get up, look

there's tar in the cupboard, tar in the cracks, tar seeping up out of the ground, tar pooling under your head at night and caked on your face

can't you stop it

the world comes to you out of order and in frames and from overhead like stage lights

the world comes to you in frames and tar coursing through the frames connects the frames and everything looks like a shadow and tar covers everything

there's a light, look close

look close, and a microscopic figure fucks an access of light between the threads of the curtain and casts a shadow life-size upon the opaque air

the shadow inhales tar and dies

the shadow says

it's cool

don't worry

and the shadow dies

everything you touch turns into tar

light pours out of your head and casts a shadow from your face and the shadow is tar

the world is a shadow cast by the world

the world inhales you and you are tar and the world is shit

a microscopic figure says

the world is shit

and dies

and the curtain swells and the auditorium floods with tar and everybody fucks themselves into a shadow now

but the shadow of a light is still a light

and the tar courses on like shit in patient, methodical sewers

you sink in shit and shit sinks in tar

everything sinks into tar

everything that happens happens with enormous force & presence and this pushes further down into a pit of tar

and in the east you rose the sun and at noon you turned the sun into shit and in the west there is only tar

there is only tar

and light

light coming from the middle of you

which casts a shadow

from every other part of you

and the shadow says

the world is shit

the shadow says the world is in the inexhaustible complexity of everything & the ineludible dissimilarity of anything

the world is in patterns & the patterned failure of description & the fertility of unfathomable error

the world is in infinite evasions

the shadow says and the shadow kills you and you die

you fucked the world and the world fucked you and the world was enormous

and only tar remains

lit dimly, eerie, like a dream

my thoughts are rude,

my thoughts which drop quilts to the floor and lift false bottoms out of cedar drawers and won't show me,

my thoughts which are private and neglect their health, my thoughts which stay outdoors and eat only sap and shit pitch

yes, my thoughts are in a forest, one hundred of my thoughts are in a forest fucking and laughing

at me

and

at everything i think of them, at my thoughts of my thoughts, whom my thoughts exclude & toward whose approach my thoughts stomp their feet & urinate

in the bottom of the forest there is a clearing, from the hill i watch my thoughts which strip bark & bore into sapwood, my thoughts which suck with black lips at the perforations, with lips & noses & fingertips black from exposure, my thoughts which might conceal things in the trunks—

from the hill i watch my thoughts in the clearing dig holes and bury themselves or part of themselves, their thoughts of themselves, i think

a stream which feeds me and the encampment of my thoughts of my thoughts runs thru the forest and strange thoughts, strange thoughts of my thoughts which are pits concealed in the forest, leech thru the soil into the stream

later, powerful noises surround the forest from within the forest: ten thousand of my thoughts of my thoughts camping at the edge of the forest enter the forest and the forest rearranges to suit my thoughts, to hide my thoughts from my thoughts of my thoughts

or else, a fog hides the forest from me

or else, the forest is my thoughts of my thoughts and my thoughts cut them down to make a clearing and the trunks that are my thoughts of my thoughts crush my thoughts and my thoughts laugh and expire and leech into the soil

i can't see the forest and for a long time my thoughts of my thoughts make powerful noises in the forest and then my thoughts of my thoughts leave the forest, they leave the forest defeated and insensible and they leave and they exclude their thoughts, one hundred of their thoughts whom i welcome and who have no secrets and who watch themselves in the stream and wait, one hundred of the thoughts of my thoughts of my thoughts who wait in turn to replace me

when i am so tired i can't place sounds or time their silences or something

when someone talks their voice comes from all four walls at once

when i look away, my notebook and my pencil on my desk make very loud noises without moving

when i look away, a long time pulls from the spool and falls to the floor

my eyes are fixed to the spool by fat cords like belt drives

when i look at a thing, all its materials pull from the spool and fall to the floor

somehow i must turn my eyes to rewind them

i swear you look like someone you can't possibly be

are you ghosts, or will the ghosts become you when you get here

somehow i must conspire to arrange in symbols ghosts that will become you when you get here

my notebook and my pencil on my desk are very bright like searchlights and remain invisible

when someone talks their voice takes up all the light in the room for a moment

and falls onto the floor and falls thru the floor

then one eye turns backwards and one eye turns forward and one eye stares at you when you get here

i am waiting for you, you are out of sequence, i am waiting most of all for a pressure and a hair in rivulets from every access followed much later by your voice and bare shoulders

you are arranged in symbols and my symbols are fixed to your symbols by fat cords like tree limbs

when i am so tired you seem to be all at once

when i am so tired you seem to have never happened and to be about to happen and to be already happened

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