obviously

hating life is an incomprehensibly large number like the diameter of the sun or the age of the sun or the temperature of the sun or anything at all concerning the sun really

and

the longest parade is where the head comes around & meets the tail & comes after the tail

the longest parade is two people facing each other

you said that it made you hate life

i said that ha ha yes it made me hate myself too

you said is something wrong

i said no

hating life seems impossible

hating life is an incomprehensibly large number

i said i hate myself but the best way to love yourself is to fall off a bike going really fast onto the ground and not get hurt at all because of reflexes

or i mean

the best way to love yourself is in the backyard but to not run away when the family dog is covered of a sudden in hornets

if you fell asleep at the window and woke up in the bright yellow green outside the window would you think that you fell out of the window or would you not think about it very much or at all?

you said it was the western canon and that you did not like the western canon and that the western canon made you hate life

i asked if the western canon is a kind of parade and you said yes the longest parade

longer than the parade which proceeds from the inconceivably hot center of the earth into the inconceivably hotter center of the sun

yes the longest parade which like the sun cannot be looked at except only in very high speed instants or thru the smallest openings like the openings thru which light now points out from the family dog at all corners of a cover of hornets

which projects like a star chart on the side of the house

loving yourself is a constellation which turns out is an airplane and this excites you more

loving yourself is an unutterable complex of rotations occurring at very high speeds

and hating yourself is an unutterable complex of rotations occurring at very high speeds

well

and are you going to bed i guess and is something wrong because you're not going to bed and

no i just fell out of my

bed

and the woman at the counter streaked a tremoring fluorescent off the laminate of my driver's license — but how many days seem to stain my face now?

at 17 when in west springfield we lost the car, swallowed it up in midnight entire (too high to cut from cloth the landmarks, everything changed already, razed & remade, by our second circuit; and was that my cousin in the bowling alley?), turned on sidewalks under street lamps of sodium vapor, the bomber jacket with a patch tacked to it he pointed at — an eagle, an arrow, a radio headset — then thru the grates of his teeth, swept out thick of a seal brown mustache, "not a day over thirteen" — thus the recipient of a private wire not even intended for broadcast

at 21 the man in the lot in the broad sun with everything he owned, laughing at the boy of fifteen, appeared here, surely absent elsewhere

a divergence, an acceleration: dull shell of the seed of a fable

shown now, a glare, a black light, a tentative concession to tests of authenticity. . . then, finally, resolution amongst the symbols and how remarkable!

'so we have the same birthday!', yes i said to her

'just a different year', yes she laughed

'just a lot of years, a lot a lot of years'

and coffee grounds & whiskey for the balance

yes a fable: 'the old woman & boy split coffee grounds & whiskey at the counter of a rite-aid and became then the same age exactly'

(and which age? the variants abound)

then told to children stirred by numbers, children gauged by numbers, children trusting in the measure of things, in any of measure whatsoever of things — the mercury bulb or the bimetal strip, the meter or the league; the brush & its colors, tongue & its flavors:

every instrument a new sense testifying, a reduplication of the senses:

any part of a thing the surface of the thing, to the sense shaped for the thing:

a fable today, a pencil mark on the door frame

a look, a pointing, a pointing to nowhere so long it becomes remarkable, a point instated

& the point appointing: a date, a chore, a fable — light painted by the prism, light pouring from the cell, pulp strained, lumped punctuation