matter ===> phase

we are picking thru broken glass on the bathroom tiles, which are a grid and a map, a strange projection, that's what's happened hasn't it, the once achingly round now dropped & flattened for our analysis, only it is hard to read, we are cutting our fingers twice in one place, once somewhere else, but the markings are like press-pins, like mosquitos caught well-fed and too slow, we are clearing a space and charting passage, moving forward and thankful the cries of what's left behind & passed over are faint against the fabric rounded on our knees, safe in their undrawn borders, calm in our mechanical refinement, on the carpet now, inventing perhaps the cotton gin, collecting everything on sheafs of tissues like a screen, like or very possibly actually coffee filters, we reached for anything and it obliged and later, balled & crumpled, rang like very small and misshapen and unlovable bells -- and always against these graded images & dim observation our one clear thought is that this all looks so much like ice

we could stop, stand, forget our structured self-preservation: given time the glass would like ice give up too, disappear, would buckle at its lattices, would melt and evaporate and be breathed into our lungs and cast down innumerable narrowing arteries, thoroughly and forever vanished

and isn't the analogy true enough? glass ignored and stepped over and on long enough and ground back into quartz and secreted in the pores and the creases and the gaps between and among and constituting everything, isn't that similar enough, identical in fact, the same process exactly perfectly the same the same the same

of course we will be long past walking then -- these lacerations, no doctor, it is frostbite, we will tell the doctors, our rooms were too cold! we hadn't counted on that, we will laugh at ourselves and put our doctors at ease, the ice could not melt! domestic frostbite, yes it is rare, but our rooms were too cold!

and covered in ice!

we are breaking so many glasses now. each glass broken is scooped into the next, we turn the ice musically in our tumblers, our drinks are perpetually chilled. we have fixed the heat in our rooms, they are very hot now, we are always in need of refreshment. we are drinking deeply from our glasses perpetually chilled, collecting the bright curling ice from our floor, filling our tub brightly, the shifting buoyant glass really sounds against itself just like ice floes cracking! we are sinking deeply into our ice bathes, we are really really refreshed

so much like ice!

we are passing from here to somewhere else. we are returning.

these thoughts seem very dangerous to us; just what did we break on the uneven, the improperly squared linoleum tile? a coffee pot? just the glass. the harness sits on the counter, grasping, specific but able also it seems to fit to a limitless arrangement of things. a tool for sculpting we think. we are lost in our thoughts. our thoughts are sublimating, if that is possible. the tentative emerging volumes of our thoughts, our sculpted reductions and evidences, they are changing directly into airy nothings, vapors. what were we thinking? we are vacuuming, we have stuck in our heads its high crooning song, we are noting with satisfaction the grit sounding in its brushes. what was it we broke? all the signs are vanished, washed over, blown away. we can't remember.

feels like my life has been spent protecting something

i don't want

and can't lose

like crop dusting a well-groomed field of weeds

everyday

until the ground is thoroughly toxic

like breaking into empty apartments

and reversing the peephole

like taking pictures of my hands and my knees and the back of my neck

and uploading them to social networking sites

with the privacy settings

that mean

no one can see them

ill-overheard

one am, noise of something spreading in the hallway

the run of carpet in my peephole is invisible beneath wadded newspaper, debris

two boys push an overturned bench through, in the posture of football drills, as if a snow plow

they say, that's all from my stuff

they say, that's a lot of paper

the next morning smells of mildew & ink, and the carpet is marbled with once-hygenic sundries -- band-aids, dental floss, razor blades -- like a dirtied ice slower to melt

two am, the girl in the next apartment is yelling in korean, on the phone i think, she tries it awhile then settles for sobbing or laughter, depending on the night and other complexities muffled by the walls i guess

three am, policemen are beating their fists on a door, PARTY'S OVER and WE'RE NOT ARRESTING YOU

my professor of mathematics entered and i think to be sure he had done this correctly, entered correctly, entered the one of all the rooms that would attend to & catalog his presence, to be sure he said my name, asked where that was, in the room, if this were the room, and passed sharply among faces with i think only the apprehension that each was inappropriate to his purpose

he saw me and when he saw me began class

it is flattering maybe, being an index to a memory, banally

how could i be that

i have another report

in my world hunger class a man in front of me looked on a very tiny computer at a blog in pictures of a man aiming many guns at faraway large white panels then pointing closely at the newly blossomed & dappled absences

how strange his doing exactly that then, in class, so particular, too particular, brazenly obscenely particular

once walking home through the strip mall and a man came from the liquor store with six packs bottomed of a long garbage bag and said how old are you boy

and i said 21 which sounds like a fake answer

and he said you better run off to school boy you like look you aint 15

and i cut through the grounds of an apartment complex for the retired

. . .

once walking home through the strip mall and a man came from the liquor store with six packs bottomed of a long garbage bag and smiled and we shook hands for longer than was probably okay

. . .

once walking home through the strip mall and a man came out with a six pack tied to a long piece of rope and he was dragging the six pack on the pavement and i said what are you doing

and he said combating 99.9% of bacteria

and i learned how and i never got sick again