That wounded faculty and palsied arm. Give in to it if you can remember
how, if you can remember anything. If it's there for you.
I'm sick, baby, frail and unferocious. With a blondewood pencil still
not as pale as my rationale. It's proving my felicity that I'm worried
about.
This is the industrial malaise that I always suspected was in existence
and tried to get in scrabble, what I've been preparing for all these
years. While a girl weeps in the corner, and weeps and weeps the whole
train ride, she just keeps going.
The only way, I need to pick and turn what seeps from my hands. If I
could just happen only just happen to change something that got broken
or was skewed as it grew. And I could walk into a room without smelling
every insistence like a group of office secretaries. Spitting every
word, snarl not strong enough.
Fragile, her heartbeat under my palm in a small square of reflected
sunlight. She used to take my chin in her hand and kiss me. Just like
that. A white lie, a casual promise, a startling off hand benediction.
Hey I know there's more to this.
And now I can feel it, think maybe I took too much a hand grasping and
grasping in the dark. I feel so weak, I think I always was, spinifex
in the Black Forest, kerosene on a summer night, warm but inappropriate
- round hole, distil phalange peg.
A huge industrial machine crouched in a humming room; scent of motor
oil and burning hair pressing at the walls. Like a slow burrowing bullet.
Soaked earth with roots twisted through it and a scattering of calluses.
In the corner an arrangement of human fingernails mapping an unimportant
constellation.
This isn't a fever or a dream the photographs are pinned to the sticky
walls, their edges are curled.
There's a pair of old shoes by the door and the sign IS faded.
There is a baby with a scratched bruise on its forehead and there
IS an elderly woman with a floral print dress reading a book with her
expression compressed, like it's an obituary.
I have to wait. Just a few weeks, a few million seconds, if that's
enough.
It's moving slow but heavy (radius and inertia and depth) like an oil
tanker or a tectonic plate. Hurts too much. I'm too tired.
I lost the keys. I thought I had them for a while but they turned out
to be the wrong ones. I was wrong again.
I have no will.
Come on, give me the crook of your arm to cry on.
I'll tell you about the menagerie of moons and press your hand between
my hands and wishwishwish.