Surface. Signal. Structure.
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
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
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 roaring of lions, the howling of wolves, the raging of the stormy sea, and the destructive sword are portions of eternity too great for the eye of man.” William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell AFTER CUTTING THROUGH A SLICE OF KEY LIME PIE in some dime store diner last week, I turned… Continue reading American Rose
“No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.” Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter I UNDER THE SPREADING CHESTNUT TREE, they leaned into each other for warmth as the rain fell steadily around them. It was… Continue reading Cheaters
The New Poetics 