Surface. Signal. Structure.
Also when they shall be afraid of that which is high, and fears shall be in the way, and the almond tree shall flourish, and the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail: because man goeth to his long home, and the mourners go about the streets." Ecclesiastes 12:5, The King James Bible … Continue reading His Long Home
“What we call reason is often nothing but custom.” Michel de Montaigne, Essays I – Keeping an Eye – Easter – Allegro When the Morans decided to install the cameras it was not because of anything that had happened so much as because of the sense that things might begin happening if they did not.… Continue reading The Gentle Collapsing
The Ninth Iteration “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more.” Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science The Cell No one remembered being brought in. This was not discovered all at once, nor announced, nor confirmed by any authority. It emerged… Continue reading The Burdens of Ordinary Kindness
Butcher “Are you still to learn that the end and perfection of our victories is to avoid the vices and infirmities of those whom we subdue?" Plutarch, Parallel Lives I EVERY MORNING AT ELEVEN the butcher tossed the expired and discolored meats into the bone-can. When the can filled to the brim, he wheeled… Continue reading Hard Labour for Hard Men
I The light had not yet decided what it was going to be. The room held. He lay still without listening for anything in particular, until the faint ache in his calves reached coherence, and the body took that as permission. The floor was cool. The air carried prior use. He dressed without sequence because… Continue reading Fathers and Sons
“Each of us is responsible for everyone else, in everything.” Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov I Caleb heard the sirens before he thought of them as sirens. They entered his apartment by pressure rather than by sound, finding the seams of the building and worrying them open. At first he did not move. The sound… Continue reading The Soft Machines
“What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.” Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus I DIDN’T WAKE UP. I came back on. Heat first. Then the noise. Then Denisha made a sound that wasn’t shaped yet. It came out of her throat wrong, like the air didn’t know what to do with it.… Continue reading Still Two-Thirty-One
“I went on.” Samuel Beckett, Molloy I WALK MOST DAYS because the days allow it. I wake early, not with urgency but with the sense that the body has already begun without consulting me. The room is pale. Quiet enough to hold. I lie still until the ache in my calves makes itself known. When… Continue reading New Grass
"It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those that have lost it." Somerset Vaughan, Of Human Bondage I THERE WAS A RED-BRICK HOUSE in Riverdale the neighbourhood kids relished visiting because there were greater freedoms to be found there than in any other household on either side of the railroad tracks… Continue reading The Crystal Furnace
The New Poetics 