“a naked spectacle laid bare”
Joseph Guglielmi

Rough colors — nauseating rhythms. These sounds and visions. A passage in blue light toward a wall. Something unbearable. Something fixed and bursting — like shrapnel — or water sprayed over skin. Remainders of the sun in cords — against coterminous surfaces. I wait out boredom as I wait out the rain. A moment in a limpid winter sky. A resignation — resort to patience with unpronounced thoughts. A deaf world — this world — a world of voices that return more and more powerful. Where voices invade. Force support to leave you soft and cruel.

When I cross the street I enter a separate life. Sometimes a life used up. An inclined street shortens her arrival.
Little distances — vis-á-vis. Reassuring places. Hidden inside the nerve of the city — heat buzz electrical contours — an enormous revolt. Continuous silence within continuous violence. What explodes under your eyes — a multitude of beautiful crimes committed undetected.

This is not to say that I am unrecognizable. A man is helping a woman into a car — I do not know them. We share the city. The rain still falls and the newspapers are damp. We share the dampness.

When this afternoon in the streets. Grid and pulse. Hands clenched abruptly around the grip of the bar — the bus sways — rhythms finally. As one has. And then the glacial silence returns.

No more starting point.

“impotent handshakes”

A gesture to outdistance words — without defense and there is nothing to bring you back or to link yourself to. Only with vague and ridiculous intents — arms or legs or eyes — ridiculous impressions of names. Hand prints in watery concrete.

Isolated from the revolt: now the crowd. Slow movements work themselves into the cavity — thick air. Rain. This body stretched out over the wet grass. These eyelids open to the sky and pockets of clouds. A reflection of a pitted sidewalk or street. Or an image that is recalled without any attempt.

Walls bathed. Cutting. Yet still not quite having a body unrolled from the space of its tenderness. Sometimes the look of things allows for them to be. Emanates. Refuse force — head between legs. Face grounded in dark warmth. Retains a foreignness that is reached through a distracted glance — or what is envisioned falling asleep. Not moving.

To want the impossible —

what transpires.

Impossible sleep. My body already discovered by your words. Posters and her presence dissolve along the wall. To want a long nap — a nap in the sun. Away from the carved out water. The holes. Reflections in windows.

Spread out —

• • •

Visions — or capsized. Ousted from bed. Not returning as anticipated but following some new direction never predicted — a bodily impulse. A frantic pace or gestures across the field. Along avenues, taking words to there end. A song you heard from the neighbor’s window — the butcher boy. When seen from his cell.

What has transpired will never resolve. What has become by a force of will will disperse — some coagulating before dissolution. Who I was was not who I am. Measurements of mouth or cock or feet. Marks on the doorframe. Seamarks. When everything is siphoned into memory — a grammatical body — compressed.

— an originality of defect.

Each step. A hovering blue. Words as objects are collected — hulled together and released. Not without trace. Sheets still hold onto the moments she pressed herself into.

Something between loss — between one frame and the next. Musical resonance picked up by the eye. Reciting what he’s forgotten or overlooked — what’s never known. Loss never separates. Day to day infinity.

A foreshadow of morning. Fatigue becomes ones own. Manifests itself as self. She walks away from the window half asleep. Fog and mid-song the faint sound of a hive.