Even now there are fields of wheat How funny a field of wheat The hammer strikes and sends the whole thing forward Anything but figuring out a story Anything but a way to explain myself Before the second shot she was off Eat my dust the dust the yawn the midday mud I know what pushing feels like. I know the feeling in my gut, I know how to tell when the wind is changing directions. But I have no idea about pulling. The best way to clean them out is silence. The best answers are Yes. No. Be Patient. Beware of false friends. You will hear the good news soon. Wait for a letter. Oh. Spit in the eye. The slow circling, where the animals size each other up, and for an instance before judgment there is possibility that something has been confused. Who's the predator and who's prey. I like to walk one foot in front of the other. Next time I will draw my shoulders up higher. A round wheel at a mill and each spoke reads ‘face it.’ I hold myself to a scolding, sternly. You have to pour water. Still, I am too indecisive, and could not bring myself to have bought the calendar. Securing, another days expense of useless paper. Alone on the milk sea, papers tissues and crumbs, lying in the bath when most of the water has drained, hard boiled eggs, gazing over at your own shoulder, grocery shopping. The whole time i’m lazily steering, only adjusting the rudder to keep, in some general sense, “away”. It’s like this, because I'm never hungry and can’t sleep. The time just comes and goes. Everything is totally lactic, lapping pale water, basic. My spirit feels like the way whales decompose, rising gasses illustrative of the passing of the spirit, growing and threatening to blow the whole carcass apart. The breakdown never comes. Wave. wave. Frown at the body stains on the pillows and puckering scars accumulated, and yep, that's the most of it. This is maybe how most things break down, the trajectory of not’s and heirlooms that are too ratty to make it, have lost themselves to slightest disdain, only ever animated through the shrugging of shoulders. The drama of reversal not sparked, no mania blotting at marks and picking scabs. The normal laundry regiment is already it’s own game of strategy, separations, weekly speculations, bets. Stains come and go, not only disappearing into the wash, but appearing at random in soiled spots that were not present before the process began. It’s not for remembering, but for passing time, sending the troops out and getting them beat at the suds. Yes. Slowly and one foot at a time, the downbeat drummer boy, tired and dragging his feet sets the slow march, letting one baton drop on the tightened skin for a single tat and the time between the one hit and the next is a sequence: of a head on the verge of sleep rolling forward, jerking awake, and panicking his duty to the next note, tum. Despite the unreliable and perhaps shady premise for this type of beat, it somehow produces the perfect cadence for dragging feet forward, and in this way the sleepy drummer is indispensable to leading the ragged army home. If he’s not around the swelling returns, tumult. Crumb to boulder, cannonball. In a video a drifting car doing its loops resembled a tragically overweight balloon. The things that I must do look nothing like the things I trust myself to do without thinking, speeding. It’s the inside of a bachelor medic’s apartment, still a liquid world, where the bodily aches of daily life, knots at the top of the neck and concrete shoulders, only exchange shifts with the pain of stretches: sores at the bottom of the stomach and weakness behind the knees. Forgetting to go to the store. Experimentally, I took out the soap I found in the drawer of my deceased mentor's boudoir that I had mandated the use of on the day of my marriage and washed myself. The soap is 8% less of it’s mint volume, shedding its fatty pearls, rid of it’s original parchment paper gleaning wax texture. She received many gifts of hand lotions and soaps and teas yearly as symbols of gratitude on behalf of the patience shown in the role of her occupation. It was nice and unceremonious of a shower. More than ever an unshakable hatred for. Lined the bottom of the experience, and now the memory of the experience. And the hatred for, the sickness of, the malaise of the unchanginess in, I wrapped the soap back up in its paper but the thing was ruined, the surface like the cakey and glistening wet skin of a baby. Everything this was. Stop. My vision is just worn, finding a new degraded status, humbling it to the ranks of smell and taste. The only trick left up its sleeve is its special ability of isolation- just this word now, read it: pause. There is just too much work to be done here. Here, just now. This curious woman with pursed lips pulled a new trick out of the box today. Impersonally, striving to see more clearly though the window of, for new ways to reach in or tweak, to further studies of restorative cognitive therapies. She placed one of her chubby fingers in front of me, pointed upwards, and paused like an inquisitive dog trainer. She says the words finely, the first monday of each month that year: “Now I want you to follow me with your eyes.” Her point wove back and forth. The wind breaking off her finger met my eyes like sandpaper. It split something, something like a table knife. Each moment, instance exactly when her course doubles back and changes directions, how they seem to double in time, bouncing me off some invisible edge and back again, knocking my head and returning me to the inverse lap. It’s through this tracking that something else will bloom forward. The shadowed past of sports analysis footage, the figures of the past that the present leaves behind as it streaks forward in time. It is exactly past this present presence that some second idea begins to peer out. By distracting the hunter. Pause. I couldn’t tell if the pain was coming from my head or my eyes, if the tears were of emotional pain or physical strain of staring so intently, thinking I had needed to see. Later, on the bus ride home, the camera panned back and to the left, revealing the beige walls of her office and laminate cabinetry. Speaking to the news anchor, she said “We call it ‘rescripting the images.’ You keep the knowledge. You lose the emotional reaction.” The way people write about memory really blows me. She shows up to a theme song for a few weeks, embodied experience, feeling it and parallelism. A metronomic pace matching. A month later, six months later the joke appears. I don’t know why but it always does. Hindsigh. It was another over-investment in alignment, the lyrics came back to bite her in the ass, always to the tune of I-didn’t-know-then-I-know-now. Still, the books are full of it. Literary awards handed out to people who carve out the longest lines on passing smells and pastries and glares of light on glass cases in old grocery stores. Your subject is consecration. Listen, my shit is lossy. Bailing split boat with a bucket of holes. This is how we produce the grand artifacts of our times: he-never-loved-me-anyways, it-was-my-best-apartment-yet-and-i-never-should-have-left, it-was-by-far-the-worst-new-years. We advertise what suits us, our separations of oil and water. Sometimes it comes down to waving away flies. Four, five times a week. Returning to the same problem and repeating the same lines, along conversations and in private. There’s some things you just can’t be doing, sliding down walls is one of them, explaining everything is another- but these may be the two extremes of the same kind. The truth might only exist in the unspoken, what gets avoided between two people with ideas about sharing the future. Sitting in the orchestra pit as a saccharine song with the lovely singing rears its head again, a second formulation of the same niceness and rightnes. A song sung as one sings to sound meritorious and right. The bow tips over the cupped hand of the strings along the bass, and the woman's voice, with the quality of a lightly toasted piece of thickly sliced bread, floats out a line from the life of a cajun man with shoe soles as thin as crepes. Pleasantly relayed, a complete and well rounded nothing. The theater undergoes a sure invisible explosion to the duos performance of vacant songs uniquely characteristic of nothing but their duration, and then their sequence, that there was one song after the next. The audience, weary and irritable, all individually set out on mental paths away from the central happening. In such a captivity, to do lists, anxieties, neurotic rhythms, are all so much more sweetened as unconscious liberties of mental freedoms, away. A highschool chemistry teacher who reportedly attracted a cult following among certain students of his for his offbeatness and pearls of wisdom would offer to drive me home from the bus stop whenever he’d intercepted my waiting. Driving along, he’d often make the remark, that the best way to address the issue of pollution and waste, on the global level, was to dump your trash directly in the middle of the street. Just beyond this statement laid his rationale, which he would subsequently explain. That the overabundance of waste could only be taken for true stock if it was unavoidably visible. I used to have no problem killing bugs with my bare hands. I was nearly prideful that there was no fear separating me from the act. Lately I find I just can’t do it anymore. I don't know what has changed. One time before it all happened I was so mad at you. Because I’d sent you that video, of a farmer trying to comfort a rabbit dying from some injury or disease. And I did honestly think it was sweet. I was moved by the stakes of the situation, the display of kindness, the involvement, the gesture, these were all the tools of universality, crystal legibility on display. And you said clearly: That rabbit has no concept of what’s going on. That rabbit is dying, that rabbit is in it’s final moments, is experiencing the terror of a large and strange animal taking attention in it, that there could be no real comfort there. I was so offended, because I had wanted for you to be like the farmer, while I would be the rabbit. This was also, clearly, a mistake. My friend and I convey our sadness over the widespread dismissal of violence and tribalism but neither of us detail our particular bloodlusts. The specifics of the topic are somehow erotic and private. We describe to each other being ejected from our longstanding religious convictions that we were placed in the world, each in our particular location, to accept. These relationships feel as if they are on the other end of a long plank, only to be pointed at as a past facet of identity. I came from there, but it's a bit too precarious for my tastes now. Like the diagram of any viewing device, the triangle that extends to reveal the virtual until it’s an acceptable version of the real, unquestionably- The in-ness of these conditions render the world as only extending outward from your own sense of self. Your own construction of reality based on the interpretations of your perception. Some people gamble. There was a whole summer I was walking around deluded, thinking that the whole world really was an extension of my will. Everything I ever wanted has come true, for better or for worse, worse meaning the hidden desire for a death, better meaning money. This became a problem for two reasons. Anything actual, yet outside of my will became a sublimated, locked away desire that I had to face and address. And then, of all the bad in the world, could it all become erased if I merely willed it enough? But surely then, its continued persistence meant that all the evil of the world was my secret allegiance. I began smiling at strangers on the train and praying for them. I wanted to prove myself wrong. This all ended in the kitchen of a coworker who I was paying a visit- I thought surely for dinner, but no. She was in training to become a veterinarian, and had just moved to the apartment directly across the way from mine. Her interim dinner table were multiple wired dog crates with planks of wood from discarded police barriers laid across by her fiancee, completely shrouded by red and white checkered tablecloths, as they waited for her heirloom oak furnishings to be shipped in from New Hampshire. It was impossible to disguise the trajectory of my spiral, as the premise had been following me for days, then weeks, the thoughts floated to me as though my head were under a sort of static. I did not think twice in telling her what was on my mind, because I had no other thoughts to present. I do not remember her reaction, other than that it was more gracious than I ever could have managed, her being delegated to a member of meat and physics under such a proposed worldview. She started a sentence with, “Ok, so if you really do control the world with your will..” The act of speaking the idea into the real world, dedicating it to words and giving it an audience was enough to kill it instantly. The words formed profanely as they were spoken, if only by the fact that they were being spoken at all. Clearly the whole thing was ridiculous. I left humiliated. I don’t remember that we breached another conversation topic at all. Sometimes she still calls me up, and we talk about her boyfriends. For the second time in a row, I filed the thought away for future argument and self counsel. There, in the break room at the call center, I note my moral counterpoint. Not all numbness is unpleasant. For example, running a bug bite under hot water. At home, a glass in the sink and leaving it for hours, time folding over shards in the uncertainty of how to treat it, inability. I say, to no one in particular: But there are some things I need to draw out of myself. There are some things I need to keep close like a hooked fish, real to the puncture in the lip or cheek, the pulling sensation, being reeled forward through torrents, out of virtuality. It is a preservation technique. When I see myself letting go, I feel like an insurance cheat, because it takes no power at all. Most things disappear downstream. I’ll walk back and forth by the sink, mainly ignoring things. The largest shards of glass are always the easiest ones to pick up. The smaller and imperceptible breaks are a joy to catch. Today while I was in the shower someone kept ringing the doorbell. Truly relentless dinging. Thinking it was the landlord coming over unannounced, I kept yelling ‘one minute’, fuzzy sweatpants on over wet skin. When I opened the door it was not my landlord, but two Chineese Jehovah witness recruiters. They seemed not to expect me as much as I was not expecting them. They expressed they thought I would be Chineese too, but gave me their flier just the same. For some reason, they seemed incredibly embarrassed. The two of us were sitting at the beach on a bright skied and clear summer day. We were drinking beers. Though I never found I needed it, I had bought sunscreen on my way to the beach at her request, and we marveled at the way the lotion dispensed into the porcelain palm of her hand in a perfect and uninterrupted marbled twirling caduceus pattern. The last time we had met up, we had just bought expensive matching underwear as an act of dedication to our youth and loveliness. We had each discarded an old romance and wanted to move on into the future, we decided that the underwear would be a symbol of our virility and a token of luck. She stretched out her long spine, with her arms reaching wide out in both directions. We talked then in the way we always had, sharing the aphoristic world views built from relationships, slowly circling in on the specificity of any one event, but never disclosing it immediately, or never making it the point of our conversation, despite the fact that such an event was the explicit rupture from which all our discussions would seep. We nearly ever only spoke in that way, delivering ideals to each other or not at all. Despite only ever sharing lunch breaks together and having no larger involvement in each other's lives we seemingly had still managed to breach and discuss the topics of our deep pains, our moments of relapse, betrayal, our false optimisms. We depended on each other for the instance of articulation, the love of speaking florally about despair to an audience that would pardon us of self righteousness. The funny space where generalizations are also philosophy, supposed refinements of experience into a working code of behaviors. She stretched out her long spine, with her arms reaching wide out in both directions. I remember a decisive sentiment, the topic was trust. It was delivered with a sympathetic voice, nearly wavering, with a sincere insistence that often pairs off with tearing eyes: Can’t you imagine the first ever sacred instance between a patient and a surgeon, where the surgeon had to look the suffering victim in the eyes, and said “you’re going to have to trust me and let me try something here”. From the bottom strands of my hair to the skin thats hardened on the bottom of my feet, from the first letter of the word truth to the love spent at the bedsides of the sick, the family tree assignments conducted in middle school to the shame of being different, the historical scaling between myself and the images of my ancestors, fascinations with the powered visibility offered through medical diagrams to the horrors remembered on the behalf of crimes committed against truly oppressed, there is no history where the history of medicine is not also the history of torture. The speech bubbles from my mouth, the only thing people truly want is to live in peace, any offense towards this is an offense towards people. Then I walk off tense in my boots, ready to spring as an overeager medic. Well, what about martyrdom. I won’t let you die without me. It is that same strain of power, that childhood submission, the sacrifice of self, my hand in your guts, appealing to the highest power across the gameboard, death, I study the plays to get the one up on the strongest hand, like any good loser. This to familiarity. A calendar with monthly quotes. The butcher won’t even accept this level of unprofessionalism. From reality, memory to history. Down the funnel. There is the generational divide, the drawing of the line, say goodbye and go. When I put my hand to the back of your head, I am not behind your thoughts. The things that happen are similarly virtual, everything moves towards your peripheral. With the turn of the wheel, the pain, the sting of the pain, and then its narrativization- it was something you had coming, it was karmic. Distilling your crisis. The moral of the story- Well, I just wanted to tell someone. Myths are stories to be told over and over and over again. Myths are cautionary tales. Myths are what we tell ourselves to remember who we are. You know where to return to get what you need. Stop touching yourself. I want to give myself a new kind of blindness. You’ve abused your swelling orchestra for the last time. I want to rely on a sense of action. I want to see echos like contact- trace diagrams. I won't be swayed by stagnant beauty. The preacher of love is the strictest lover. The preacher of change has never budged an inch. This is a tool for differentiating between mercy and laze, a grave perspective, seeing stone. Come and see my one thousand crossed arms, final stands laid out like a naval graveyard. Each elbow is a compass and each anchor flag faced fear. When she told me the bugs eat dust, I smiled at my surplus. I was guided to the table where my classmates were already seated. French curves were scattered around the table, some a mint green color, all transparent, only ever slightly varying in flourish. I sat down in an empty stool with my mechanical pencil, and picked up a french curve. I could tell immediately that it would snap beyond a slight bend. I extended the led of my pencil and began to trace the form onto a large collective roll of paper draped across the table. I loved the form, the nose of it, the curling tip. I loved the rounded windedness of it, and I was happy to be given such a thing, the mere utility being replication, trusted with something already proven, keys to the house. This must be history. I only slightly crossed back over the beginning of my line when I removed the stencil. I hated it. The drawing I was left with carried none of the lightness of the original form, somehow it looked fatter and graceless, overly swollen and clunky despite my simplest intentions. Some feeling grew inside me as I looked around the table and didn’t find a rejection in anyone's face. Repeated it once and same result, a poor replica of the perfect object. Whether it be an issue of geometry or simplification. What was the point. I snuck a french curve into my bag. I brought it home with me and took it to the backyard. I jumped on it, but it would not snap until I stepped on one end and wedged the top of my shoe under the other side. I buried it under a pile of damp leaves. In the coming months I would be sent home with a project from the same class over winter break. The teacher was disturbed I had failed to finish a self portrait painting. She could not assign me a grade until the painting was complete. She called my mother over the phone and told her to watch me. I had painted through the cardboard with my dissatisfaction. The surface of the board was mangled and rough. In the middle of my face was a hole. My mother stood over me and said, “Just finish it.” I’m wondering if anyone else has this problem, that anytime you have a painting in your apartment and you have a bug problem in your apartment, and you need to find where the bugs are coming from most of the time you can find the bugs are coming from the painting. You have to look behind the painting and theres all these bugs nested up there in the back of the painting. It’s happened two times to me now and I’m wondering how people who own paintings deal with this problem. How do you keep the bugs out of a painting.