure it is. Judging from the weather it’s almost definitely headed our way, crash right on in, won’t that be a sight, and anyway the weather is no judge. Was there something outside? When we were working for the there and then, but that should be the here and now, and it is here, and it is now, and you see it’s right up there on that billboard advertisement. Well perhaps it’s not quite as big as that, but like the one I saw in the window, I’m sure you know how big it is. It’s big, believe me, it’s pretty big. To sell me a lambswool coat, off a rack, and marked down 229.99, what a wonder, red tag special clearance event, we were so lucky. So very lucky, no, you don’t understand, how could you ever? I was going to eat there too, but something got in the way of it, it was my foot or my mouth, I don’t remember which, who can tell the difference these days, and the food perhaps it was there as well, not, no never as good as I remembered. I could sleep there, if I wanted, but I wouldn’t, or I should say I don’t but could’ve slept right there under between the doors, warm and cold still, frigid really, as many do until they feel the black gavel boot rise up into the ribcage and they scuttle up and off like road flies, at least that’s how I picture it because I sure as hell don’t sleep there, and if I did I sure as hell wouldn’t be talking about it too much. And the coffee is good too, or it’s smelly and oh it’s right there, it’s right there when you need some, when you need some you need some, so that’s our little secret, we say, and oh, it’s the good bread too, there, hardly stale, well maybe just a little towards the edges, but you cut those off anyway or try to with your utensil, and it oughtn’t to be though under these conditions, and besides it’s mostly just crust. But what good bread it is, you can just see it sit with the nice lighting, watch it, you see it lathered up with a kind of seed, or oat, meal, pulverized grain, coated, swirled like the flake of a falling or rising star, so very intricately formulated, and mechanized delicately, how strange, all on the side on which we aren’t, shouldn’t be, and cannot be, but only as far as we eat our bread off of its fucking face. But when you are even on it, you are not on it either, in fact you’re under it, and that’s a shame because it doesn’t really exist then, does it?
we did factor into the composition
as whispers of cut grass and a competence
clotting up the land
where all of what was missing and the bits of coal and silt
would later emerge upon a failing symmetry
that of our ancestors.
they we presume slept in fields of fruit and sent the neighbor children
to collect the things they had lost or could no longer carry
and so came about the floating of faces
not down but up
alongside the mountain.
the makings of tradition are various as kinds of ice
and porcelain wreckage and reds and yellows
reduced to gestures
and in them often nothing said or even scratched out
and so came about our pouring out and flying
up the land
obstructing the minor landscape and holding out for the crash
as though itself it were in the phrasing of the riding out of our place
among the cracked reeds and the sustained
and the erupting legless everything
and the coming round of all the things that entered in procession.
