50%

Even crucial. Chicano children screaming and a jellyfish, a starfish under the pier which is where we spend New Year's Eve—and the next year in the living room bouncing on the sofa as the ball dropped because something had to happen to break the world apart. Outside, the oak is shedding limbs, one for each storm, or high trauma. They dangle, stuck on the lacework of the living, and the trains shake them deader than their already sawdust. The acorns pop on sidewalks, a meal yellow, a golden like squash and the season. My pockets are mostly empty. The trains go by. Inside, my house is dust and airless. I live in it. Perpetually wounded or waiting for the blow. No pinnacle of nerves and needles, the push, the staring, the outside. Which, no was, means no recovery, no brave moment forward into bright futures. The beaches dwindling at noon, the slippery rocks, the cowry shell deep in the ell of weed and rock and water. How do people do this and not break all of their teeth, gnashing? How do they know that it is not always silent spaces and the hum of moment. In the summer again the mountains catch fire and I who live in the flat lands will watch rivers flow forward and back. I will stand on one foot in the living room, play music loudly, call people on the telephone. The trains go by—coal, hydrogen peroxide, chickens to feed the chicken trucks on the road to the Bay—they haze the street behind them—feathers, scales, the dust of many bodies moving at once without volition or will. To the left, getting off the bridge in Kent Island, an estuary, man-made, where swans nest.

25%

Outside, the oak is shedding limbs, one for each storm, or high trauma. They dangle, stuck on the lacework of the living, and the trains shake them deader than their already sawdust. The acorns pop on sidewalks, a meal yellow, a golden like squash and the season. My pockets are mostly empty. The trains go by. Inside, my house is dust and airless. I live in it. Perpetually wounded or waiting for the blow. Which, no was, means no recovery, no brave moment forward into bright futures. The beaches dwindling at noon, the slippery rocks, the cowry shell deep in the ell of weed and rock and water. How do people do this and not break all of their teeth, gnashing? I will stand on one foot in the living room, play music loudly, call people on the telephone.

5%

Which, no was, means no recovery, no brave moment forward into bright futures. I will stand on one foot in the living room, play music loudly, call people on the telephone.

____

What happened was I wrote a really long piece that I thought was about one thing—a sort of fuzzy, muddled thing, but one thing nonetheless. Then I discovered my computer's auto summary feature and asked the computer what it thought my piece was about. The above is what the computer thinks I tried to say at 50, 25 and 5% of the original. It is better than what I thought I was trying to say, and I'm not sure how to take that.

"Teach the computer Phenomonology."
— Dark Star