An Interior Presence

Against a mat of black sleep small blocks of time, in which one may be seen moving about, industrious and productive, small frames, with which and within which much may be deemed done with alacrity, accomplished, a mosaic of small wonders almost directly observable like graves in a field of quartz, or jewels in a sock in a bale of rags, all not to say cramped but expansive, activity bordered by what may be assumed to be unconscious planning for focus and the recruitment of minutes, the blandishment of sleep that begets the disposable apparatus of function, function being the cells, the dendrites, bubbles in ancient ice, fleshcurve in river bank sand, all bearing the light of discovered resourcefulness, where rest is the curse of motion, rest required if any knowing is to be viewed, viewed as assembled bits of binder and bridging, with preparation wholly unknown and not to be kept or observed but essential, a lattice of enablements so austere as to be elegant, like peacocks ennobling the morning dead with the regalia of folded eyes, all a tempting request for a place out of time in which, looking in, such looking and the doing of it, resolves the eye.

Thwarted

I was wrestling with a frogwoman, saying No under the grasping sheets, but she was all over me in a gelid, muscular wriggling. And, of course, there was no speaking—just a billow of throat skin pressing my face and sucker-feet pumping at my legs so fast and hard I woke up and woke her up, too. "You wish," she sneered in the dark, chopping covers beneath her for a barrier.

The Ex-Husband

It’s raining hard. A man wearing thick-lensed glasses sits weeping in his car. He looks through fogged binoculars, through the spattered windshield, through a fourth-floor apartment's double-paned storm window, behind which is set a large aquarium. He can't see a damned thing.

The Burden Of Vigilance

One would have thought that the sheer volume of Supreme Court decisions would have been sufficient to stall the threat to civilization posed by the march toward ever more raucous displays of emotion in public places. This said, please note my promiscuous reticence to admonish when it comes to the subject of abject loneliness experienced at the cinema-loneliness not the least bit germane to the coruscation of images at hand, but rather a remorse brought to the fore by the presence of motes and smoky effluvia sifting upward through that dimension of film which is the beam before it strikes the screen. As if, somewhere within the speed of light, there is a room, within which all the ample depredations of the day are stored, along with a chair, and a watchman, the watchman being-ipso facto-that person who, in the cinema, is grossly aware of a dull place within the only definitive velocity. My burden no doubt delights those hungry for spectacle. But they are mere popcorns.

O'er The Ramparts

So beset am I—so taken aback by the voluminousness of the task before me—I can merely hold a sheaf of papers and drop my hands in my lap, demonstrating, I say demonstrating the torpor that resides in accumulations which find the mind a smear of white indisposed to the rash of letters and figures that make the eyes itch. My hands fall into my lap—fall as if to say There is the television set. As if to say you Could go to bed, but the sheet is just another white page. As if to say Sleep is carboniferous, sleep is the flocculent of life. As if to say I really did happen to glance at a shadowy glare cast up from my watch crystal in the midst of the city, and it was a forest, it was not there. As if to say I thought immediately I must write this—I must let go of the paper and write this in the high wind of dreams that make one list and speak badly of one's circumstance—that makes one bend and scrawl upon the spumescent tatters, with an elephantine pencil and a scowl.