“If you stand still long enough, it starts to get warm.” He then pointed to the cliffs, the grass soaked edges of the riverbed hanging over the bone colored rocks. “When the river reaches the bank, in the spring, it’s almost like a sauna.” He then squatted, folding up like a lawn chair, bare knuckle colored skin at all angles. Slowly his hands sunk beneath the clear surface and he cupped them together. “I love it here,” he whispered, “you can see the little fish hiding between seasons.” My cousin laughed like a child, curly dark haired Adonis squatting in the current. The next time I saw him he was only angles and sweat, dark sleepless circles, shivering in the heat of summer. He asked me if I remember that day in the river past the hollowed out corn stalks, while I cooled the tracks in his arms with an old moistened t-shirt.
“I love the feel of wet sand,” she said and flipped the blanket that covered us. The lightening lit up the sea like an electrified filament and she danced on the beach between heavy drops of rain. When I called her back to me, full of fear and thunder, she ran towards the wooden grey lifeguard stand, kicking up clumps. Catching her at its base, she breathed heavily and couldn’t take her eyes off the ocean. She kissed me like violence and grabbed hold of my arms, withered as they were. “My father died out there on a night like this.” She said, listening for lightening. “The day I was born was a storm and he died just minutes after.” Later, we made our way back towards the car and pushed our bodies into each other, into the steering wheel, into the seats, into all the things that make cars all wrong for fucking. The only time I ever saw her face again it wasn’t her face anymore in the hospital. It was wrapped and meaty and swollen and bruised. She was doing eighty five, racing against some boy I imagined she thought he looked just like her father, just like me. The police tried to pull her over, losing the boy and she had lost the wheel, slamming the rail until the car slid off onto the shoulder and without stopping hit the first trees of the beach.
From the minute I stepped off the board I knew it was going wrong. My body flattened out instead of turning and the pool seemed suspended below and awfully angry. I could see each mouth open in wonder at the edges, I could hear silence. I landed flat on my stomach from fifty feet up and it’s a wonder that I could move at all afterwards. I stayed underwater and swam from shame until I reached the shorter end, I think some people were actually applauding. My friends met me at the other end, and my best friend’s sister, who I dreamt about off and on, did not reach for me. She laughed and pointed even though I couldn’t breathe and her brother threatened her. She was older and thinner and had dark hair that streaked her head and back, slick. After a while he started laughing and I did too, choking on the water left in my lungs and our other friends couldn’t hold their stomach’s. Later that night, touching the redness of my chest and stomach, I reached between my legs, felt the beginning points of pubic hair, thinking of her laughter.
The boat jumped across the water and the sun was too high, we were out too late. My uncle had madness about him, such anger and rage that I didn’t want to tell him what the tuna sandwich and beer and boat were doing to my stomach. I was too young and as he cursed each wave I held onto the side railings while my cousin-in-law looked for the bottle opener, my head was just above the propeller blades, drowning on board. My uncle yelled “Goddamn it! Goddamn that woman!” and veered the boat at too steep of an angle. I could hear the motor roar and the clattering of beer bottles against my legs and the loud thunk like hitting a buck on the highway of the buoy across the bow and I remember thinking not ever again, no not ever. The boat flipped and the sky was this clear blue and the sun this impossible pinpoint and the meat of my uncle’s jaw and the boat going and I wasn’t moving at all, just skipping above the water and somewhere I could see someone’s arm holding a brown bottle like it was the first thing in the world to hold on to.

We move and stop. We regard our surroundings: an olive branch, a piece of chalk, a bone, a watch, and a pot. We shit in the pot, examine the watch by bringing it to our ears, toss it aside, and stare at the chalk. How odd, how odd for such a thing still. We gnaw the bone, wipe our asses with the olive branch. We look at the watch again. We leave.
We breathe and nothing comes of it, or came, so we go. Arriving and leaving with each step, every step; coming briefly, to go to another rest. We stop for short intervals the same way our feet do, but also piss and swallow, which they do not do. We cannot do all three, or even two of the three, at once. Impossible, or too trivial to do so, or stop. A perpetual state of always and never. We are in between, like breaths, in the middle of something that moves, in and out, never being what we were when we first came upon anything or after we left it.
We are tired but it all seems reassuring, or redundant. What ‘it’ is, we do not know, but it is more than just an expression. “it” is something, a number perhaps or a set of numbers or lengths or feet, but not our feet, for our feet are all the same and move. Numbers do not move, they simply note our movement: figures and planes are our permanent abstractions; without them we would have nothing to judge or have with, not even our movement. Yes, comforting to note how far we have travelled without comfort. We are not dragging ourselves in place at least; arching our legs and angling our ankles for nothing. Figures and planes and some measure of distance: receding, enlarging, level, shifting of perspectives. We are forever leaving somewhere and arriving anywhere but never here for too long.
It starts to rain, raining. We stop. There are objects around us, but we shut our eyes. It does not take much. It is raining and the drops beat on our backs. We do not move for the time it takes for the storm to pass: we are in our minds and somewhere other than here, as always, but in our minds and somewhere else, more than here can offer. At one time it might have been imagination, but that no longer has any meaning. It has stopped raining. The air wraps around and slithers when wet. When it rains and we do not seek shelter. Rain is shelter; it is of our shape on us, our thirst, it cleanses. Rain is water left. We move to only have it rain on us.
When we walk, we walk almost touching our toes: our shoulders are level and slightly forward of the ribs, with the bones of our spine jutting like stubby fins from the centerline of our curved backs. Very reptilian. But we have stopped and we straighten our backs to be as boards: very erect, smooth and flat. It is not easy. It is not raining. It pleases us oddly, and we do not know why ‘oddly’, to hear our joints popping; miniature air explosions from beneath and within the bone. This way we know we still have backs unbroken; little else is.
We regard our surroundings: a few feathers, a leather bound book, a number of nail, or toenail, it is not certain, clippings, and a painting. This is of interest: we look at the painting to judge its appropriateness. In various, and undoubtedly, specific areas of the canvas surface, there is color, but all appears grey and meaningless. We are colorblind and can only comprehend shades and shapes. For instance: the book. It has a cover made of dead skin, its interior consists of thinly sliced torsos, and for the purpose of exposition of things not immediately apparent upon the surface, but that is lodged in our minds, melted hair binds the whole thing to itself. Other than that, nothing. Again we approach the painting. For lack of sight we run our fingers over the surface to discern other than what we, or the artist for that matter, intended to see, or saw. We chew on finger or toenails, as we do this, and run the scraps of feathers through our scalps. Recreation, or critique, if we had degrees, but even the temperature escapes us. So we stare, to recap, at a painting, one hand running back and forth on it, our jaws working like cows, hard to swallow without spit-we abandoned that, much too much baggage-with bits of feathers in the wire of our scalps, silent except for the wet sounds of what sinews and muscles remain.
For everything is barren; not dead, barren. Even the painting: all the strokes are of something not mixed well, gritty, a quick attempt, and merely, at that. We drop our fingertips and they rest at our thighs, breathing deep for a scant few seconds. Then we arch ourselves, almost doubled over, but not in pain, and move on. Nothing has been of use to us here.
We move and while we move, on average a very rare event overall, we rut, to keep us, as us, for we are alone enough, however also the numbers dwindle, and we cannot continue if we do not fuck at some points. This is done with much precision; the act dry and without lust, complete by the time of contact. Make no assumption: it is not enjoyable, but it must be done. Necessary. We fuck as we shit: a consumption of time to be done and over with, for sustenance, or survival. Sometimes it is successful, we become bloated and drip and break water. That is of interest: water breaking, heralding arrival, after much constipation.
We arrive, have arrived, and grow, have grown and grow old, die, and leave. This is how it was and is. We do not will, we observe, everything is foreign and yet, all-too-familiar, our senses dulled by the extremities, including our limbs. Silent but for our grunts and what little is left around us. Peculiar only to believe otherwise: that we are neither product nor waste, that we leave footprints along with prodigies and scraps uneaten, that everything had been other than where we are now, in the present state. Impossible. We can no longer express, nothing to do with the chords, but with the orchestra in general, without even marked sheets, the specifics are too dull for words. In essence, at the heart of it, the only constant, after all, only this, and the end, remaining: we move and stop ..we regard our surroundings ..there is nothing of use to us here.

Everything else is props. Sunlight is only good for walks through parks and smiles or for sunrises filtering through bedroom windows and for sunsets on warm sand beaches with murmuring waves. Moonlight is necessary for love scenes and sweat and skinny dipping. Storms are the most dramatic of props, with the juxtaposition of silence and flashes of light and explosion of sound. Countries, seasons, the color of walls, the position of cups, the show on T.V., at a certain moment, all of it, are props: The grain of a piece of wood, the lines of a fingerprint, the material of clothing on a body, the color of the hair on the face of the story. The use of props makes the story more real, more true, by rearranging them, placing them at an appropriate time, an exact place, by staging meaningless things to add meaning. All in all, they’re just props that cannot be hung if there is no nail, no story, on the wall for us to see.
Everything else is props.
He sits and we see him.
We see a stage and it is empty, except for the chair he is sitting on and the chair right alongside him, so close that his arm is touching her arm.
We don’t know who she is, and at this point, don’t care but even that isn’t important. What’s important is that their skin barely touches, just as their lives barely touch, just at the edges, the limbs.
She gets up, walks behind the chairs and he follows her with his eyes. She stops, looks at the wall, then touches the nail “What’s this?”
Leaning over the back of the chair, he replies, “The Story.”
“What’s the story about?”
“I don’t know,” he frowns, turns and faces us. “I think it’s supposed to be about us.”
She goes behind the chairs and leans her elbows on him. “Are we lovers?”
He smiles, “No, not yet anyway, maybe.”
“Maybe?” she stands, raising an eyebrow.
“I’m not sure, I think we want to be, but the story isn’t about that.”
“Is this real?” she sits again next to him.
“Depends,” He replies, crossing his arms across his chest.
“On?”
“Do you mean if this is Real, the story or real, like, if this is really happening?”
She thinks about this, almost pouting.
“Both,” she says.
“Yes,” he says.
“Both…,” she ponders this and looks at him, looking at us and still we don’t know what they look like.
“What do you see?”, she asks, looking past the stage.
He leans back, stretching his legs. “Well… it changes.”
“I see what you mean,” she says, squinting through us, at us, leaning a bit forward.
“You do?”, he’s surprised, not because she does see, but because he is asking her instead of her asking him.
“Yeah…”, she turns to him, curling her legs beneath her. “At first, there was the narrator, but behind that, you can almost see the author, when the story was being written, but they’re not the same person.”
“Wo, wait a minute.”
“-ssh, you should know this,” she turns his face towards her with her hands, “but after the story was written, all you can see is the author, who now is rereading this-”
“Oh…” he says, sitting up, looking at us again, “you can even see the reader, when the reader is reading this and…”, he waits, staring a moment, then adds, “are we just words on paper?”
She shrugs, “does it matter?”
He looks at her again, “no, I don’t think so.”
They look at one another and we wonder why they know more about the story than we do. Are we reading this at some desk underneath the neon lamps of a classroom or are we in an audience, watching a play with the barest of props or is this what the story is about, the wondering.
“When I asked what do you see,” she looks downward, “this is going to sound stupid… I didn’t mean out there,” pointing past the stage, “I meant me.”
“What you look like?”
She nods her head.
“Well, there’s this yellow-green boil on your nose and it’s blood red at the edges-”
“Shit!”, she covers her nose and tries to turn away.
He stops her, facing her, getting off his chair and kneeling in front of her. “Relax, I’m kidding… ?trying to brush her hands away from her face.
“No you’re not”, resisting him.
“I am”, he pulls her hands away gently, then studies her. “There’s nothing wrong with your nose and it isn’t too long or piggish and you don’t have big nostrils.” He pauses, studying her a bit more, finding the words, “you have big brown eyes-”
“Do I look like a bug?”
“No!” he laughs.
“I won’t need eye make-up?”, she asks, “honestly.”
“No, but I think you’ll wear eyeliner just to piss me off.”
“I’ll be wearing it because I don’t want to look like a bug.”
“You don’t need any make up…”, he looks around “…I wish there was a mirror here…” then gives up, takes her face into his hands, “look, you have this really long silky hair and this smooth white skin…”
“I’m pale aren’t I? Casper the friendly ghost-”
“Will you listen?” He smiles, “and you have these beautiful,” he touches very softly, “lips, full and…
“Thank God”, she sighs, “I hate chicken lips-”
“If the Titanic had your lips, they wouldn’t have worried about life boats.”
She laughs and messes his hair “jerk…” she says affectionately then she asks, “am I tall or short?”
“Daddy Longlegs”, he replies.
“I’m an Amazon.”
“You’re beautiful”, he says and she frowns. “What?” he asked.
She looks away, “it’s not the first time I’ve heard that.”
“Does it make less real?”
“When you’ve heard it too often it means nothing.”
“Okay, I’ll say it only when a reader reads that line in the story.”
“That might be often.” she pointed out.
“But only I’ll be saying it, me”, he takes her hands, “will it still mean nothing?”
“If you’re not who you seem to be.”
“Then, well,” he pauses, looks downward, rising, still holding her hands “who am I?”
“I don’t know”, she stands also and they are facing one another and she squints, “you’re a bit of the author, you like to write.” She backs away, letting go of his hands, crosses her arms when she reaches stage left and squints some more, tilting her head. “Your father was an alcoholic and he used to beat you and your mother.”
He takes steps towards her, angrily, “is he still doing that?”
“No,” she shakes her head, “the bastard— he left when you were four.”
“Relax,” he holds her at a distance, “it’s behind me, happened years ago, right? How old am I?”
“You’re going to be twenty one.”
“See happened seventeen years ago, don’t be upset..-”
“It’s shaped you,” she says dropping her arms. “You drink, but you’re afraid you’ll drink too much and you hide it behind being obnoxious. You’re scared of your own temper and you want so desperately to be a good father-”
“Wo, I have a son?” his eyes light up.
“No”, she says and touches his chin, “but you want one, you cry about it, you think you’ll never be loved…”
“Will I?” he asks.
“Will I?” she asks and walks back to the chairs and sits. He joins her and they stare at us. He doesn’t have an answer to her question or he is thinking of something to say. It’s almost as if they’re waiting for an answer from us. Are we part of the story? Are we real?
“Yes and no”, he replies.
“What?”
“The narrator asked if the reader was part of Real, if the reader is real,” he turns to her, “but yes and no to you too.”
“What do you mean?”, she asks.
Then he says, putting it kindly, “you had or have been loved, but it’s not working out, it’s been through the ringer too many times,” he pauses, pushes her hair behind her ear, “I can’t make any promises.”
“Neither can I,” she takes his hand, “we tried this once before, remember?”
He shakes his head, “don’t remind me, I got too carried away…”
“And I…”, she looks down at their interlocking fingers, “I…ran away…”
“Are we ready this time?”
“Maybe.”
“Maybe not”, he smiles, plays with her hair, “let’s just let the story happen…”
“But the story is ending here, isn’t it?”
“Yes it is, the narrator is going to end it but we can just go on with this”, he says.
“Will this be in writing?”, she asks, touching his neck.
“The end?”
“No the ‘us’?”
“Does it matter?”
She smiles and tilts her head, “Is this real?”
And the lights go out.
Do we want to read the story? What would it look like, sound like, where would the props be, how? Who would they be ? He, she or you? Then we realize, filing out, questioning into the open air, that we never wondered why a curtain never fell.

A: What are you doing?
B: Writing a story.
A: What’s it about?
B: Writing myself out of a story.
A: How do you do that?
B: That’s what I want to find out.
A: Are you in a story now?
B: I don’t know. Sometimes.
A: How can you be in the story when you are writing it?
B: What if I was writing about myself?
A: Okay, then you would writing about yourself and not the story.
B: Couldn’t the story then be about me writing about myself as a story?
A: What do you mean?
B: I mean that the story would have to be about me writing about myself writing my way out of a story.
A: Meaning that the story that you were trying to write yourself out of would be the writing of yourself as writing?
B: Or of me writing a story about myself writing a way out of the story, which is about myself writing about myself.
A: But at no point could you be writing the story then, unless you weren’t you. That would be a story.
B: Yes. That’s right. You’re absolutely right.
A: Then who are you?
B: A story trying to write itself.

on a bed of simple springs
she pulled him
,to just before her thighs,
with her hand
and smiled,
“should we bring him home?”
he pushed into her
and she breathed sharply
looking at him as if he was,
‘suddenly someone different’ ‘
when it was she who shaped herself
around him tightly
in the opposite direction
of where he once was, fracturing him
into the use of a language
he had longed to learn with some
-one, in that silence.
he went headlong
to fashion her hips, her breast, her face, her hair
and, ‘the soft wet that he was engulfed in’
into the remaking of her
,of himself in loving her,
dissolving each previous one,
into an ‘Only her’ so strikingly real
that with each breaking
he would be whole.
she clung to his shoulders,
leaning over as she rose and fell onto him
in and out of this place where he found himself
without words and so much to say.
he disappeared
into the motion and friction of her
reopening a newly made world
and sealed himself in it.
she laughed afterward, “..think of it:
in a couple of months
we’ll have done this hundreds of times.”

one

He says I’m going to write a novel to day or the very least start one but between him and the keyboard there was her her needs his curiosities distractions other obligations to be filled to fill up the time a call to his mother because she sounded sick dying miserable on the answering machine that was exactly how he had found her on the phone a little better on hearing him his voice the rambling on and on a rambling machine the usual diatribe that started with when are you coming home crash ended with the night before he left in a little yellow walled room she had come into that room not a word sat on the narrow blue bed half turned away skin tan as burnt as tarpan as burnt as sand who had yet to see her years who had yet to witness the turn of her life could still feel the moment when he laid hands on me slapped a strong hand across my face my thinking how natural how it was how I must have deserved it here in a foreign land with nothing else to give him but my body our language how he took it all everything except his son leaving us in the middle of that house miserable without light or water and everything outside was dark and terrifying not even any money or the car to get out of there stranded facing the fierce possibility of having to go out somehow feeding this child crying in her arms with the police at the door asking her if she has seen him does she know where he has been if she could understand the question or possibility of drug abuse looking back at this now this is never what he had wanted he didn’t want to pull himself apart like that pull her apart like that in the middle of that room before going to somewhere else where I would hope everything I was here would be a was not an is not an am I wanted to be something different here he was writing or remembering or confusing the two conflating one for the other trying desperately to get away from it from her saying I never abandoned you but rather you want to tell her how much you miss the clouds the big open spaces how the night dark and blue and wide would become all open outward the world would go flat and even underneath it endless roaming the nights out in the streets in the quiet in the silence everything so perfectly still alone driving along the roads to air your thoughts out and vast something like the country something immoveable like a mountain ridge at its distance from a dirt road a fixed solitude a quiet plain of leaves between you and the house when you had gotten up to mow the lawn to ease your mind to ease the stirring in your chest of something old and sure and slow the loud noise the angle of the trees the peach and the evergreen in the yard that you never could get right you wished you would you wished you could be that one thing then and be this thing here he was contemplating the mortality of his moment between then and now the difference in himself between then and now the rapidity of movement the indistinct possibility of having been someone else and how he wanted to supplant himself into two places at once places in the heart he mutters into the phone just walking onto the bare wood floor room just coming home from work in her gray skirt and white blouse she looks at you seeing you on the phone and knowing by the look on your face right out of the room back through the dingy little kitchen of plywood walls to the living room of cracked alabaster into the little walk-in closet where there was no light no switch no plug to witness your undressing to change out of her work clothes because the apartment was too small for the both of you to have clothes in one place the both of you who abandoned places to be with each other out here in the wilderness of a one horse town it can be all so sad and plain and tired if it wasn’t so much of a drug I wish we could get paid for this he would say kissing you breathing hands on your nipples unbuttoning you thought that would be nice to make pornos of your lovemaking you thought you two would look really hot then your mind drifted down shifted down turned what would you do with it anyway the idea got more and more sour who’d want to watch it who would I want to I don’t want anyone to watch I don’t even want to watch it thinking this pulling off your stockings keeping your balance against these drawers that were built in the walk-in closet bunching them up and into the laundry basket right left of your foot your toes snaking into the little pink slippers unclipping your bra at the same time you hear him raise his voice a little bit over on the other side of the room over the hum of the computer all he was all his writing was himself repeated broken up outward displaced re-received that all everything in the world was to him impressions and hanging up the phone he had gotten the distinct impression that something had happened to him between the leaving arriving the first smooth grey cement steps of the brownstone they now lived in and the draft underneath the bathroom doors and the first check that they cut togther not one thing to threaten themselves or each of them but he could swear that sooner or later he wouldn’t miss being a child anymore a child of three or four or five the sensation of things around him the corners of things the thingness of each impressionable object on him in his field of vision that there was himself as field of vision not the sure distinction between himself and what he saw and that everything pressed itself upon him in seeing but rather he would miss being who he had not wanted to be a bundle of awkward relationships between himself and his body his words and his gestures his voice and his face a mass of inconsistencies consistently bent curled and inward like skewers rusted through flesh all wrong now this thing that he couldn’t help but think was falling apart he had come here to be alive here he was overeating over exaggerated over bloated overwhelmed at least at the very least at last I stopped smoking which is a good thing because my clothes don’t stink anymore like every time I cross paths with cigar smoke where the stench hangs onto my clothing like death like that pain in her chest when breathing when waking from the night before where they had danced in the basement and they had applauded as she swayed drink in her hand lost wanting to be lost to another culture to victimize herself into another form of assimilation all the boundaries had been crossed before in other places in bright sunny places where she had lost herself then in front of him the gentle sway of wanting some more of this hand outstretched with her drink and another drink he had asked the look on his face when did you become that kind of girl the look that you would never forgive him for giving that one drink more when it had been more than enough to keep you off the balance beam of life it really doesn’t take much the music was loud deafening enough to forget who you were he had always said that to you hadn’t he to be yourself you had to forget yourself and you thought that was so pathetic and impossible didn’t make any sense whatsoever but it would’ve been nice to believe it and the next day all the smoke had settled in your lungs filled up spaces that you were quite sure would never come back to you it was almost a panic if you hadn’t felt that way before in your past this wasn’t really new that’s how it felt and you wanted him to reach over the table right here in the bagel shop that was one big clear glass window facing the plaza a suburban nightmare in all proportions bright white too white and the little old yak yaks behind the counter don’t toast bagels here only cut and smear them and you want his mouth inside yours pull the smoke and your lungs all right out of you right here for all to see when she had told me that when she had come up and stayed for a few days for a graduation that hadn’t amounted much to anything a long speaker with long winded speaking through heckling and jawing and all around disrespect as if there was ever any political motivation behind any boo or cat call standing there after four or five years of smoking up drinking stringing myself along that last night near the end before the end of smoking he had sat in the bar with seewhatshisname and they were talking bullshit about politics and people and the politics of people and the people politics that stopped people from being people with each other and blaming it on politics and he reached for the pitcher of beer hovered it over the table thinking of you at the time pouring even scribbled something on this little napkin when seewhatshisname stretched over the back of his seat wobbly metal thing bending under his weight his stretch like a snake in eden’s garden you thought to catch the attention of these law students out just after finishing their exams they looked at him like he was some destitute some bum he was rather dark rather darker in a bar this white this close to the plaza to the square to columbus circle where all the black people don’t go into bars but into delis or bodegas when they’re not sticking them up either shucking out forties or rolling paper he could tell that was what they were thinking holding their mugs a little closer to their chests straightening their backs we toil over words you and I he had said coming back over the table rebuffed after only wanting their attention nothing more than to get what we all thought would be a more informed point of view left later on in the streets in the subway where you and he hadn’t much to say about but the ringing in your ears of a night too long too wooden dark brown yellow dense and hard to breathe after having left the bar all that nonsense you talked about between pitchers and pack after pack of cigarettes smoking each other’s brand the ease of it the casualness of switching from one to the other each with its own merits standing on the subway platform the breeze in the tunnels as muck and mired as it is makes them sway in their present condition the condition of two lonely drunks who don’t know where to go home to anymore in the summer night in the subway a subway in the new york summer is cement steel and rust but close wet and alive like mud somewhere between the two he says over and over again what he had tried to tell the law students there’s this insane notion that the body is separate from the mind that it’s made to be separate a thing that you can’t touch is privileged over something that you can and that’s such utter nonsense utter nonsense you know he turns to me and I think how utterly lost we are how we don’t know one decent thing to say to anyone but mad rants and raves for conversations with those kids who were in the bar all our age already rich already putting on airs already turning away from us like we were lepers or pariahs and looking at you now I can see why we get turned away three inches thick of scar tissue for hands mouths and eyes it’s a wonder that they even let us roam the streets like this and he laughs the wind picks up in the tunnels and a grey brown dirty rat scurries under over around the black third rail over under around a length of metal like that cut into the air like a destination like a point of infinity stretching from one end of the station to the other from one end of its mouth to its ass he said and we too can run on like that like that rat or like that rail and cutting into the air the train barreled in blind screaming along those tracks like it was never going to stop but it heaved moaned and pulled at itself just before the doors opened and only when they were inside does it finally stop tripping them up lurching gagging a final choke but then the doors close.

two

Of course to write back again to move back in again would be out of the question it’s impossible to pick up where I left off to the beginning again back to the drawing board again is like approaching another canvas another impossibility of place another avalanche of thoughts desires mistakes hadn’t kelly said the errors are the text that the errors make up the text or the meaning is the text or the mistaken meaning of the text becomes the text the black board stuck again stuck to moving away again to the tv or the Internet or the sound of her getting ready to come to bed always listening to her rustling to her movements across hard wood floors the end of the night is a difficult time to write in the white space between the pixels of the monitor the white space of the infinite nothing compelling the notion that there is everything every little thing exploded and expanded upon mercilessly because it has winded down after being wound up and twisted and sore too sore to think anything else much other than a passivity for the eyes an ease of the eyes an ease to the strain of living through this throughout this through this skin of mine sitting here in the dark and all there is to escape me escapes me like some sort of demand upon my neck muscles being made how to write again that is always the first question how to write me again the screen monitoring his every move he can feel her in the next room suddenly anxious of the thought of her and this coming between them and her coming between them and of coming apart at the seams late at night at her coming with the phone hung up and the incessant drone humming of the computer he feels suddenly tired I’m getting old I’m getting tired of rubbing his eyes the draw back behind them a pulling ache as if he had difficulty with his skin of the question with answering the question before him and he needed to figure it out as when she walks into the room and finds him sitting there in front of a blank screen yearning to itch something else to scratch his back or the phone lines or the remote control in this age of prepackaged deals left holding remote controls in place of you and so far away are you from my fingertips that when I reach out to you I bump into the screen smudging the traces of desire left to you finding yourself thinking that it isn’t often you find him like that wanting to be nowhere or maybe it was becoming more and more often now that you lived together that he seemed to be somewhere else and you didn’t know what to make of it if you should make something of it if it had something to do with you if your hand was somehow in its making or him or the both of you or with the both of you suddenly being in one place at each other’s throats at night fingers lightly never too far from one jaw or the other how do you relieve the empty space the void space the nothing space caught up in a world of words that you have no part of a world of words that you cannot possibly ever see what they do to us as they do it to be so excluded from the thing that we become and are in writing in writing what we would make of words as worlds of worlds as empty as words as worlds not ever to be touched worlds out of and far from ever touching of and far from ever being real and you step into the room towards him as if the distance could be crossed as easy as one foot in front of another wearing slippers to protect you from the cold always too cold in this house at night even in the spring the chills race up your calf like wet blades of grass nearing the distance to him shortening the distance between the tips of your fingers and himself treacherously reaching towards his back the back of his head fingers nearing his head his hair you wonder what sort of disturbance would this be what would you be ripping him away from or rather what would you be ripping away what would you see in the split second before he realizes that it was you not the sudden confusion that he seemed to be what motion would you be awakening him from what thought or lack of thought would you be committing himself to now near in touching him behind him in front of the screen the monitor monitoring your movements to him away from the door about to come between him and the monitor him and the written work not stepping in front of it or him not exactly as if you had wanted to be written on to be the keyboard and the page simultaneously to be written on in two ways to be written finally and surely without pause or hesitation or choice to know and be an outcome out of your hand she touches him at the base of the skull and his head lolls softly back like a cat’s neck like a cat against a leg even though I’ve never liked cats there’s something to the hair at the back of his head that reminds me of baths I used to take when I was a child with my father when my father too had been a child with me and my little sister and all I could dream about was daddy’s little girl being daddy’s little girl with my sister taking care of my little sister whose face was a little moon and her nose a fire plug chubby limbs that never stopped splashing the bath tub in brooklyn where we weren’t allowed to play with the other children in the hallways the building was too high too far too narrow from the ground but when we did I fell on a bottle or with a bottle in my arms not a baby bottle a glass bottle up in my chest to arms fell and cut my neck wide open but I didn’t remember it until later when I realized that there was a scar around my neck the size of the sea I grew ending up in jamaica always so much moving around leaving and arriving packing up and leaving behind cardboard boxes that we would hide in until we would have to leave again in closets full of clothes over us over the floor between things where all the dust found itself on our hands and we were just like that just as light just as at rest between the spaces of our fingers on the other side of our elbows when we would bend in the wrinkles of our knees where it would never leave his hands were so soft then not so hard as when he had smacked me later ten twelve fourteen years hadn’t it been again and again that summer night right in front of the boulevard or had it been fall caught out kissing around the corner behind the house around the block little mamasita he wrote I could have been on the window sill watching the sun over rust and bars of this neighborhood with one time to all the boys muscling their cars through traffic and basketballs that bounced into our streets with children running behind them little girl with little boy hands in her hair making pigtails I can still see you and your mothers so young looking at boys across the way who wouldn’t say no lying now miles from home six feet under fodder for weeds let me count the ways but not that if anything we can begin to write the relationships between this thing and that ourselves and to each thing in its proportions in its measurements in its distance between hand and word the words between you and I between your hand on my lips the infinite distance repeated and broken up be it the gesture of a word when it mutters into our mouths or the time it takes to heal the absence of its presence of having been all we are doing is attempting to begin to cross the distance between here and there by putting things in between us he had said the inevitable has become the obvious and we are obviously headed for a conclusion as we read and insert ourselves in the middle of every text that is uncaring of us as we are of it when we are through and I never meant any harm by putting this one thing in front of another of putting one foot in front of another one fragile moment glass in front of another and filling it to the fill but somehow he had found himself home and none the sober for it keys jingling and each time I swear it each time I get like this I can’t even figure out my own fucking name in this doorway outside in the dark with the lights out the bulb broken like the neighbors are awake by looking and each time I swear it’s going to be the last with my stomach at the back of my throat and my life bearing down behind my eyes and if only I could just set it clearly enough to make it past the front door I made it this far through this rain when it wasn’t even raining but it was harder to look out the windshield just keep it going and try to keep it straight he laughed make it to bed to rest I’m not fucking asking too much am I just to get inside and sleep this thing off and by the time I did get outside of my own head I never did slumped on the door until morning and still to this very day the bitter dew on my lips of vomiting in my sleep waking up the hardest part between the dream and the light of cold denial of the world outside the safe place from which you do not want to crawl out of there on a hope that a life lived is not only your own for a brief moment that everything hangs together and is connected a little jingle of we’re all connected we’re feeling and hurting for you how hard this must be on you they had said in the hospital bleeding his chest out we really do understand it happens everyday around here we see it all the time left in the hallway waiting for x-rays getting up sitting up setting up everyone leaves the room for you really it’s nothing to worry about it wasn’t even a real knife even though the pain of it the open wetness of it the thread going through each end of it and drawing it closed right in front of his eyes his chest felt real enough and the doctor breathing into your mouth breathing your life but we all knew he could have died that night if not any other and I thought this to myself I thought who would say this who had said we all knew if not that day any other would have done surely as any other and onto my feet thinking this voice in my head that was surely mine in the midst all the clamoring that was going on behind the trombones the trumpets the brass section of my skull the percussions against forehead of each step over another I could even sense them jazz musicians ruckus a making for surely her singing saying scatting would today any day would be just as good as any other if not this day he could of died that night I don’t know where to place it that night that music where had I heard it from what she was saying where it was coming from like she knew what it would be what it had been like in the stopped fingers jittered enough for the keys to fit inside a knob when I want to keep falling back into her fingers at the back of my head urge her further into my brain stem the incalculable sensations of nails along nerves fingers on wires on violin strings putting an end to sound an end to the chording up of the throat in speaking in the ache before speaking and relieve me of you having to read this the strain it must have on your eyes to make sense of this putting of two and two together out of my mind you said to me over and over you’re going to starve shook your head from side to side slowly as if the world was drowned in molasses you’re going to starve you’re going to find yourself again sitting at a keyboard back again in one place again with her again wrenching with something that surely would have been the death of me if not this day then any other.

he writes

and in his writing he finds himself, over and over again, he sees himself, sees himself as himself, reaches to himself: an act of duplicity. He asks himself, “Who are you?” at the same time that he hears himself asking, “Where have you been?” He finds the prospect of answering his own questions difficult, he fears that each will be similar to this one: incessant speaking and hearing. He thinks then, standing in front of himself, of conversation, and the necessity to have interruptions, the necessity of silence, the necessity of the gap between speakers; and how he can’t quite imagine himself. Instead he reaches out again. The distance seems to yawn beyond himself, to not only be expanding, but forever stretching out: the words escape him. He finds himself suddenly unable to move, and in so doing, begins again. Finding his arm at rest he sees himself reaching out to himself. “What an odd little game we are playing,” he hears from himself or has said to himself, he isn’t quite sure. He is reminded of the old man at the hotel in Argentina who had been waiting for himself, or was that when he had been writing to himself, or simply writing? Either way, it is in his hands now. Not writing but waiting to write, he is without pen or pencil or paper. Standing with himself, facing himself as himself, across and reaching out to him, he doesn’t know how to respond to this gesture that he is making. He asks, “What am I do to with this?” hearing simultaneously (and he was waiting for it, straining to hear under his own words as he spoke them across from him, aware of it’s presence looming in possibility: if this was possible, then why not two places at once?) “Where to begin is the first question. William you have gone quite far enough with that. But you haven’t straightened the axle yet, have you love? The television and my brains are on the floor. Have you picked them up? They are waiting, you know. What are you doing just standing there? They’re waiting for you, you know.” And suddenly his hand has closed and sharpened to become a finger, from an accusation of my presence in front of myself to now pointing past me. I’m pointed in the other direction I am pointing in, this direction, I am facing the direction I’m suddenly pointing to, the direction I had pointed out to myself merely seconds, or perhaps years before. “One never knows until there,” I hear myself say but no longer see myself. Knowing not to look for myself any longer I find that I can move. I move. I step forward into the direction I pointed out to myself and find it is like following your finger as if it stayed in place, but since it too is also moving, ahead with you, leading you further, you are following yourself. A certain emotional detachment is required to believe otherwise, to know your finger as otherwise, as Other. More accurately, you need to cut yourself off from your finger: you’d need to cut your finger off; to continue following it, to let it run wild. I instead think of myself as someone else, and it all comes easier, even though the places I know I will see are places that only I have been to, only I could have sat in, and will speak to people only I have spoken to and have known to know. To know the bitter taste of a coffee without sugar, I ask for it to be made bitter, and the outside of the cafe, of where I have taken a seat, is empty and lazy enough for it. The sun is bright enough, but the wind is not brisk. It is light, allows the sun to warm my skin after a long winter; now pale, almost ashen. God knows (or doesn’t) that we need it. You can see it in the children, how light their feet are, how they dance against the pavement, their heads twisting up almost into the blue of the sky. All they can do to keep from staring into the sun. Their parents stroll, mothers talking between each other, but the children yearn and tug and scream happily, hysterically at one another. As if they all understood. I could write a world out of this, am writing out a world, out of a world just as this, just this. When the waitress brings me my coffee I ask her if she could spare a moment for me, as often as I come here. She smiles and sits, leans forward. Her head casts a silhouette across the table. “How is Turkish coffee,” I gesture to my small cup of dark liquid in front of me, the demi-tasse, “prepared? Not the making of it. From the bean I mean. I heard it’s a recipe.” She shakes her head, tousles my hair as she gets up, “Oh, William, you wouldn’t understand” and leaves off, doubtless to other customers inside, or the ones that have just seated on my left. I do not know if she is working by herself today, or if she ever works with anyone else. I like to believe, especially at moments such as these, so far away from what I am and have become, without reminders to ruin the sun of the day, that she chooses to, to work alone, to have me to herself. It is an embarrassing thought, and quickly I try to erase it. But what’s done is done, what’s said is said, and what’s written remains written. Roman proverb I seem to remember from somewhere else, Littera scripta manet. Even in the dead hearts and minds of imaginary men. I stare back out onto the world, I sip my coffee (as bitter as the children we see and love in the world are as sweet, as bitter as the sound of granite in a mill against one’s lungs). Words fail me for what I feel at this moment, how could I describe the sensation? Sensation indeed. The sensation, the thrill, of simply living, of knowing one’s own life, of one’s own activity of life. The serenity of having the world within you as it encompasses you, swallows you whole as you fit it in. But it is very quiet, does neither boast nor proclaim. It is not a loud thing, you don’t go raving into the streets proclaiming that you know your life being lived, that you are living, you know you know. No. It is a quiet thing that lies in the breast, not ‘chest’, not ‘heart’, safely in one’s breathing, like a vessel being filled slowly and there it remains. It is easy to find it in others, to hunt for it, to admire it, even envy it, covet it, long for its taste. The vitality others have in simply crossing a busy street, or lovers holding hands, or smelling bread. It can drive one mad to pine for it ‘out there.’ This is not it either: it has to belong only to oneself, of oneself and felt for oneself. In knowing, one owns, and that is a very difficult thing to accept. It has nothing to do with understanding, it is a question of acceptance, and most of the time, that is impossible. The day begins and ends within oneself, and when you understand this, everything is given a chance to breathe, even yourself, even you can find the words for it, then, only then. But, until ‘then’, then and only then. Later, she asks me “How is your writing?” How did she know I even wrote? She barely knows me, barely remembers what I’ve had here before. She remembers my smile, my gentle face, my hands folded on my lap and that I like to look at the world from this cafe from time to time. It is often times questions such as that one, that leave her mouth full of a mind of their own, perhaps her own, that she poses without posing, out of the blue so to speak, that surprise me the most, that take me aback: their disquieting guile, their quiet insinuation, their ease of assimilation into our conversations. For a moment, only a moment, of seconds, no more than years, she fools me into believing that there are other hands involved in our affairs, other than my own. She becomes stunning and I am compelled to do nothing but convince myself to love her. It makes me sick with worry, it churns the stomach, and it is difficult to see her, to look at her. They are not the same, and this saddens me. So much so that I have to leave, she asks me if I will come back again, and if not, where will I be, and the words are lost. I do not even turn around, I’ve committed a trespass that can not be forgiven, even little understood, I refuse the strength to open my throat to her. I cannot bear to speak any longer, I’ve said too much in the world, spoken too loud, made impressions that I shouldn’t have. This is what I think a text should do. It should do precisely this, whatever it is: that is for each of ourselves to decide, if that is still possible, if we can indeed have minds of our own, if we can even allow it. Walking away from the cafe, and the resonance that that sentence has and carries, pushes me further and further away as if my body was a sail, and it, the wind. I felt as a sheaf of paper, gently blown about, blown to bits, scattered across the street and almost came very close to being as such. I stepped out into the street off the curb without looking, a car screeched and swerved and other cars did also, to avoid it. I was called mad. Perhaps. Perhaps I am, or was, whatever the tenses could have been in my muscles at the time, I don’t know. We’ve moved so far away, beyond that at this point, and it is so tiring to continue on like this, hollowed out and brittle like the tree bark I found my hand resting on, finally in a park. Or, the park, the one far across the city, on its more affluent side. I don’t know or remember how I had gotten here and under other circumstances I would have been troubled, if not for the day. The sun and its strength, the gentle way of the wind, not even a breeze. I am caught with my hand, by it, by the splaying out of the fingers (my fingers) against the bark. Standing, I stretch the hand, my hand out. It looks so lovely. Where was it before? This attention to details, to details of my own body. You forget it oftentimes, particularly when you are strong and youthful. It becomes invisible until it begins to fail, then: it grows. There perched in infinite space in front of you against the solid weight of the world, of this piece of the world, this tree. So strong and able and willing. Against this strength, the hand against it, where the flesh moves like sand over the bones. Tired bones you imagine, because you cannot feel them. Only at times, and by accident, you feel only the outcome of their breaking when they break and at some time they must. It comes with age. And veins, so delicate, like a woman’s hand. I start thinking about how all relations to this body are like a relationship with a woman, one that a woman has with her body. You think of this as my hand stretches out into this infinite distance that I was taught to look at and consider yourself apart from. Your hand (our hand). My hand there and growing old by the minute. I steady myself, my breath, I realize that I have been gasping, “Had I been running?” I ask myself from a voice behind me only to see myself there, standing on the grass only a few feet away. Again, between places, without words, without place, standing in front of me. My hand away from the tree and you are no longer bracing yourself. The perspective changes, the perspectives change, the tree turns around us, bends around me, you bend down slowly before you see me. You’re studying your hand against the grass, how whether or not it fits there, how it feels there. Seeing myself arriving, you don’t know where I came from, where I had been, and for some reason, I need to believe that I can forget. Resting on a tree with a difficulty known to be in the breathing, gasping, as I was just moments before, I ask you a question, “William, have you been running?” I do not listen to myself, seeing myself in front of me resting on that tree so once near to me, I stand up, reach my hand out to you. I look at myself. I ask, “Where have you been?”

***

Scratching the back of his head she asks, “Is it finished?”

“I don’t know.” He stares back at the monitor. “Does it look finished?”
She kneels besides us, scrolls up and down the screen. Reading off the monitor, her mouth opens and closes silently over the words. Nearing the end of what he has written, she places her hand atop his shoulder. A sign of affection, or to get a better hold of our self, he doesn’t know. She finishes reading, pauses. Then we shrug. “I don’t know. Maybe. I can’t see where you can go after this.”

We looks at her. “I have a feeling I should apologize.”

She stands, makes a perplexed face, all screwed up and far fetched. “Why is that?”

“I tried to be you for a while.”

She looks back at the monitor, fiddles with your glasses, bends closer to it. Scrolls around. Maybe she had missed it, maybe it was further back than where she had picked up from. But then you remember it from the day before, stop looking, straightens her back again. “What do you have to apologize: for trying to use me, or for lying about that you could ever understand me?”

“I don’t know. For both. For the fact that I’ll never be able to speak with your words.” You fold his arms across his chest, he stares at the screen.

“That this business of writing keeps me away from you, from us,” You look up at me, find our face looking down at him, see the reflection of his words in our glasses. “The things that we need to do to get through this. The day most of all. I think the days are too short here.”

“I know,” you take two steps away from him, then turn around, finger to our lips. “It’s been a while since you’ve written about us.” She stops. “Not us,” Corrects herself, “you know what I mean.” We sigh, “It’s been awhile since I saw myself in print.”

“That’s the trouble with it.” Stare back at it, at you. “It’s not an easy thing. I mean the expectation for it is always there, page after page, this wanting to be real, to step outside of itself, out of its bounds… But I don’t know.” Sitting forward, you add, “I don’t even think it can happen. Not like this.”

“No.” We end, “Not like this.”

-*-

At the end and I need to, if anything, address you formally. I wonder what you will make of this: confession, memoir, fragments, story (or stories), failure or a successful failing? I don’t know where can I go from here, or what to make of this. I think the questions are one and the same, but they might be different for you. Everything that has been written, in here at least, is not true. However, I feel that if I had written any differently it would have been a lie. I have tried to capture certain events and instances in writing that appear here differently than the manner in which they could have happened. If you find that the text has failed, or that it has failed you, keep in mind that the uselessness, or futility of words lie not in language, but in me. Of course, I understand that every reading of this will produce another reading: people change, I will change, so will you. It is inevitable, like death. Which is odd that death should bring itself into this relationship, with writing; that death should suddenly stand between us like this, as if the paper and the circumstances weren’t enough. As if writing and reading and our meaning weren’t enough. I had wanted to make one thing clear, in writing this and it was something about writing, about the writing of this itself, but I won’t go any further; to “tell it to you.” Any explanation on my part ruins whatever meaning this might have had for you: something would be stolen away from you, and I am not a thief of meaning.

didn’t she put it here didn’t she put it here and said didn’t she try it on for size and put it in front of you to see and said didn’t she say that she was putting it on for you and you said that she was putting you on didn’t she say didn’t she put it on in front of you and asked you what you thought of it didn’t you say then didn’t she say she would put it on for you when it’d rain and you said you’re putting me on didn’t she put it here in front of you and you had nothing to say about it and she said didn’t she put it in front of your mouth when you asked and she said didn’t she put it on in this room when you weren’t looking and she told you to look and you said look at what and she stepped in front of you and you had nothing to say did she mean it when she said she was only trying to put you on for size or was that when she had said?

(excuse this)
so long for me
to write,
“next time,
…a poem
or something.”
down
again
happier than i have
ever been
in darkness
with nothing
to reach out
but trying
to swallow me
down beneath the surface
this blanket
that covers
many places
left (or right)
to hide
from this
blunt.
i’m a little nervous
for the same reasons
you were pregnant
with an early grave.
i don’t seem to drown
from this beer
no matter how hard i try
the icy definitions
like i wished it upon myself
someone living
in my body
i can describe it to you
but it’s indescribable
pain.
i realize the short time passed
was rather long. “i promise,”
but that’s what we do.
you are here
by no choice
you have to be
as much as you hate
yourself
& the choices
they offer you
make your own
out of those
that are not
their principles
they don’t care
beyond the reflection
of this hell
of your own
meanings
camus says,
“increase your freedom”
we know we can
believe in no one.
and (to) think
my eyes
are closed
but have been open
reflecting sounds
(as) if they were
real
there are no real meanings
so it is useless
it whispers
in my ear,
“not much longer now”
i’m feeling pretty
within moments
you’ll see it
as a lie.
we live
by lying.
each day
we lie
by “we live
by lying.”
we can bring
our own lives
into nothing
or meaning.
you just have to say,
“fuck them”