Anniversary

We walked in the woods while it snowed. This much is historical fact. I myself remember the trees, the compass, and the blizzard. She remembers forgetting her glasses, and that I guided her home. At the time I didn't say it, but something came through the snow and touched my soul awake. That part is speculation. Later I would wish for machines to test my hypothesis. "Beauty seizures," I called them, and wanted them measured like the enlightened monks who sat in airless chambers while scientists watched them put their hearts to sleep.

Later that night I told her how the snow erased the difference between the trees and the leaves and the ground and me. She remembers me saying "I love you." But I never said it. Did I? I remember she wanted to hold my hand -- this was a bright spring day on the grounds of the church -- and I didn't want to. When I gave in she said, "See, doesn't this feel good?"

The machines showed a flat line. But when he stepped out the chamber, he reportedly felt quite fine.

Untitled

Mom will die and Dad and then--- this is not news to anyone. I try not to read the paper, though sometimes in the train I forget and suddenly my head is full of rape and death. This is no way to commute. Then the world goes on. Sunset in the evening, the distant glow of cellphone lights in the park. Sometimes I come up from the underground and see the sky. I mean really see it. Mom will die and Dad and then there will be clothes to keep, or give away; closets to explore. What if I find his porn collection? The weed he didn't finish? Should I smoke it with my sisters, high together at last, and sad? I wish the stars would rearrange themselves and spell out their names. Then death would be fair -- no matter how he lived, whether she got the job she wanted or not, the sky would announce them forever as RICHARD and WENDY. Just above my head. So close I could almost touch--

This is not news to anyone, but I love them. It makes the commute bearable.

Knowledge of Good and Evil

(for Gloria)

We did not steal the apples. They were three for two and I bought two for me and one for you. "'We love one another,'" I say. So when you did not want to walk with the walker, I let it go. Later you spent the night designing a machine that would make life easier. After the fall it did not matter what Franz Wright poem I read in the rec room to keep you company. If my mind was half on something else. "'We don't really know anyone well, but we love each other.'" It took six decades and in the seventh your brain hit your skull when your head hit the floor. The Harlem river outside. Winter coming on. I know the names of several people who did not do anything about it, though they heard the sound. Somewhere sometime we are all accountable for what we do. It is not our soul. We must give it back the way we found it.

As for me I regret everything -- no, nothing: the river was just right, as I remember it, when I walked out into the rest of my life, exiled from the time I could have said goodbye

Kurt

Though Kurt was a pedophile -- tried, convicted, sentenced to twelve years -- he was in many ways a nice man. In fact at the trial one young man testified by saying: "He never hurt me and was always polite."

It is difficult to imagine, but this may help: he wore striped shirts from Gap Kids and had scars on his face from teenaged acne. That is to say, Kurt did, and not the young victim who spoke warmly of him that afternoon, whose face was smooth and pretty in a way boys can be at his age, much to their embarrassment. Of course his testimony helped put him away. But it was inevitable. When they searched his hard drive, police officers found that Kurt was in possession of some 1500 photographs of child pornography, including those deleted in fits of conscience, which were recovered and prompted further investigation.

How does this happen? Files are stored on a hard drive by orienting the magnetic particles of the disk in one of two directions, zero and one (on/off, yes/no, etc.). Information about the stored file - in this case, one of the almost twelve hundred deleted jpegs - is kept in a file management system. When in crisis, Kurt was deleting only the reference to the file in management system. The picture, stored in as a pattern of zeros and ones, would remain at least partially intact until reformatting, or if the hard drive were exposed to a strong magnetic field.

I was Kurt's therapist in the nine months between arrest and the trial. That's me, seated two rows from the back.

"He's a faggot," is what Willie had to say on the matter. "He wears those faggy shirts and acts like he's better than us but he still makes boys suck his dick. That's what he does." Willie leaned back and nodded at the group. "And now he's got to do what we all got to do, though I don't wish it on anyone" -- murmurs of approval from the men -- "even if he is a faggot."

It's not worth fighting it; Willie is a bit of a monster and besides Kurt is gone. "Does anyone else want to take a moment and say something?" I choose my battles with these men. Gary raises his hand.

He speaks:

"You know I try to good with everybody, I like to joke around, you know, and you guys all make fun of me sometimes and everything, but we're always having a good time, right? And I hate to say it, but I never liked the guy. I know, I know and I really am trying... I know my triggers... and I'm real careful of my SUDs*... and I want to practice tolerance in my heart, you know, I'm reading the Bible every night. Lord knows I don't get much else to do, but I hate to say it but you know he was a faggot, Willie's right, and he got what was coming to him."

If you had access to their files, you would be able to read more about Gary and Willie, both African-American, both in their early 40s. Both offended against all their stepdaughters, aged six through ten, for as many years as it took for the girls to reach puberty.

I am white, like Kurt.

And so he got twelve years, and the young man with the pretty face cried when the judge said it, and the guard took Kurt away for the final time. In the hotel room he had given the boy a book called The Little Prince, and it ends with the narrator asking you to ask yourself: Is it yes or no? Has the sheep eaten the flower? And he says no grown up will ever understand that this is a matter of so much importance!

Six decades after he crashed it, and one month after the trial, Antoine de Saint-Exupery's plane was found off the coast at Marseille. The author of The Little Prince was taking pictures in preparation for the Allied landing in 1944 when his plane went down. Researchers still have no idea what caused the experienced aviator to crash on that day, which was reportedly sunny and calm.

Like many things there are two answers, though it takes me a long time to choose.



*Seemingly Unimportant Decisions

Mission is Number One

Casual and intrusive, exhaustive: worse. It is not ever casually hot, Sue suggests, merely raises her hand, intoxicated and then dislocated: the fan is broken. There is no electricity. The secretary is without a desk. The detailed map of the interior, while highly sophisticated and indeed accurate, is no longer available. I believe it was a brief reminder, inappropriately quoted, Cheryl suggests. Her name is awkward. She needs to be fired, I mutter. Drinking, pandering, I do not care. The absolute reason, eventually, dissolves into the action, the consequence. I have, recently, abandoned stringent definitions and, instead and coyly, arrived for recognition. I have come for recognition. Six forty-nine in the morning and it is casually hot, though impossible, even improbable, yet existing. The electricity is broken, Warzol interrupts, as he is accustomed, a train of experience embracing a subjective universe—a metaphor?—yes, I apologize, allow me: a train of experience embracing a subjective track. Much better. Please begin again. It is like this at first. The themes were not adequately unveiled nor placed at mathematically unobtrusive and learnable intervals. The average mind, say the mind of reader X, would not subscribe nor comprehend this opening. He speaks to complete metaphors because he speaks complete metaphors. Sue is suggesting interesting ideas: mere intersections of possibilities, mere abilities to make me into a recognizable figure, a person of important ideas. I am trying, of late, and with minimal yet surprisingly aggressive success, to come to terms with my artistic self and I have found, without too much awesome introspective dialogue that I am fairly neat. You are neat, Cheryl says, reading, again, a quote: Unsuspectingly clever and upbeat. I have missed my exits and my smiles. No, no, there are forty-nine reasons why I am clever. I became an expert at reasoning when I was nineteen:

Don’t get caught out of bounds.

The Space Station Vacuum

I vomit for seven hours. You are nervous, she says. She is my wife. I am nervous, I say. I am agreeing. I am an agreeing person. And I am the man vomiting. My body is not agreeing with me, not anymore, no—not right now. They will bomb a village in Africa, Maurice says. It is a fair exchange, Hank says. Where is Africa, he asks. He is my son. He is always referred to as “he”—it was an agreement, another agreement, made under external pressure, coercion, really. She says he is my son, I consider later and even earlier, I did consider that earlier, once. I vomit again and I count to twenty-seven. I am on the floor, on a marble floor, I am in the bathroom. Twenty-seven? It is not so arbitrary a number, she says. She is my wife again. A person known as "she" more often than "her", and rarely as dear. There are twenty-seven men and women in the space station that is hovering around the earth. I have never been in space but I am told it is a vacuum and I am also told that there is very little air, perhaps no air at all, inside a vacuum. I cannot imagine a place where I couldn’t breathe, Maurice says. He is laughing. He is arrogant. It is really a fair exchange, Hank says again. They did not bomb the village in Africa because of the space station, Sally chuckles, but it was a logical incentive. It has already been bombed? Of course. The time is six forty-five. I cannot believe I am asking questions. I should not be asking questions. Of course it is fairly inaccurate to assume that the progressive argument would continue, would indeed surpass action. That is quite foolish, I admit, in private, only to my wife. This was the illogical particulars of events. I am in lack of a direct response, Cheryl responded, to an eager and overzealous press corps. However, I would be most interested in a hearty debate. Yet, privately, and most awkwardly, there was a sense that the general and prior flow of water, indeed any substance controlled by gravity, was not an act of logic, at this time. Like a vacuum, she asks. She is correct. Yes, exactly like a vacuum. How, I wonder, again senseless and without aid, did action become a vacuum—no!—how did the process of act and actor (combined to create action) fall under the control of a vacuum. We have a vacuum cleaner, he says and I am convinced, most certainly, he is not apparent in his resemblance to me. No, it is not possible. We could trade the passengers aboard the US Station 1BC to the African Union in exchange for a non-bombing non-binding agreement. It is a classy idea, it may even be genius. I am unafraid of admitting this fact. I am convinced of this fact. There are only so many children in the village and the act of bombing would create very little aches and pains and actual deaths—well, no, it would cause many deaths. Here are the pictures. These are projections, I suppose, wonder, voice. Fool! It was already an act. I vomit again. The actions inside a vacuum are most peculiar. Oh, outside it is already cold and dark and the view of earth, so tiny and so round makes me homesick. There are twenty six men and women in a space station, she says. You mean twenty-seven. No, she says, and he was not particularly fond of the vacuum cleaner.

Numbers

Instead of a country there are numbers. The numbers go out in every direction at every angle, and the angles that describe them are also numbers, and the distance they travel are numbers too.

Instead of citizens there are patterns of change. Some pattern are predictable, certain number sequences reoccur, but always in a changing relationship to each other, themselves, and the whole.

The whole is what you call the world. Inside it are more wholes; they are smaller and infinite. What you call the world is itself a smaller, infinite whole inside a larger infinity of numbers in changing relation to each other, making patterns you can call the universe, or the multi-verse, and so on and on.

God is the name I use when I am thinking about the whole. I live in the United States of America. I am a citizen. There are infinities above me and below me. I am happy sometimes and scared of the part of the pattern that repeats for me and the smaller and infinite wholes I call Mom, Dad, Jennifer, and Sarah; and my friends; and some are named Steve and Marcus and Geoff and Miguel but when I am thinking of them and I am thinking very well God is the name that comes. Work is what binds me to the responsibilities of the world, which are: love, fairness, and participation with humility.

Mostly I participate; mostly I am not humble; and then comes the numbers with a new whole God made of stars or pain and what I do next is my choice, though it moves in every direction, at every angle, and belongs to everyone.

fat woman

naples, this year, this day:

…she is judgmental. She is eavesdropping. She is smelling. No, she is just a snoop. Bugging, taping a stifling dirty affair. He is sleeping with women in the second floor garbage shoot. That is the beginning. I didn’t agree with her, not at first, not at all, I didn’t agree that she could bug her man, her husband, her lover—her item. I didn’t agree at all. Not in the context. But of course I was a woman, a little mouse, a sneak, a peaker, a wanderer—a walker, yes, a gambler, a romantic. Alas, only a reader and a sitter. Everything is blissful in the zoo: the tiger, the smart tiger, the blessed and full and courageous lion (as proud and courageous as a lion), an ape, a gorilla, oh, as big and erotic and egotistical as an Ape!—any animal, any animal at all, of course, any animal, any animal in the zoo. She is a spy. A real fundamentally foul spy. And he is making sex with women in the second floor of a garbage heap because there is no place for the garbage and there is only place for the garbage of the mobsters. The italian mobsters, yes really, italian. No, I wouldn’t dare listen to the conversations, especially not the afterhour conversations, I am not permitted to listen to those, those are fearful and dangerous and full of plannings and plottings. Martha is fat. I am fat, she says. She is fat like a big dinner roll. Like a dinner roll that is human. She is plumpy, dumpy, lumpy. But, oh, she does not have mobster ties and she is lucky, at least, she is very lucky, to have such a garbage heap in front of her apartment. But two stories, two stories of garbage, and he, an insect, a man with six legs and six lives, is courageous enough is eager enough is playful enough to enact—like a lion, like a tiger, like a bear—the act of…oh my!...yes, but I am just a playful being, a sad and tragic target, a homely being, a woman of medium height and of interesting appeal, quite attractive in certain light, quite seductive in no light, purring like a kitten, no like a puma, and a leopard, oh, like a leopard I leap and plunge into the growl, the purring growl, oh, of a kitten, a puma—oh my!...He is, he is, even now, he is making the back and forth in the garbage, with, of course, with Tracy, she is a tramp, a whore of indulgence and self-importance, a woman, a classless woman looking for a fruitful introduction to intercourse—Oh, my!—not, intercourse, I meant discourse, they will bring me back. She is ever so judgmental. She is eavesdropping. She is ever so smelling. Ever so smelling…

Beings

Ruwa is a town in Mashonaland East, Zimbabwe, situated 22 km south-east of Harare on the main Harare-Mutare highway and railway line. In recent years it has grown rapidly and become a popular area for people moving out of Harare. When I was a girl, I had unusually vivid dreams there. One night I dreamt three beings from space visited me in my bedroom. Without moving their lips, they sent me a message: "You are all going to die."

Family who stayed watched President Mugabe destroy our infrastructure. I left when I could. While they cooked what they could over firewood I ate in my small apartment in the New York Bronx. Four nights a week I cared at a home for mentally retarded women. Daylight came through the curtainless bedroom and washed out my dreams.


*

LYNN: Is there such thing as UFOs?

I'm not sure, Lynn. Nobody knows for sure.

LYNN: Is there such thing as aliens?

I dont know... why are you asking all these funny questions?"

LYNN: I saw it on TV. Aliens on TV.

You saw aliens on TV?

LYNN: Yeah, yeah. Aliens on TV.

*

During the first decade of independence, Mugabe used the North Korean trained Fifth Brigade to silence any opposition from the Ndebele nation in an operation against dissidents referred to as Gukurahundi. Several thousand civilians, mostly Ndebele, were killed or disappeared and have not been accounted for to this date. Allegations of genocide and ethnic cleansing have resulted in calls for Mugabe's arrest and prosecution for crimes against humanity.

Then, last summer, I woke up with the hot afternoon sun in my window and saw men and women on fire falling from the sky. I threw open the window and watched the Harlem river sparkle and the commuters waiting for the train and the air was quiet and calm. After so many dreamless sleeps, were my dreams starting to spill out of my head? I shook and sat down on the bed.

That's when they started again. For three nights before September 11th, I dreamt of an exploding satellite, and an Asian man who looked very happy.

*

Mona asked me if I would go with her to church. Sometimes we talked when we passed shifts with each other. I had told her about life when I was younger, losing touch with everyone, and then about the drought, the famine. She nodded. "I hear you, honey, I hear you. “How long will the land lie parched and the grass in every field be withered? Because those who live in it are wicked, the animals and the birds have perished.”"

That Sunday I sat next to her, in church for the first time since Ruwa...

And the preacher said:

Three days and there was a flash in the sky above the schoolyard. Three holy spirits in silver ships, angels' spaceships running on God's Eternal light -- they landed and the looked in the astonished faces of the children. And they said, See, We have set before you today life and death, good and evil; and the we will bless you in the land you are going to possess. But if your heart turns away so that you do not hear, and are drawn away, I announce to you today that you shall surely perish…

And the children heard the words though they did not open their mouths, and in from their conscience came a rumbling like a great ships through the darkness.


*

Time for your medicine.

LYNN: No, no sleep..

What's wrong? What do you mean?

MONA: She's just being difficult, aren't you Lynn?

LYNN: NO! No sleep!

Why no sleep?

LYNN:

MONA: Don't touch yourself! What's gotten into you?

She's scratching... let me see, Lynn, what have you-- oh, Mona!

MONA: Oh Lord what is that?

LYNN: He did it...

Oh Mona we have to page the nurse... who did it Lynn?

LYNN:

MONA: Don't act like you don't hear her, Lynn ------. Who is he?

LYNN: He did it. See?

Oh Lynn...

LYNN: See?

*

Please pray for the Christians suffering in Zimbabwe. Without speaking, open your mouth for the speechless, in the cause for all of us appointed to die.

Happy Birthday

If the satellite doesn't explode;
if the man on the screen got it wrong and tomorrow finds us in our beds,
then I'll come back and see you again.
We do not have much time. Soon our parents will die, and our brothers and sisters,
and the brothers and sisters of our friends.

(Sarah got Gumby for her birthday;
Jennifer hunts moths;
and I am dressing as a skeleton for Halloween again--)

Only then can we sit here and talk plainly:

"I love you. Do you love me?"

"I do. Can I keep you company?"

"Yes, please."

We sit in front of the television to see if it will snow. Groceries, a trip to the bank, download the pictures from the night before. I will stay in tonight, meet you at the bar tomorrow. Raise a glass and say: How perfect it was to be alive with you in the world today. Whether the camera catches us or not. Even if the sky fills with fire.

Border Crossings

The drive is mostly hills but there are some parts that are flat. The border is a gate and a hut. The hut is made of tin. The hut has three windows. One to see cars coming. One to see cars going. Another to look at the mountains and the flat desert. One man lives in the hut during the day, another in the night. The men carry weapons, long weapons. I do not pretend to know weapons. They are metal or plastic or iron or even wood. Some of them make a lot of noise and others are very quiet. There is always a lot of screaming when there are weapons around, screaming and crying. We arrive at the border in the morning. The man in the hut makes noise with his mouth, strange sounds, like an elephant—no, like a snake. He is too often in heat and in cold. The desert does not keep its visiting faces often. They are expelled quickly, almost whimsically, and then they are replaced just as suddenly, just as haphazardly. There is not anything that survives in the desert that is in motion. It is not like that in other places. We are stopped. He is babbling, again like a snake, and she is responding, with gestures and some words, animal sounds. He is making rice, she mutters. We interrupted his lunch. Later, as it happens, we meet again, the two of us, in a crowded square in the capital. He is not carrying his weapon and he is not making noises like a snake. I ask him for fifteen hundred American dollars and he agrees, stares at the eyes of the bartenders, the waiters. Tomorrow, in the morning. He agrees. The army soldiers guard the borders of some countries, guard the border with weapons and alcohol and illicit narcotics. They are bored and they do not usually concern themselves with the crossings, except sometimes, occasionally, they do. In other countries, it is special guards at the border, with special numbers, and colors. They are not as bad. They might even say good afternoon, or hello, or fifty dollars will make it easier. They will shoot you, he says later, in the square. The men with the red eyes, blood shot eyes. They will shoot you two times. I needed that hint later and I remembered it. The men in the southern river valley were not oil men and they did not care about the ex-patriot population. They were mercenaries, kidnappers, contractors. At one time it was unimaginable to own land, then it was people—now it is people again. No, it has been imaginable to own it all. The ownership of land and people is not so foreign. But, once, it was very foreign. It would be heroin, in the eyes, heroin, or something else. I am staring at the horizon. We are at the border. He wants fifteen American dollars. I am not annoyed but she is upset, agitated. It is the desert, I think. There is not any place here that would remember a traveler, even for the afternoon. It is a lost place, an eaten and eating place. It would be heroin, made in factories that are in tin huts, like this tin hut. On the border of a place that is abandoned, crossing into another territory. More men with guns, rules, imprisonments, capital punishment—all just to remind us, even now, that there is a line that is the sky and there is a line that is the land. The line that is the sky is not changing, is always the line that is the sky. The line that is the land, the very skin that is this line, is always changing. The rice is finished, it is ready. The man waves us through the gate and we cross the border. We are not remembered by the man until later when I remember him as well. The drive is mostly flat, this time, but there are hills on the right and on the left. I have always noticed the immediate change when crossing borders. The light is not the same. The shapes are not the same—the colors too, they are unlike the colors we have seen before. The lines are not so accidental as the drive makes them feel. No, the gate in the road is not accidental. There is no tree, no marker, no home, no people. But the crossing is a revolution, a rebellion. Even when there is little honesty there is rebellion. I am not loyal to the crossing nations. I am removed, un-committed to cause, leadership, movement. We are driving fast again, the landscape catches on fire and it is not the same fire as before. It will tire, eventually, but now it is glowing, novel—the world over here, right here is far greener, the desert is far more alluring, romantic. Reliable. There is memory in this desert. And the lines are like the lines in the sky. We wear different colors now. I am most taken. My arrival and my departure, I think. There is too much color and there is too much that is crossing paths, back against my memory and unleashed on the hospice care and unsuspecting grandchildren. I do not remember. But there was cool dry skin on the seamstress, unease in the cab driver, and of course, there was the maddening color and the strike against my face, the brand—that I am branded—and yet unattached, so un-attached and un-owned by that same continual arrival and departure—yes, yes, the arrival is mostly a change in the color, the texture of the upper lip, the romance of survival, the elbow, even the gain. And the departure is far from different: it is the solidarity of this collection. Eventually, as might may have it, one morning, I may kiss the lines of the land because it is the skin of the earth and I am speeding across the desert in so much color. I am left, here, only to become and un-become myself, always assured that I am not so timid and not so transient a beast. That I am not the strict and rigid foundation of the institutional earthly life. Indeed, my last crossing, deep in the desert where there was no reason for a border, where there was no reason for a war, where there was no reason for a change in color so drastic, I still see the lines of the sky. There, they are effortless, without judgment, swarmers and embracers of the lines of the earth, partners in the rejoining of the great vacuum. And we, we men and women, escape to undo the lives that are lost in the rewriting of our blood.

Entities

In August 2007, scientists discover an enormous black spot in the universe. It is neither a black hole nor dark matter. There are no stars inside, or planets, or cosmic dust. It is one billion light years across, and it is empty.

*

Seth and I smoke a cigarette on the steps of our apartment in Sunset Park, close to two in the morning, on one of the warmest days in January we can remember.

*

Zimbabwe 1994: it was in the morning of September and we were playing when Elsa said what's that and I turned my head and saw the thing past the playground, where we were not supposed to go. Because there are snakes and spiders and they didn't mow there with the tractors, but everyone went running to see. I didn't want to go but Emily said Come on, and we were both supposed to watch the younger ones but I did anyway. When I got there I saw there were three things, and one of them opened and he came out and started walking in the grass like bouncing on the moon, but not as much. He had eyes like rugby balls. Some of the younger ones started to cry, and I said hush! and the black boys from the village said they're going to eat us and ran back to the schoolhouse. I wanted to run but I felt weird. He was looking at me. When I got home I had a horrible feeling inside and I kept thinking things like how all the trees will go down and there will be no air and people will be dying. It was so bad, like having a dream but I was awake. Mum asked me what's wrong and I told her about the things that came down the the man that came out. She said Isabelle but I couldn't shaking and I said We are making harm on this world and she said Isabelle stop what's wrong but I couldn't stop I just said Something's going to happen It came through my head when he looked at me It came through my conscience Something is going to happen Something is going to happen Something -- and she slapped me. And that's how it happened.

*

"There are four types," Seth says. "There are skeptics. They assume that what you say is wrong, until they get some proof. Bud considers himself a skeptic. He asks his questions, and he has a template he works from, something he considers really reliable, to gauge 'Well, okay, this is the truth. There's nothing to gain here.' Versus, 'This is a lie, this one's crazy.'

"Then there are the Believers. Whatever you say, whatever you show them -- it's all bullshit to them. They know already what the story is, and if you ask them, 'Well, what about this and that, you know, the Rendlesham Forest, or the 60 kids in Zimbabwe...' they said, 'I don't know that.' But they still believe it's all bullshit. They think, 'Oh, these sad people, they just want to be in front of the camera and get out of their insignificant lives for 15 minutes.' You can't shake them.

*

Jim Penniston, Former USAF Staff Sergeant, 81st Security Police Squadron, Joint USAF and RAF Bentwaters/Woodbridge, England Air Force Base: "As we got closer, a silhouette of an object was present and I realized at that point, it was not a conventional aircraft, meaning it was not one that was published in Jane's Defense book about aircraft. It was like no aircraft that I had ever seen."

WHAT WAS THE SHAPE?

Triangular.

WHEN YOU SAY TRIANGULAR, WAS IT ABSOLUTELY STRAIGHT ON THREE SIDES? OR WAS IT SWOOPY LIKE A CORVETTE? OR?

No, no, it was triangular, straight on each side.

[Sketch of triangular craft by USAF Staff Sergeant, Jim Penniston, from his December 26, 1980 investigation notes made after midnight while examining the glowing craft of unknown origin in the Rendlesham forest near the joint RAF and USAF Bentwaters AFB in Woodbridge, England.]

WHAT DID IT APPEAR TO BE MADE OUT OF?

Well, I couldn't tell at that point, but obviously I set the other airmen up to complete the radio relay because we were having awful bad static on the radios. I could barely talk to the first patrolman that I had set by the logging road. I could barely hear him. I could not hear our control center at all.

I had my notebook and my camera while I was out there because cameras were carried because of terrorism to take pictures of base encroachments. And it says what I wrote that night:

'Triangular in shape. A small amount of white light is appearing from the bottom of the craft. At the left side is a bluish light. And on the other side is red.'

Then at that time, I started taking photos. I think there were 36 in a roll. They were all B & W, that's what we carried.

WHERE DID THOSE PHOTOGRAPHS GO?

Base photo lab.

AND THE BASE PHOTO LAB PHOTOS WOULD BE IN WHOSE HANDS TODAY?

U. S. Air Force.

DID YOU TOUCH IT?

Yes, as part of the investigation. The size of it was approximately 3 meters wide by 3 meters tall -- that's approximately 9 feet.

AND WHAT CAN YOU SAY ABOUT THE SURFACE THAT YOU TOUCHED?

Well, I think the fabric or the shell was -- I guess the best description would be a very smooth opaque, like black glass. I was pretty confused at that point.

WHAT DID YOU DO NEXT?

That's when it started to -- I backed away. I backed away from it because the light was starting to get brighter. There no sound. That is probably the most incredible part of this. There was absolutely no sound from this craft.

It lifted up a few feet, sort of went through the woods maybe 25 or 30 meters,
hovered momentarily, then lifted up to about 250 feet above the top of the trees and then it was literally in the blink of an eye, gone at that point.

YOU AND JOHN BURROUGHS FILED A REPORT ABOUT EXACTLY WHAT
HAPPENED THEN?

Yeah, we kept a very sanitized -- we reported it to our Security Shift Commander, I think it was Captain Mike Verrano at the time. And we were assured by then the senior officer at Bentwaters that this information would not go outside the United States channels.

DID YOU SAY TO COL. HALT, 'I SAW IT. IT WAS TRIANGULAR. IT
SEEMED TO BE MADE...?

Oh, he was fully briefed.

DID HE SAY TO YOU ORYOU SAY TO HIM, 'WE'RE DEALING WITH AN
EXTRATERRESTRIAL CRAFT HERE?'

No. No.

YOU DIDN'T DISCUSS ENTITIES?

No, never.

*

In Philadelphia I heard it all:

We were playing barbershop so I got scissors and I nicked his head a little bit.

I always kept candy in my pocket and when I went up the stairs he tried to steal it.

My stepdad had these tapes and I watched them when he was out. That's when I started thinking about it.

He was a baby about it. I said, I didn't mean to cut you but then he started to cry. And I got mad.

I said, You can't have any candy, Maurice, but he kept grabbing around my pockets, and at my shorts.

I saw a woman lying on a table and they were strapping her hands down with these metal clamps.

I told him, You're being a big baby and he said, I'm telling Mom. So I said, I'll give you something to cry about.

He kept touching me around there and then I just stopped thinking and I grabbed his hand.

I knew something was about to happen.

*



*

Seth lit another cigarette. "The third type, they're the fanatics. They take anything you give them and say, 'Yes! I knew it.' They form cults and shit." He drags. I noticed Orion's belt, and tried to find his hands. "They're the loudest ones, you always hear them talking and it bothers the skeptics, who are trying to be logical and understand that this is really hard, it's nuanced, you can't say 'Well it's always this way or the other.'

The fourth are regular people. They don't give a shit either way. Bud think they should."

"But why?"

"Because it matters. You know, there are maybe 70% who are just making it up. And then there are the real crazy ones. But the rest -- they're not enjoying this. They aren't looking for a camera to talk to. They were driving somewhere, maybe with a few other friends, and suddenly they're on a different part of the same road and they feel the same, except a few hours are gone. Gone. That's what happened to Barney and Betty, back in the 60s. Something happened, they saw what they saw, felt a vibration and then it was all over. They went home.

"But Betty found powder on her dress, Barney kept checking his genitals. He couldn't explain why. Then the nightmares. Betty was on a table, they checked her teeth, her breast, they told her to lie down. They put a six inch needle in her vagina and said it was a pregnancy exam. She said it hurt until they touched her head and then she felt fine. They showed her a map of the heavens. She woke up and realized that the three hour drive that night took seven.

"The next morning a near perfect circle of warts appeared around Barney's groin."

We finished our cigarettes. We were in spring jackets, Seth's sleeves rolled up. He looked at me. "Did you ever tell those kids, 'No, you weren't raped? You're wrong, it didn't happen, get over with it?' What do you think that would do to someone? Did you know that Barney was black, that they were a mixed race couple? This was 1962. What do you think people thought? Betty became a celebrity in the community, but she didn't stop having nightmares. What would you do if you were driving and suddenly your standing next to your car, it's three hours later, and the radio's playing nothing but static? Who would you tell? And what would you expect them to say?"


*

"This is 1,000 times the volume of what we sort of expected to see in terms of a typical void," said Minnesota astronomy professor Lawrence Rudnick, author of the paper that will be published in Astrophysical Journal. "It's not clear that we have the right word yet ... This is too much of a surprise."

Holes in the universe probably occur when the gravity from areas with bigger mass pull matter from less dense areas, Rudnick said. After 13 billion years "they are losing out in the battle to where there are larger concentrations of matter," he said.

Retired NASA astronomer Steve Maran said of the discovery: "This is incredibly important for something where there is nothing to it."

Positivism

The investigation lasted seventy-seven hours.

Police Buildings are four stories tall. There are no elevators in Police Buildings. The front doors stand nineteen steps above the sidewalk. There are no ramps. Officers routinely and vigilantly patrol the area immediately surrounding the Police Buildings to ensure the safety of the community. However, as the radius increases (i.e. as the distance away from the police building increases) the level of policing rapidly diminishes. As a result, there are a series of DEAD SPOTS in the city. A DEAD SPOT is a location with no police presence. A DEAD SPOT is not an official term, nor is it open policy to promote DEAD SPOTS. For example, the area between Martin Ave and 55th St is a DEAD SPOT. This too is not public knowledge. This area is forty-seven blocks. There are seventy four Police Buildings in the greater metropolitan area. Each building employs one hundred officers. Each building is twelve miles apart. Ten miles from each building is considered a high radius distance and is rarely patrolled. Eleven miles from any particular Police Building is considered unsafe and foreign territory. In short, all territories outside ten miles are considered DEAD SPOTS to the particular police building in question. If these areas are more than ten miles from any Police Buildings, these areas are not ever patrolled. The investigation in question occurred in a known DEAD SPOT but within range of accepted patrolling territory. The investigation lasted seventy-seven hours. One middle aged man was murdered within sight of Police Van 71 but outside the ten mile radius. Policy demands the reminder that it is not official protocol to abandon patrols outside the ten mile marker. During the night of October 21, Police Van 71 was at its outer marker for only a few minutes. Usual circumstances would require, by unofficial police code and conduct, the officers of Police Van 71 to immediately vacate the premises. However, due to eye witness accounts of Police Van 71, the victim lying in the street one block from police van 71, and a strict political climate in city hall, Officer Howard and Officer Cruz were encouraged to report and to launch investigation 11B-61. Neither Officer Howard nor Officer Cruz reported using narcotic or alcoholic substances during the night in question.

On the night of October 22, one hundred and twenty-seven potential suspects were brought to Police Building 55A in Precinct 11. Due to overcrowding, fifty suspects were eventually housed in Police Building 55B. Captain O’Donnell oversaw the investigation. Each suspect was weighed and measured in a proper and detailed examination that would reveal any and all physical contamination or deformity required for immoral or amoral activity. After twelve hours, seventy-nine suspects were released into the community. After twenty-four hours, forty-two additional suspects were released into the community. On the evening of October 24, seventy-one hours after the launch of the investigation, six suspects remained in police custody at Police Building 55A in Precinct 11. All suspects were disproportionately tall or wide in at least one particular area. Suspect 1 presented with poor posture due to the enormous size of his head. Sergeant J. Smitt reported that the pressure and exhaustion from such a physical state would induce serious and potentially violent fits of rage. Suspects 2, 3, and 6 fit the physical profile of the common aggressor or criminal: excessive muscle mass, petite ears, large and protruding chins, clearly defined cheek and jaw bones, and (most importantly) considerable, even inappropriate, arm length. Suspect 4 refused to co-operate with police procedure and with the physical examination. During the scalp evaluation, Suspect 5 presented with an inordinate amount of indentations and protrusions. Results of examinations were presented to Captain O'Donnell in the seventy-fifth hour. In the seventy-sixth hour, Captain O’Donnell reviewed all the appropriate material and judged, based on 115 unusual signs of indentation and protrusion, that suspect 5 was unequivocally the perpetrator of the murder on October 21. The investigation was closed on the seventy-seventh hour and suspect 5 was summarily let to the electric chair in the basement of Precinct 22. The execution lasted seventeen minutes.

The specifics of evaluations and examinations performed on suspects during detention will be released to public domain at the discretion of the Chairman of the Police and Fire Commission.

autobiography

September 2001: I get high for the first time by myself. The space between the minutes was so wide -- how had I never noticed? And when I made it to bed outside a car drove by leaving a sound that resolved into a song as it faded, waves of air pressure swinging back and forth until the room went still and I slept and did not dream.

Incredibly enough Eve got me started. I wanted to fuck her so bad, knowing she was there right through my bedroom wall in her Led Zeppelin tee and eyes becoming more and more bored, the world was boring, smoke a bowel, stay awake for a little while... I told her on the blanket she laid out behind 36th Street and then nothing turned itself inside out and we agreed that was what this was all about. High times, long minutes in a boring world.

*

But we are in the world to love the world. I made a promise to myself, to the trees at Frost Valley. To Maureen. This is not about her. This was before Tiah came and turned trees to enemies who wanted to take her apart and she fought and fought and only after giving up did she see they were on her side from the start; it was a mental thing: to be held vs. taken apart, it was how you made up the meaning, what memories filled you up, and with what kind of feeling.

It's always women trying to take me apart, or else I'm dying to dissemble and my clothes are off and she's got bored eyes on, bored and boring me through and through.

Back on the blanket in the shadow of Hill College House underneath a billion invisible stars we are finally getting really high. Lights go on in rooms and you can trace connections between them like constellations changing as boys and girls go to bed or come back home. The building is a complex labrinyth of college freshmen and faculty and graduate students studying and eating and trying on talks about God, acoustic guitars... instant messengers drop a few words and then are idle... idle hands, touching hands, hands asking questions, hands on private parts, their own, someone else's. "Cold hands warm heart," says Tiah, so I write into a song on acoustic guitar for her when I am far away from 36th Street, lost in myself, after I've stopped making phone calls or opening the mail. Out there I thought: If I lose Tiah, at least I'll still have getting high. Where I counted cars that one night, bad night, first time doing an overnight at ATI and Heather locked herself in her room, reneging on the ride she promised, which meant reneging on everything, without warning, her eyes blue and bored. Tired of handcuffing herself to the couch to get a rise out of me. This is not her story.

*

This is about me; I am writing so I can see myself. I have heard we orbit our memories, and not vice-versa; so here they are, falling like tea leaves so I can read myself out of the patterns. Because we are in the world to love the world, and I am another limb; I am ready to be taken apart by words so I can be held by time. The women are all gone now. I can hear cars outside my apartment. There are so many songs, and it is not just the pain of things Last week I saw the milky way. I played mandolin with a stranger, we sang, "Hey I got some news for you..." When the chance came, I put my lips to the bowl and inhaled into my mouth, and then out into the stars.

tired song

broken down beaten and battered from lack of sleep
I jump the fence and count a thousand sheep:

why there's you, and you, and you and you and you...

and I am a sheep too!

"he wasn't the type of sheep to die...." --

"well, we all the type of sheep who dies, I tell you what. maybe not so young, but now he's gone and gone goes a long way. into the universe. out of the universe. straight through the heart and back."


some sheep die too soon; we all go on
forever

Tuesday

So it was that early on Tuesday the man in the black coat stared blankly at the wall and listened to the clock in the town strike seven and looked at the empty, very white, page in front of him and concluded that he had nothing to say and that he had not had anything to say for a very long time. And so it was that this man felt very uncomfortable at his usual desk and very uncomfortable in his usual clothes and felt very uncomfortable in his usual house. I am very uncomfortable, said the man. And so it was, on that day, this man, quite young and of quite tremendous potential, set forth into the world a little bit gloomier and, still, a little bit happier all the same. Why there is not anything at all that I need to do anymore, said the man. And there wasn’t anything in the world, not yet, that he knew by name. All the things in the world looked as if they had just come out from the earth and from the trees and from under the rocks. All the things, indeed, looked as if they too were looking upon a strange world and such a strange day. Why, yes, the man in the black coat declared, it is as though the squirrels are even very much uncomfortable in their usual clothes and in their usual homes. It must be a most usual day.

Maureen: An Introduction

ah long day looking down it like a dark hallway, sometimes you rhyme sometimes you don't. it's the rhythm of it, without expectation to let the groove fall where it may. I'm tired of the things I can think about with my mind. the best stuff cannot possibly belong to me. I wrote a poem when I was 16 called The Stuff of Desire. It was two pages -- the first four lines, written about Meghan Smith during one of those sharp lust attacks in the computer lab, of all places, because our hands had touched over the keys. The rest was Mom cooking rice, something stolen from Corso, something else from Maureen. I had her running along the beach, out past Port Jeff. She would get into a rhythm and then I imagine gulls. Light bodies in the air. I call it autumn, make the sea do something memorable or her face. I could put her in running shorts, a nightgown - like I did at 20 for Michael Koch and when she read it she said, "Did I ever do that? Did I come into your room that night dressed in a nightgown?" She was all hysterical, laughing and little something else. The Stuff of Desire. That was her title, her words, even now they keep trying to come up on my screen, her hands meeting mine on the the keys...

This is not it, but at least I found a way in. At least these are mine.

At Frost Valley she held my hand while my head exploded with snow. It was a blizzard. We were orienteering -- finding our way, losing our way. On Shattuck, in Berkeley after the first real fucked up flashback, it was Maureen's line I took comfort in : "Sometimes we must learn to fall behind before we understand how we can go." She would never have understood this. Would she? The white robes she bought me - had made for me! - "because," she said, "you're the purest thing I know" - could she ever believe I needed her poem because my hands keep rotting on me? The first time she asked, it was like dare: I bet you've never had an impure thought in your life. Name one.

1:

When I was 15 I wrote a poem about jerking off against the bathroom floor. I never used my hands. Even then I wanted to be tied up, and lust was something that held me down, and love was someone who would do it to me. In the silence I heard the car spitting muffled frequencies off the road and thought: if you only knew the things I think to get myself to cum. And then I said, "I can't name a single one."

It's boring to ask what if. We are in the world to love the world. I mean this one, the one I am sitting on right now, on the couch with the TV on and muted and the women in the infommerical doing aerobics backwards in the window that is otherwise completely dark. The world where I said "I can't name a single one" and the rest was history. I accepted the robe but never wore it. The snow fell around us in the woods of Frost Valley, NY. I never went back. It is the story of how I said yes to the world, and how the world said yes back. When I killed her off in the piece for Koch she asked, "I wonder if you're trying to tell me something." And 8 months later when I said No More, she asked, "What are you trying to say?" Some days the words are with you, other times the walk down the hall is long and you do it alone. She sent me my diaries in the mail with a card. She was still waiting. So I am. You always do it alone.

Black

The magnificence is in the darkness in the hills. At first light, once estranged, then launched upon the earth in quick breaths, the dawn erupts, a magnanimous and tender despot, lynched each evening by jealous and haunting cries and rebirthed so soon, so early, in hibernated strength, oh, painless pregnancies--and yet, the setting moon neither, never, aggressor nor coward. Ah still, the magnificence is in the darkness in the hills, between the death and the rebirth, in the strange lone and lengthy shadow against the mountain, the sleeping soldier island, encased in his tomb, breathless, in rest, now not tempted to turn and uncross his celestial embrace of home, sword, god, earth. We raised ourselves amidst the darkness of the island. First occupied and led by duty in yellow sunlight, then unleashed into the wounded graveyard in cold black. I knew not myself apart from the triggers of the island midnight, the sporadic dance of starlight on the bare rock. We had been taught to starve the eye sight, unveil the sense that did not operate in market empires. There is no empire in the sleeping soldier. The somber, mild village, would succumb at last to rest and out of the attics and basements, now fleshed by skin, we rose and raced into the moonlight, up the steep earth path into the heights of the soldier island, a sanctuary for the last breath of man to make, a man who plunged, not once, but twice, into fire and brought back light in the darkness hills. We unclothed at nightfall. Deep into the midnight hour, the skin will tempt to abandon the uniform of cover, brought out to know its shadowless face and undo its habitual awkward crawl. I did allow--at least when I first removed, with great care, my pajama top and placed it by my night stand--I did allow myself to tremble. And, lured erotic by a forbidden deal, I slowly walked out of my pajama bottom, stood in the black of my room and stared at my naked body in the mirror. There was a pause, then, a pause I remember quite well. Ended by a call, a scream into my lungs. The sleeping soldier rises in the darkness in the hills and calls the heart out of the cellar, she whispered, only whispered once, at lunch, and kissed, perhaps, by the feel of the wetness in the air. The uninhibited mind was only once tempted to return and did not. I was outside, below my house, then, this the first time: barefoot, the earth is loose, cold, and my skin is not so protected, my organs are unleashed and my manhood is no longer bartered between futures, failures. The magnificence is in the screams to the precipice of the soldier island, alone, naked, hunting my skin in alleys, streets of a dormant village—there: even the animals have become the day. We are not alone, convinced to blindness, on occasion, in the black, told to let the skin erupt and foil the protectors, the guard. Told to launch the skin into wet air. We are chasing ourselves into the heights of the island we guardians of myth, of legend, of the supernatural. Yes, I am the possessor of new sense, the occupier of virgin soil, ready, within the muscle contortions and the exhibitors of faith, a new promise, in principle, un-readied and explosive. We are found, harbored by the mud, dried across the chests of llama fed pilgrims, dripped. Blinded and un-caught. The sea is a moody man, she says once, smiles, and without sight I am thrown into the whirlwind of an earthquake. I gasp, lynched, the body nailed to its own position, and like a worm split and re-birthed, and returned into the entrance of its father, too a worm, his mother, too a worm, his ancestral patterns, yes, yes, too were worms, now uncloaked in the basement of the sky, the attic of the mountain, ripped into the pieces of adolescence and maturity, remade like a manikin and left to linger, drown, in the waters of the soldier island’s highest peak, the cellar of the ocean. The magnificence is in the darkness in the hills and brought into the completeness of identity, remanded for structure and piety, permitted the excuse to exhale the human, the man, the organ brought into being and owned, encouraged to expansion. From birth, she yells, in each life! For birth, she whispers now, is truly acceptance of expansion. There is no more skin than this skin, she says, later, breathless in sweat and exultation. All this, this here, is acceptance of expansion. And I, in willful disobedience of the daylight protector, climbed unhampered into the midnight black, and there, in jubilation we lived our humble and sweet expanded acceptance. The magnificence is truly in the darkness in the hills. I no longer needed to see, not then, not after that.

Modern Assistance

Couple A:

The Newspaper says we are going to get bombed on Saturday, Hank says to his wife, Sue. They are eating breakfast and watching the television. The television doesn’t say anything about a bombing, Sue says and she stuffs egg and toast into her mouth. Usually she is more graceful, Hank thinks, it must be because of the bombing that is most certainly about to happen. I haven’t been all that reflective lately, Sue thinks, indeed I haven’t been thinking about anything at all. Sue and Hank were married in ’78, after the blizzard that closed the highway. The highway is open today though because there isn’t any snow. I hope I get out of work before five, Hank thinks while he drives to work. He likes it when he gets out of work early because he can go home and watch television. I like the television, Sue says to her friend, Barbara. The two women are knitting and sewing and making cookies and washing clothes. I like to gossip, Barbara says to Sue. Remember when Mary Beth stole the bag of cookies and ate them in the woods. Sue laughs and covers her mouth—and she got so fat, she whispers. She is still fat, Barbara says, I saw her at the grocery store last week. We didn’t sell so much last week, Bill says to Hank. We are going to have to really step it up this week. We need to sell a lot more than we did last week. Of course, Hank agrees. Anything I can do, he says and thinks, I am not going to get out of here early today. Hank counts the days on his calendar. Forty-five days until my next vacation, he mutters. We are going to go to Florida and visit my parents, Sue says. They are getting old and they have many aches and pains and life is very difficult for them. Sue is hanging clothes on the clothesline and Barbara is sitting on the deck and drinking lemonade. We made cookies for Sammy’s class today, Barbara says. We made oatmeal cookies because they are his favorite. Ben hates oatmeal cookies, Sue says. Oh, Barbara says. She made tuna fish salad again, Hank mutters. Didn’t you have tuna fish yesterday, Scott asks. Yes, Scott. She must have forgotten. Did she cut the crust off? No, Scott, she didn’t cut the crusts off. That is too bad, Scott says, it is always better without the crusts. I know, Scott. You know they are talking about a bombing here on Saturday, Barbara says. It is later in the afternoon but it is still not too cold outside. The newspaper said it would start at five in the morning. The television didn’t say anything about a bombing. I know, maybe it isn’t true. Well, Saturday isn’t a bad day for a bombing. I guess I’ll just stay in the house. Me too. My wife made ham and cheese, Scott says. I love ham and cheese. Me too, Hank says. I wish my wife would make me ham and cheese. That is one hour, Bill says, return to work and sell some units. Yes sir, Scott says. Yes sir, Hank says. That’s the spirit, Bill says. I hope Hank gets home early so we can watch television, Sue says. I know, Barbara agrees. I hope he does too. Barbara doesn’t have a television because her husband threw it out the second floor window. Donald was very angry, Barbara admits. Hank still hasn’t shown me how to turn on the television or we could watch it now, Sue says. She would watch television all day, Hank says to Scott. But she would make you ham and cheese sandwiches, Scott says. Really? I hope we don’t get bombed on Saturday, Hank says. Why can’t we get bombed on a work day, Scott says. I haven’t sold any units in two weeks, Hank says. Me neither, Scott says. Bill must be very angry.

I don’t know why you are upset, Stan says to Lucy. It isn’t like they have that much to live for anyway. I still don’t think we should kill them, Lucy says, maybe we should tell them to stop having babies instead. It isn’t like we are wiping out a political rival or an ideological rival. We are simply bombing a population that is too dull to know that they are getting bombed. It still doesn’t seem right, Lucy retorts. Of course it isn’t right, Stan says and smiles. But it’s not like I told them to stay in their homes.

Too Much World

Oh, our depleted and romantic history. And concerning the irony of a physical spiritual icon—or the ability to transcend the evolution of the thinking man: a back porch, an attic. Literal and never metaphoric. Oh this was painful bliss, an invested commencement, a well intentioned arrival, occurrence, emergence. As in, one turn after another, into a spiral of creation. And my skin was in needles, inflamed. There is nothing so painful and removed and lonely as the first full commitment to art. There is no initial solidarity. There is no greeting hall or handshake. It is an isolated entrance, under an extorted, stolen image of the very soul of man. There, it is the unbecoming of the cultural and social self and the becoming of the vast and expendable and expanding single observer. Perhaps, athletically, the baptism is like trying to hold your breath under water with the intent of never returning to the surface. My lungs do not burn. But my skin is inflamed and I am on fire. I am on fire and I am under water. There are always beginnings, simple beginnings. I am not always on fire. But the bleeding events of this weekend, years later, left an acute memory of paralysis: too much world. I was stranded in the turnstile, at first. There have been few moments as embarrassing as the immediate, yes even hasty, return to a social environment after peacefully inhabiting the personal refuge of self-reflection. Next, I stood on the A train for most of the evening, re-adjusting my outfit, patting my hair and asking for, even looking for: Bleeker Street—no, the headquarters for the modern revolution. I have been away for a minute, I explained, only to be ignored, shunned, mocked. Where is the cultural capital of New York City, I asked, by now no longer ashamed but very frightened. I had begun to sweat, as was my custom. It was an absurd question, I gathered, from the responses, the stares—but really? Why? Absurd because the Capital was most assuredly at Bleeker Street or absurd because it most certainly did not exist. No, the latter could not possibly be true. No collective consensus? No hub of intellectual pursuit—the very hunt. Oh, we loved the hunt. Oh, I loved the hunt. The snap into a cultural world after undigging the social phenomena, after seeing principle. Ah, I finally deduced, I was alone. I was always alone. I left the A train in upper Manhattan walked into a Deli in early morning and read the Post. Ah, carnal and incestuous starvation: cannibal starvation. It had started, years earlier, with Nicole. The unethical and inappropriate union, underlining spiritual sex: there are only guidelines in the social order, really. Pretense, coy verbal petting, an engagement of subtle touches. Yes, an infatuation. There is no spiritual survival without extension and I am convinced, still locked in infantile obsession, to achieve extension, expansion. No, it was an amusement, a distraction. I was locked, trained, in meditated attacks: made a pass at me! I have returned to the A train, standing again, no longer hungry—yes, no! I am voracious, I laugh. There is a return in me, finally, a return. I can think, for a moment and see. It did not start with Nicole. The mirrors in the changing room on the fifth floor of Filenes basement—I am this person. It is early morning now, on the train, commuters, readers, activists, some of them, mules, others. Where is the cultural capital, I ask again, a different crowd, not as stranded or strangulated by their own self images, comforted by releases, by the construction and the formulation of idea, principle, evolution. Maybe. It is here, a woman says, mid-thirties, lean, provocative, eager, clever. She points at her breasts or at herself and laughs and exits the train and turns around, looks again, over her shoulder, skirt knee length, coy. Oh, we loved the hunt. I follow her off the train, but not really. I stop on the platform, below ground and wait for another train to run through the city following the endless starvation of a cannibal crowd, an incestuous mantra, a depleted and saturated and uncompromising history.

Synagogue

In synagogue they said my name and the name of my father and my father's father. For hours I heard nothing but Hebrew and now suddenly this, the first family name I ever heard, like a familiar melody in a long strange song. I do not believe. I am in Israel, surrounded by men who I am told have blood that runs like mine in their veins and back through time to Abraham and Adam, my namesake. Blood leading me back to me in the Garden, made from clay, lifted from the God box underneath the wall from which shook out all the mothers and the fathers and that's how the universe was born.

What don't I believe? Above us the women sit in the balcony and and ululate and throw candy when the time is right. The kids down below dart out from their father's legs to take what they can; theirs is a language I understand. My grandfather's niece's son-in-law shows me where we are in the text and he is patient and warm and at first I think sad; but no; he can't express himself to me in English, it is too complicated, he is hopeful that I might come back to into the fold of blood brothers and sisters, family beyond family, I suppose this is all really about home...

...San Francisco, 2002: We are gathered in the living room of our transitional living program for a staff meeting. It is the morning of September 11th, I have my coffee and donut, and Stephen wants to make us a space to process how we are feeling. We try. My thoughts are sad because I believe in the magic of dates, number as doors into the past or the future. If we knew how to the open them then time travel would be as easy as dawn on the morning of your birthday, your death-day's secret date made visible like the moon. Stephen is struggling to articulate his feelings, his eye watery and working towards an answer. I watch Nicole heading down Ashbury outside, her hair pulled back tight, early morning pale of her face, beautiful lips and eyes on the cigarette in front of them. I have glimpsed the ecstatic beauty of certain mathematical relationships, e to the j times theta; and once started a poem that went, "The clock reads 1:07am and I know I love you." I was 15 years old. Olivia's face was the almost too much beauty to bear, but I liked the pain and when the song came on I would sing "You're so fucking special... skin makes me cry" until the hurt felt desperate and endless and wild. Then suddenly all the numbers in the world could not take me out of myself and my poor young body, unloved and touched, virgin, virgin for a long time...

Stephen gives up with a sigh. "We just have to support each other and be mindful of how the residents may need us today to work through the difficult feelings that may come up." He looks around. A year later we would sit together in his apartment, both a little high, and he will tell me that as long as he and I stick together we can make some really special, we have a chemistry, a rare thing... and I think: I've heard this before. I think: Uh-oh. Shortly after that I never saw him again.

*

You can go out west because you need a new frontier. You can go to San Francisco if you have no home, live out on the streets by the park, stay away from the gutterpunk kids in front of Amoeba Records and the undercover cops trying to see if you get high. Find some friends and stick together. Beg a little, play guitar in the BART station and make about ten dollars an hour until they ask you to leave. Change your body with metal and ink, change your sex with hormones; they're free, but the surgery will cost you, start saving up. In the synagogue we face the windows, towards Jerusalem; some men come from their seats to kneel by the windows and pray. When they do I pray, too. My companion takes the tallis and puts it over my head. He places his hand there and asks God for the ultimate blessing on me and my blood and my family. I can't see anything but the light working its way through the cloth, and again there is that strange music but now I feel calm and quiet and loved. There is no transformation, no change but a new story, a date to remember, and a faint burning in my chest I only now recognize must have come from outside my heart, slowly moving in.

Assisted Suicide: American Poverty: 3

The ill frailty of suicide, social suicide, an institutional dismissal of self value—oh, this selfless attack is barbaric, she ponders, muses, at least engages, an active onslaught. A massive run-on sentence, Chet noted, amused, discarded the magazine, exhaled the magazine into the dummy, she is just air and plastic. The clique formed and initially did not intend massacres, no, no: clippings, awkward postings, inappropriate portrayals. Killing is a progressive stance against mutually indolent rival political or ideological parties. Became. It became. It is the third aggressor, the third engager, the man with the pistol, the woman with the pistol, the child with the pistol. I have lost my diction, Steve muttered, mentioned, again, not active, inane. The collapse of the modern idea, put lightly (its crashing destruction into bombs, bombs, bombs), came smooth, tactless, and slinky—yes, he was encouraged to make up words, slow, dumb words. DREGFOTT: to abolish the use of mines. PRIEZTMANPOUR: a well established and sinister military advisor. As in the PRIEZTMANPOUR did not approve, nor recognize, the government’s insistence that it must DREGFOTT. It became worse. The whores were on the street in symphony! Yes, worse and worser. I am dropping bombs on playgrounds, Steve muttered again, muttered, himself, posing as himself, hunched over computer screens in the dark, hung over, vomiting in the shower, pissing his pants, no fucking diction! Chocolate martini—that is the issue, the fucking drink order is killing your brain. No, he ignored it, hung over, dumb, blind, bling-bling, it is all a lengthy dream of disorder, discontentment. I might be awfully incapable, Steve wrote, an entrance into the third paragraph of the essay—for the quick reader, the editor, the man with the glasses who sits in a booth and raises his hand—but the idea is quite enchanting, reminds me of the small of her back—borrowed, or poorly stolen, his editor reminded him, even embarrassingly bad. Yes, yes, I know. I have been bleeding words for the past forty-eight hours, fifty-two if you count the Swedish whore and the Romanian transvestite, but they were fake, fake, fake. Forty-eight, lets stick with forty-eight. Still Steve was making up words, putting himself in misleading positions, next to the camera man, on the couch, in the alley, smoking weed, drinking himself to death. I would die like that, unimaginative, useless, living out a social suicide. That is, is, the death. She ponders, active, the social suicide, the one harboring gangrene in the backyard, my back yard, the cultural plea, undeniable, she, the muse, the muse, she is gone, departed, there is only one more step, Steve thinks, one more step and you are above the crowd, out of the crowd and you can see—see, see. And I walked down two steps and fell into a pisshole of mediocrity, pedestrians, fucking pedestrians. I’ve been needing a new swear word, he mentions, she is casually intrusive, sits too close, smells like lavender, no something else from Latin America, where there is romance, yes, she is intrusive, smells like liquor, yes, new York, liquor and weed and cigarettes, and despair: I don’t know what to wear; I don’t know what to look for; I like green. I am a whore. That was abusive, unnecessary, she is the muse—no she is abusive. In an ultimate protest, the singular most powerful step into a nuclear spring, he enslaves and unslaves himself, against the towering market, to insert, there is no recognition in its finality: do not accept, impose, or infiltrate. Remember her father was a PRIEZTMANPOUR. The financial burden will—borrowed, stolen, poorly stolen for a lifetime concept, object: principle. I have molded my angelic sense, my starved diction (indeed, he was bleeding words on Friday, he lost most of the three syllable words on Broadway and many two syllable words and a box of one syllable words, no, I didn’t see cat or boat in the collection, so tragic). The absence of this fate, enslaved and no longer slaved, to the absence of letters, he supposes, demands then that the only option was, is, indeed the only option ever could be: invent his own precious language and DREGFOTT.

American Poverty: 2

When the time was right, Gary had sex with both of his stepdaughters.

Good. With that out of the way we can move on. Once I saw him drifting through the bright open spaces of 30th Street Station, and I thought: no one here knows this but me. He looked lost, and sad too yes but also certain hardness set about his face I did not know from the Institute. There Gary was a talker, soft & good natured, easy to make fun of...

...when I was young I remember a cartoon like this: a big bulldog walks down the street. he's got this chihuahua sidekick leaping around his feet going on and on with the "are we going to the park, boss? I love the park, boss, I do I do I do-" until a well-timed smack shut the little guy up. I was the same age the stepdaughter when Gary first started. He was like that chihuahua, at the Institute, always prattling at Dr. Ingel's heels. And then the inevitable smack. But now here he was, tight lipped and tough cheeked as the college students rushed to trains to take them away for the holidays; the feeling of Christmas coming up, and days without work or deadlines; I was high and floating through myself, my head up in the vaulted glass ceiling amongst the stray pigeons and the light. He was no chihuahua now. And when Dr. Ingel's interview for the city paper came out -- the one where he called himself a victim-practioner and told the story of what his neighbor had done some thirty years ago -- Gary got there early with the other men, a newspaper under every seat, waiting...

Oh but it's complicated. Abuser and abused. How to document the many ways to cross each others' borders? Once I saw a woman inhabit her secretary. As the weeks went by everything about the manager -- her clothes, her attitude, her weight -- entered in the young woman's being until dressed up fat & angry the secretary was barely recognizable as the baby-faced girl I remember. And the manager did less work than ever.

One time, Mike came in me and tried to fry my brain, though it was my hand that brought the pills to my tongue, my choice to swallow...

Dr. Ingel defended his decision well. Freudian or no there was a time for disclosure, and though I agreed I also smelled blood and it made me nervous, all those men watching him with something singular in their eyes -- they who had fondled cousins and touched daughters; whose mouths has pressed up bare vaginas, who gave with that first strange sensation a shadow that could live for years, a lifetime sometimes of hypervigilance and exaggerated startle response; vaginismus, vagina dentada, frigidity and lovelessness, PTSD, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, talking cures, the ability to keep a secret even when one should not. For Dr. Ingel, it stopped here. He surrendered his secret for a cross and climbed on. These men know naked when they see it, and so they watched, and they laughed when he joked and smiled their congratulations for his bravery, teeth like dull white nails... they know how hard it can be...

With that out of the way we can move on. It will be almost 60 degrees tomorrow, unseasonable for January. But this is 2008, and anything is possible. I store all my favorite songs compressed and placed in the inside pocket of my jacket. I don't get high anymore. Soon Bush will be out of the White House and we can hope to understand what we've done to Iraq. No one stays on top for long. The episode ends with a reversal - the chihuahua struts with that oversized sidekick jumping and "yes bossing" him until enough is enough, and the smack comes because it has to. Because he can. And with that out of the way, we can move on.

stream, 1

I've been thinking of different ways to live the rest of my life.

I could be short, rob a bank, ask permission or grow a beard. I could be tall, walk straight, kiss with both lips and fuck everyone I was attracted to, at least I could try.

Go back to college, go back to elementary school, relearn the alphabet and improve my penmanship. Ask more questions, smoke in the back of the class, get sent to detention and shoot hoops instead.

And why not? Time is short, right? There are no bombs (yet!), no shortages of grain or livestock. I eat when I'm hungry and can always ask for more.

But no, they're wrong, time is long. Ask any mountain and it will tell you. The mountains in Alaska, where I stood at the center of the world, are craggly babies compared to the Alps, where I have never been...

That's it -- I should go to the Alps! I can hop a plane, exchange my currency, marry a Swiss woman who loves me for my exotic character, my uniquely un-American openness. Then I will be happy.

Or could I be happy right now? Is it like a vault, to which I have forgotten the combination is 1 2 3? Or a door, and I am pulling and pulling when it says in clear block letters PUSH? Is it better to be happy than alert? Is there a difference?

I could break down, grow up, be my father, never speak to him again. I could make more noise when I walk. Sing songs about God to a 1-6-4-5 progression in 4/4 time. I could be a mountain, eaten by bears, robbed and left for dead. Looking up at the city sky. Feeling how very long is time, how far the stars...

American Poverty: 1

That the concert was terrible meant nothing to the lost grillers of cheese, vagabond jewelry makers, kids getting stoned... Mike said "Stay with your family" and we did. I trusted him. I was starting to love his wife, too, a little bit more when we left her in the apartment looking for a cartoon on demand. I can't help it; I love children. But here they were, dirty, kid-faced and un-innocent; a cop came up around one and cracked his head down to the dirt. But not before he flung a bag into the air with a whoop. Mike watching me watch him, saying "They don't care about us."

He said this, too, at work; at home; about our bosses, Isabelle, the sick men and women we cared for; and his college friends, his high school friends, the woman behind the counter at a gas station handing us a pack of cigarettes and gum...

We took the ecstasy first thing and by the time we reached the bathroom my pupils were shivering. I had never seen that before and didn't want to know. I felt good, though the words I wanted were falling a little further and further out of reach, and the gum was sweet against my teeth. Mike was flushed and smiling. We were happy. It was that easy.

The band played while it started to rain and I danced toward the stage and looked away, up the slope where men and women kept climbing the trail to disappear somewhere -- "They're doing heroin," Mike shook his head. "The scene is real dirty, no one to take care of us any more..." Needles in the mud, toddlers on shakedown street, they got your ice cold pharmies there and everyone is promising purity, "This shit is pure." The Dutch were here once. Before them the Indians. Now it is skiing in the winter, and in the summer the lot families arrive for shows. It's tent city, me and Mike and gauzy clouds drifting around like serotonin.

Mike convinces me to take another.

The girls around me are dancing in the mud, one has a watermelon, and in a second my eyes go white hot and I am sweating from all the heat the young bodies make, all their hearts pounding at once. Indian bones, marijuana and rolls, Isabelle's face from nowhere hits the soft spot on my brain: "We are in the world to love the world." I try to keep dancing but this girl is bumping into me, she is dancing no they are fighting, there's a muddy watermelon chunk that they are wrestling for down there, pulling dreadlocks and saying what, I can't hear, the drummer is still soloing but these girls are maybe 13 and 14 I can see where her shirt is torn where her breasts are coming in and my cock comes to in agony as I realize I've never loved anyone in my life and that's when Mike grabs me--

Back home. Isabelle brings new socks. The TV is on and mute. Mike brags to his wife about how he saved me from the mud pit. She is looking at me. It is an invitation. But I already fell in. I am still there.

The Box

One Concrete block weighs one ton. Two concrete blocks weigh two tons. The box is on two concrete blocks. The box weighs one half ton plus its contents: string, a chair, a bucket of black paint, a rubber band, and a hose. The box is five feet long and five feet wide. The box is ten feet tall. On one side of the box there is a door. The door is seven feet tall and three feet wide. The door opens into the box. Attached to the bottom of the door is a block of chalk. The chalk makes an arc-like shape on the floor of the box when the door is opened. The chalk is white. The chalk is not included in the weight of the contents. The door will be prevented from fully opening because of one of the five feet walls. The door is brown and the door has nothing written on it to suggest that it is an opening into a box.

Outside the box there is a light bulb. Inside the box there is a socket for the light bulb. There are no windows in the box and there are no shelves in the box. The socket for the light bulb hangs from the ceiling of the box. The socket is included in the weight of the box. The chair is in the corner of the box but does not obstruct the door when the door is opened into the box. The chair is made of wood and metal and plastic. It is a common looking chair though uncommon because it is not only made of wood, or only made of metal, or only made of plastic. Like the door, the chair is brown and the weight of the chair is included in the weight of the box.

Each concrete block is ten feet by ten feet by five feet. The two blocks are placed directly on top of one another. There are no stairs to the top of the second concrete block. There is a ladder against the wall next to the light bulb. Like the light bulb, the ladder is outside the box. The ladder is ten feet tall but can extend to fifteen feet tall. The ladder is made of plastic and metal. The ladder is green.

The proposed action is as follows: the stagehand, Mark, is to pick up the light bulb, place the ladder against the concrete block, climb the ladder, open the door to the box, walk into the box, screw the light bulb into the socket by standing on the chair, and sit in the chair and paint a black window on each of the three walls of the inside of the box that do not contain the door. The weight of Mark will not be included in the weight of the box. Mark is to regard the rubber band and the hose and the string as unnecessary items. Mark has fifteen minutes to complete the task and will be judged on his willingness and ability to follow directions as well as his ability to fully comprehend, and express, the world of the box in each of his actions.

She, in the Vacuum, Proposes

Resolved to completeness—resolve: as in, of course, close, bring to a close, allow and permit closure. The fractured space, cut into cultural insecurity, vanishes in the new year, the month, the day, the hour, indeed, perhaps, the minute. Reckless proposals, pseudo scholars, fake—fake intellectuals, postulate, present, propose: it is not arbitrary. It is not ever suggestive. The combatant force, once united in aggressive peace keeping, keeping together unions, peoples, nations, a protector of historical narratives, of the resolutions, the peace resolution. Responders, first responders to inadequate resources. Our inadequacy rebounds, often, quite often, over the course of any period. She is admired, adored. She is made love to. They are apart, distant, rebound: in-compatible. Again, combatants, forced to re-create the re-newal. Culturally, distinctly cultural in perception, the universe is fragmented and re-written succinctly, unkindly, pompous: any excuse would permeate even a lie as this: this is the undoubted denier: the decider. No, business like in manner, astute, attentive, believable, callous? Forgotten, momentarily ignored only, and dis-proportion-ate being, placate the sultan and allow him to re-enter the quarters of the majestic western world: our world: placate: assuage: and assimilate. This is the primal order of cultural invasion. We suicided ourselves, at the earliest chance possible. We conducted the RE: gain/view/cede. We, our wonderful selves, gardens to our only children, we are the feat of uncanny failure. She is proposing, again, proposing, like a witch, like a crude and stagnant witch. The inverse likelihood of success is not the possibility of failure: never attempt to rule on crude opposition, back and forth, black and white: market value, business sense. Cultural void. It was an invasion, and at first, swift, attacks, on the short handed side, backhanded side, hit, return, a place in passion that is excused by the unresolved universe, the vacuum of space left to blink, only to blink at the mere possibility of growth, production, re-run the industrial strength movement, to another creator, builder, founder, mind. It is the un-natural possessor, equipped simply, now, off the park, condos, water, electricity, gas, energy, oil. The natural attracter. In the ultimate show of respect, ultimate indeed, she unleashed an uncut burden: this, I Resolve to begin. This I Resolve to finish. Oh, of course, the universe, in seconds and in minutes, in those seconds and in those minutes, was, is, fractured, beaten, broken. Even from the vacuum, even in the vacuum, it is a clear break: a moment unlike any moment, a moment once a year, the frail animal in victory, in success, my Day: mine. Spinning in rapid succession, it all comes to pass, fruitful future, life time recognition.

No, dear lord, no. It is only the black vacuum and the tiny ball playing back and forth, back and forth. Dear lord, no. It does not occur to resolve itself to become something it is not. That is foolish, deeply foolish, to suppose it could ever be something it is not. I resolve to ignore it, she spouts, convinced, at least once, that it has fractured, broken, and lent itself to pause, to destruction, at the animal will.

Nathaniel

I sailed to America a thousand years ago on a sharkboat, Nathaniel says. He can hear Saddam Husseim speak and he is lonely. Outside dead birds fall from his sky.

I am 25 years old, habitual marijuana smoker, strange dream dreamer, I date the drug dealer down the block and we can stay friends as long as she gets me high. Nathaniel does poorly on his IQ test, and will not take off his hat. I give him no hard time about that, though Dr. Bromburg sees it as a sign of disrespect. I see Dr. Bromburg as a man-child drunk on this tiny sliver of power over the lives of our clientele. When he takes it off we can see Nathaniel's hair is beautiful.

But it does not change the fact Nathaniel taped his cousin to a chair and made him do what someone sometime clearly had done to him, though he won't admit it. He doesn't see how all we need is an explanation, a reason to believe that this was not casual cruelty or genetic predisposition to monsterhood but a ten year old who has just been through too much. There are limits to things; I once took too many mushrooms too late and unprepared, and felt in the shadow of my wall the presence of Absolute Evil. I fled the house and spent the rest of the night chasing what I thought was my roommate's cat. The cat was home all along, and in the morning, tired, sad and strange, I watched Jackass the Movie until I finally felt a little more sane.

Dr. Bromburg makes video games for his stepdaughter, and makes me play them. They are full of fireballs coming her way, one thousand and one ways to die, bonus points and when the game starts she isn't wearing any clothes. Step 1, he says: find your clothes.

But it is not all that bad. I make forty thousand dollars a year, Bromburg makes me mix tapes of rare Dylan recordings and expects full reviews the next morning. It's not that bad. Sometimes I even like Bob Dylan. And when I get high at home the world is mine to cruise around in, slow and lazy, making connections out of smoke and then blowing them away. Nathaniel never tells us the full story. He puts his cap back on as Bromburg leaves the room and we are alone. I don't ask what he wants to be when he grows up. I don't tell him his IQ score, and there is no mom or dad to ask worriedly what do we do about our little son. I ask, Do you feel like Saddam Hussein sometimes? He looks me in the eyes and says this: I was born a thousand years ago. I sailed to America on a sharkboat but they killed us. I just want to be left alone.

resolution

how quickly we train the eye not to see
the ear not to hear the sound of snow
falling on the hard ground

six hours in new york city and already I am deaf dumb and blind
my head hurts
my heart is full of angry bees

how quickly we turn against the ones we love
lashing out how surprised I was
to find it was my cheek

stinging

sorry S----, I was away for New Years

where to go in 2008? where to sing for someone who knows you mean it? I want that new frontier, inner space, but not mine. some mornings I wake up hating the constellations, The Reluctant Lover, the Libra; where I dreamt of being robbed on the streets of Los Angeles and woke up missing my shirt. where they played pool and danced a crazy conga as we sang "we will not let them win" over a major chord progression I wrote three floors up and half a mile from the grounds of greenwood cemetery, final resting place of revolutionaries and 911 victims, headstones, here lies the sons and daughters of the fathers and mothers of the united states of america, the indivisible, one nation under earth. S---- I hope you wrote something good. You see dots and are holding the pencil. What I see: people I want to touch, sunlight teetering and then gone, a resolution to let it all go. It is 2000 and 8 in America and now is our last chance to become what we need to be. where the neighborhoods change and the subway trains are held momentarily and then dispatched into darkness. where the snow makes a sound I cannot hear, my headphones are too loud, clearly I've got something to say but it just comes out da da da. give me a beat and we'll sing da da dowop pah pah! da da dowop pah pah! it's a new frontier. let's be men not apes let's hold our pens with flexible thumbs slow down and love someone its easy as 5 4 321

you know I mean it. happy new year

The State Face

Coined, conned, re-capped, evolved: progress. As in, we made progress this month. We undug a treasure. We be-Came greater, stronger ( -er), er. She stutters, coy, timid, indifferent—no, playful and insecure, intimate. She is strongest, greatest (-est), est. The pitiful temper, his pitiful temper, was suicide, ended in suicide, had had quite enough, disguised his own blood as a traitor, a player in another wagon, another ear, another era, another county. Them, he trusted them. She is garrulous when she is undressed, not embarrassed, not hidden. Upbeat, congenial, engaging: wonderful. As in, of course, most recently, the dinner was wonderful. Attended by finely dressed bourgeois, against the common threads of indecency, Ho-Ho, (-ist): the elitist was not unwelcome nor conditioned for humble courtship. The seats were at center Court. This, above all, became our Mantra: Long, long, life the kinship between….Etc, beat, beat, etc. We play it at half-time to a magazine of percussion. She is usual, fitting, and fond of her skin. She was not betrayed by one of them. The blueprint stolen from the fifth floor of the Empire State Building (psst: hssh!) was a guideline to cultural success: a metaphoric blueprint, Harrison mutters, a suggestion. A corporate emblem of recognition. Even unstartled, unshocked, there remains, but to a few of the unadulterated populace, a strong faith, an interest, a belief, in the puppeteers, the man who is the man: undeniably, they reside in high rises, off the park, wear suits, drink scotch, do not anger easily or ever and are inhumane, skinless, cold. As in it is cold outside in January (precisely: well). This would resolve itself in scandal, Emma suggests, removed from the country club residence, unkempt—by nineteenth century standard—properly educated and claimed, eventually, by law school and the unsurprising aftermaths. A drive, a frivolous drive, to insignificance. All of them, she marvels (and Us too!). The indecency, however, is not encouraged nor prohibited, allowed, yes, allowed, permitted, permissive and not depressive to the mass of elected pedestrians, more in the middle, farther father: clan, precipitate a familial despot into our founded utopian equanimity, our class of man, our class of life. She, apart from her graceful indifference while exposed, was less inclined to aggressive assault. It is not visually compatible with the educational models of success, the principle behind thematic exposure—not her nudity, not representations of her nudity—history, political science, why the trends (like science and dams and border crossings compare!) are the trends they are. In physics like in sociology, it is a meager and untapped principle, a beauty contest (no, not a beauty contest). The blueprints, harangue, dear harangue. The cultural diagram of popularity, recognition. It is a metaphoric representation, Harrison mutters again, this time disillusioned and in despair, perhaps depressive by nature, but suicidal? Questionable? The repute of such a willful being would be in jeopardy: to make himself un-exist. He would not make himself un-exist, Emma insists. Trained, as usual, as mentioned, in the strictest of classics, the trainer’s path. And yet, impetuous by desire, the man jumps, a man himself the patriarch and founder, jumps, jumps, and in the recognition, she the recognizer, the artist un-recognized in this time, the artist that must go un-recognized for culture to rebound and become itself again: it cannot be the ironic compliment, it cannot be at all. It must go, abide, in nature and in itself, in no heated face of worldly recognition. There are no maps, Harrison yells. He yells at her, at Emma, at the face of this building, at the face of this state. What is a leap, he thinks, and he jumps and doesn’t expect to get anything and doesn’t get anything at all. Her face, of course, is the face on the screen and it is smiling and thinking what a fool! And he is thinking, jumping and jumping and nobody around jumping and jumping, what a leap, what a leap!

Six times Six--Likelihoods

I am used, she thinks. Hands calloused, burnt—I am used, she thinks again, and coughs, grins, and clenches her teeth. I am clenching my teeth, she thinks. The plate cracks. She is washing dishes. She throws it against the wall, the rest of it. Tighter, she mutters. You can’t put your fucking feet here, she screams suddenly, shrieks, say—she is washing dishes. There ain’t nobody here, she decides, mutters, confused, smoking. Old, thin, pale, malnourished, yellow. I look yellow. The sun is yellow. I don’t look like that. You ugly goat, he says, smiles, laughs, comes in loud, yes, belligerent, classic and unimaginative. He slaps her on the ass. Hard, iron, and weak. Drinking and drinking. She is worthless, he will say later, drunk, exhausted, removed.

He would not consider potential, possibility. Recognize principle or action or quality of worth—coming of worth. Ambitious, quite ambitious. No, the opposite, she proposes, stretching, stretching, in class. A proposal. Angst, meager. I only want to know the odds, the chance, you know, the number. Four, I have four children. Squatting, stretching. There are characters missing, she mentions, but not on purpose, yes, accidental, for a later correction, edit. So intentional? She blushes, coy, cute. Empathize with her, the instructor supposes, intentional? Again, she blushes, perhaps intentional, he decides. How many years? The whole time. Questions vary in difficulty, some much more frequent and common others rare and seldom chosen, presented. Physical violence, sure, yes, of course. Coarse. Yes, of course. Quick. Emotional violence? Do you really know, sure, I suppose, I don’t know, I suppose. Weakening, no longer blushing, undressed. Panting, erect, solid, singular—and solidarity, of course, the union. Forward, subservient. Verbal abuse? Yes, yes, of course, I mean from what it seems. Aroused. Re-crossing and un-crossing, tempted, sneaking, the small built of skin against the sock, perhaps, not only the sock. She fiddles, with herself, occasionally. No, not often, no not often. He is working. Quick, at ease, aggressive, though. Aggressive.

She is preoccupied, suddenly preoccupied. It is black night. The moon is disappeared. She is preoccupied, the moon is disappeared. He slaps her again. She is washing dishes, only washing dishes. Exercises in human mood, arrival and departure, back and forth, up and down, hard, simple, engage, sweat, sweet, exercises in containment, repress. Press close, firm, it is black night. It is black at night. She is washing dishes. I am used, she thinks again. Thinks back, back into teaching, there was a full sentence, all of it, a thought, a person. Tall and thin and proper and well mannered and manicured and warm. Warm and not wet. Thin and proper? The concern?

Of course. The average adjustment period to a predatory lifestyle, an antisocial lifestyle, is not measured by time but by degree of exposure and age of participant. He is six. Six times six equals thirty-six. A formula, an average, it is not a guarantee. Smile, confident, repress. He is suitable, ignorant. Like apples and cinnamon and holiday. A formula, a statistic. Three out of five, even four out of five. Not real participants or real people. No, just a guess. A reasoned guess. Sure. Very little danger. Of course. Red.

You have a 36x chance of being violent and in jail in two years. It is probably even higher now. Consider the other conditions. Loss of electricity, heat, gas. Yes, higher. Mathematics, statistics. A murderer. The likelihood of snow on Friday. The likelihood of snow on a holiday. The farmer’s almanac. It is three out of five or two out of five. It snows on Friday. Yes, of course, it snows on Friday. The likelihood it will snow on Saturday. Three out of five, one out of five. Four out of five. There are only five people here. She is crying. Washing dishes. The plate breaks. Warm, wet, cold, dry.