I think I need to write with a certain kind of brutality: not necessarily honest, all writing is a lie from the onset. You claim that these series of letters represent some real thing “out there” when it doesn’t, but that can go on for days, where does gnosis happen, where does the world happen, how do we come to know it? Then that thing with sacks about the brain damage and the difference between the abstract and the concrete, the collage that makes us recognize and move in the world. I am all lateral thinking or is that associative? Anyways, the way at and through using a certain brutality. I am certainly not lyrical.

Sigh, non plussed. Blessed are the decorations. She cuts a mean mayonaise. And the harbor stands rickety like it was waiting. A cloudy judgement leads to prosecutors with bells. He sits on the bench and thinks of the zoo. Utterly complacent, the child makes figurines out of mushy rice. She asks, did you plan any of this? No, but I saw it coming.

Cracked brick, her mouth is in tethers. All this nonsense, he says, for one moment of hang time. I hid beneath the bed while she cried and he panted, you could not have remembered that. A chair in a room, leather bound, empty, and explicitly without use. She questions the shirt he has chosen to wear. He listens while dozing off but still manages something profound. Curled up into a ball, she laughs. And my son, while my son falls off high places and smiles like the dawn only belongs to him.

Sometimes exhaustion comes over me like water, the beckoning of sleep, a certain kind of filling, like almost forgiveness, a hollowing out of feeling, little room for anything else, simple and plain and welcoming.

Three piece suit ready to wear. Hair short cropped and nails trimmed. Clean shaven and a dash of cologne. A chill runs through me. How did it get like this? Snug knot and smooth sleeved. Waist slim and perfect crease down to polished shoes. It’s almost a glare. All this a facade for the truant within, the rags bundled but never forgotten. You all start from a place like this.

I hear you, she says, I hear you.
I hear her and my heart stops: I am filled with dread. Lilacs snap in two, threaded nails strip, buttons come undone.
I hear you.
And through the walls the sound of fans becoming unhinged, of blades wobbling, circumfrences wild. Doors bend, window panes flex, floors rattle.
I hear you.
I stuff myself into blankets three deep, frozen, a whisper becomes a roar, and the fog of my breath icicles on my lips.
I hear you.

I think back and it’s not shame exactly but certainly a profound embarassment: how could you? Who were you? Who did you try to be? And that last question brings it all to the surface: who I was trying to be before and then, and what am I now. Settled and yet still restless. All I’ve ever been and will be.

There is little to resist. The isolation from this larger world, the bonier context I had written of years ago, it looms. Something in that, “it looms.” The loom of this life before us, no more nightmares. At some point ingrained dada-ism must appear as schizophrenia, not that I am not allowed it. But why, no real trauma, only a progression of disappointments and short, sharp instances of trivial violence. Rather born this way, being bent again and again. Now the unfurling instead, as trivial as everything else, but the nobility of loving children and making a life with you. Instead of peering into the gap between the pronouns of ‘you’ and ‘I’, seek myself in your gesture, the ‘you’ I can become in your gaze.