fourth

its never going to snow around here. december 16th and no sign yet. its been almost exactly two years, shows what can happen in two years. so i'm wondering how a feeling can stay but all actions around it can stop. how emotions can run in such strong threads that without touching them they can float to the surface and lead the way, especially if that way has no set course. i'm wondering how, without looking at these strings, you can still know that they are true even when whole lives have been built without consideration of them, opposite them. when all the bull shit is torn down, what is left are a few hurt feelings, perhaps something irreparable, and those beginning, deconstructible stings. so he sits across from me and hes crying. he can't stop crying he so exhausted - because i'm sad and hes done it. and yes he has, but its hopeless. who can be that empathetic anyway? who can embody such grey that, even though what should be is continually evidenced and continually undetermined, he holds those strings in his hands, pays homage to them with both hands over his eyes, while he lives other ideals so crossed and tangled that all we can do is look at the past but not be it. so i don't know, it hasn't snowed yet this year and there is no potential for it building. the air isn't electric, nothing is on the cusp. we know it will come but it doesn't matter when. its just one incomprehensible upon another, and sometimes there isn't a motif to be learned of it all, sometimes there isn't a reason. sometimes there's just shit to sort through. and so i wonder if betrayal has to come with this sort of thing. whether is it an inevitable. because it seems like, even though everything was so well calculated, so empathetically worked, that i would be lucky, if not presumptuous, to assume such an easy heart break again.

global warming

its never going to be winter around here. its unbearable. the potential piles up stacking blocks a nervous game of jenga and i wear t-shirts outside at night. it snowed once two days ago. the first snow. it melted by noon. the great Release taunts but does not come. i keep taking off clothes, one at a time as much as i can, and the threshold looms opaque. air flows through me into my lungs through filters, through organs, cell walls, in and out. out as carbon flavored. i'm at a pinnacle. no one knows it. i'm reaching, everything building. time flows through me into my lungs, no filters, through my spine and into something other than ground. this makes me extremely cold. not cold but the panic of cold. global warming must be a myth. warming is something caused by information overload. too many carbon molecules beating their magnetic fists against the light.

pattern of primes

an endless history of somethings within arms holding baskets brimming with wind. a something that appears forceful, filled with a power, often invisible, recognizable with its predictable and improbable containment. i want to be buried in snow. the purpose of this writing has shifted. i would like to be frank, to anyone that still reads. it is no longer an experiment. i've already concluded its result. the buzzing world of connection is, under some circumstances, disjoint. my funding has run dry and not only am i comfortable with the notion that hundreds of stomach aches can go by unnoticed, but that i wish them to go by unnoticed. that i require them to be. that this writing is for myself and my comfort, because comfort with the invisible force, so theoretically uncontainable, can be made into a discrete mass whose shape i internalize. the civil battle has been waging slowly and over months, built with a strength i could have never predicted -- and i have moved places, stood in poses and undergone maneuvers so complex that i find it difficult to see exactly where it was i once stood on this massive board of chess. the factoring of a large numbers, the pattern of primes. i have become the shape of my own one way function, and in the struggle of myself, i see that i am both winning and extinguished. i do not know how to deconstruct a bucket of wind, but i am better able to carry it in arms, confident and young, across time. in a representation of psychoanalytic world lines i see a deep portion that has caved in under equal parts pressure and the inexplicable. human interactions carry such collinearity that there is no hope to detangle the abstracted knot. the only hope is a perturbation theory, some approximation to a known problem. and, statistically, this is not only the best anyone can hope for, but in its refusal to fit into the confines of symbols, reality itself becomes no more complicated than the approximation to it. so the simplification is the thing on which i have been meditating. no longer an experiment, statistics and differential equations without solution, more and more so, are becoming my philosophy.

i find myself in cars, on busses, in transit, repeating the word 'love' for no reason at all. just the word, without any meaning and without any connection to a being or a place. love as an isolated sequence of letters exploding spontaneously like bubbles rising from the depths of a can of coke. i have never been more certain of nothing at all. i have never been more comfortable with its certainty.

cardboard

hands red with the sweet stick
of experience, flowery like pollen
touching bed sheets and buttons
as if to fertilize.

i've started to form an idea of memory
as it influences reality
and the time i spend in showers looking at walls
abstracts of reds, olive green
transparent. transparent. heavy.
unanswerable and completely forgettable.

there are periods when all i can see
is him or her there back then
that once place, remember it was dark?
nameless and cutout of cardboard
smelling of shapes i am wholly incapable of manifesting.

you handed them to me in abundance
incredible forms at which to marvel
and then let die.
i find myself disillusioned
by this unprovoked willingness to taste and let stale.

my father once in line for a bagel
flicks his finger into the soft of a
sticky bun

places the frosting on his tongue
then moves on as if
nothing ever happened.

now i would color my abstracts with browns, purples
your strawberry lips decomposed with
the smack of pavement.
quite literally bleeding into deeper
unexplainable rust.

now i would look with a half eye
at those poses you make
there in the periphery of this
ridiculous tether
and remember what you tasted like

salt and secrecy
midnight moss
like everything was going to be ok
even though nothing was
even though everything eventually will be.

now i pick cherries and
suck on their pits
up in trees
dogs running underneath.

i've more roots than a willow
one hundred years old,
i've leaves brown and turned under from the spring frost
or a deficiency of nitric oxide.

opinion among judges

seth the bookseller sits on the ledge of his downtown window smoking a cigarette. his shop is gutted. torn apart by boulder's general disinterest in the (somewhere thriving) subculture buzzing about antique collectable children's books. cardboard boxes disrupt the once certain walkways while he sits outside there, watching the other side of the street as he has for three years. his record is playing inside and he thinks about fantasy football. the league with the other pearl street booksellers on the block between 17th and 19th. how it made everything more bearable and how he will be empty without everything that he could not bear. he thinks about the era of mariocart and video baseball, about patti smith and the $130 book, and he tries not to think about what he will do next.

I have a photograph that hangs at the head of my bed. it is of a field. sandy grey soil cut with rows of crops. unidentifiable plant shoots resembling grass or miniature yuccas sit inches above the ground. their length spreads out towards the end of my bed as if perspective lines were objects that could be plucked from the photo and draped as a sheet. i imagine, sometimes, that i am lying down in that field. that i am born of that dirt. laid carefully in lines just inches above the ground. it calms me. i imagine this now. my window is open. and though this means spiders will crawl over my unaware sleeping body, perhaps biting at any resistance i might give, their eight foreign eyes and tiny thighs acting under instinct and nothing else -- an artifact of this consensus world -- at least right now, i can hear the rain.

library of babylon

i have acquired a collection of things i keep folded up, hidden in cases and envelopes. jiplock baggies. a vast network of precise distances. a labyrinth of neural pathways. i have categories, types, hues, spins, overlap. an organizational system of things i know and things i don't. i am creating an army. a Foundation. angstroms and angstroms of current amounting to the weight of about one paper clip. the weight of the internet. an endless expanse. my system is combinatorial, like the Library of Babylon. and as any geometric entity, its growth starts from naught but lays its leave across the floor in a progression of staggering quantity until its layering saturates the earth. he left me here. pushed my face into it until i collapsed, like cards, into yet another layer of moss. and now i have categories. filing shelves, labeled boxes ("progression", "emptiness", "things to look at"). the steps are clearer along these innumerable corridors. this is that which i need and that for which i have been thirsting. this battle. my army anticipates. battalions named "forgotten places". "ordered sets". "buried objects". "music in a warm darkness". ready for this civil war. i am terrified.

delicate situations

there is a wound in me which only fragile sequences can heal. a paper crane left in the windowsill of a condemned building, a carefully piled mound of dirt. these cannot be given explanation and cannot be touched with inquiry. there are no answers to be had of them. if let to be analyzed their delicacy would demolish with the weight of intent. such actions live only and exclusively for anonymous creation on the one end, and beautiful uncertainty on the other. this is a need. like air. the only cure for the unnamed melancholy that reaches its heavy vapor in and around my lungs. i have hours and days of contaminated alveoli. tired and heavy, their purification only achieved through the most delicate of things. we, like books, are strung of motifs. what, i ask from anyone who understands, is the significance? how can I name that which looms?