Pretend these are the rules
I like it best when the window is a mirror I’ve opened slightly, so it reflects before dawn the back of my computer and the top of my kaleidoscope, and I look up from the keys, not at myself but where my fingers are sending letters I’ve invited to be words, and where my eye has rested against color, all of this printed to the last of the night, as if it’s you and we’re talking about how things appear, and to prove it, one of us says, here they are, appearing that way, while the other says, here comes morning with its eraser of light. While all of this is going on, my shoulders are stiff from the batting cage. It’s like being a stapler after years of wanting that, how my upper body seems to pinch down and asks me to lower my arms as the light arrives and I see now there’s fog again, curtaining I feel for the sake of the curtain, not the behind, the reveal that will come when I’m still trying to decide how they are in any way my arms. The notion of possessing should be interrogated by our cop shows, until I break down in the little room with its table and chairs, with its hope of violence, and admit I cannot summarize myself without referring to the boot-mark of the drunken painter, who was going to burn the canvas until he noticed the accident of walking on it had put a shape in the field that marshalled the grass to defend its existence against the intruder. God, if someone said, you can’t mention painting ever again, I’d go to the market with one tongue behind my back. There: the top of the mountain has arrived, things are falling apart into the familiar nostalgia of how good meaning feels when it’s what you tell yourself you want most of all, and in that moment, it’s there to be had in the shape of a door knob you’ve turned so many times, the shine is gone, leaving a dull opening into a room of similar odds. If that was half of our architecture, and at its limits we were sewn to a bag with a wolverine inside, or this extreme comfort of sense had to strike at least once a day a match in a room full of gas, there would be a bright howling more often than is the case. What would be gained by that, I don’t know, but I enjoy the sense that each second is both fierce in its defense of itself and indifferent to being petted by our recognition, like a knife happy to cut your throat or your apple, depending.