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REASONS FOR NOT ENTERING
the ocean is already full of Labradors. i cannot emphasize that last part enough. if my head was farther down my body, it might be my feet. i could touch you by singing about your legs. you could picture me easily upside down, which may help. my email would take care of itself by peering out through my blinds. usually, the world is contagious and oriented toward plummeting: the bedside, the solitary lookout, the places where you, still a child, once rolled over into a pile of broken dishes. it’s not that moving steadily or beautifully doesn’t matter. but the broken glass made you feel like a hundred different people.
*
ON THE OCCASION THAT YOU SHOULD FIND THIS HOUSE LEVELING
i’d like to tell you what it doesn’t revolve around. that the skyscrapers behind these numb hands don’t resemble anything but a decision to be taller. the frenzied, thickening push that might make you say, ok, let’s try again. i made it all up, of course. that there could ever exist a natural history that does anything other than float. around you, and every single word that unattached itself from your fleeting recuperation. take the size of your thumbprint: its veracity, that nobody will ever try to unstretch your fingers because they simple don’t believe in struggle. it’s scary talking about nature in this sense, not the individual roots one by one but the shape of something that’s never learned goodbye. i can’t even wave my arms with such enthusiasm. i couldn’t even make my arms look like a house without messing up.
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A MUSICAL OCCASION FOR FALLING THROUGH
once the word begins to resemble the weather: local, hardly important, what i see when i blink my whole face in synch with someone’s attention span. decisions not made by decisions but in relation to the size of the rest of them. time is sliced along some bodies as if we could put an end to something by grabbing them. nobody looks when dismantling their own obsession. sometimes i don’t know what to do with my eyes / i’m with them all the time / and then there’s you. the artificial intimacy of stacking phonebooks as if to understand necessity, building a world made of car doors repeatedly opening, the exact color of people on tip toes. one fantasy involves washing every single thing. not in search of happiness but forced kinship, to create the feeling of constantly heavy suitcases. this is not any one particular obligation so much as a body in relation to an endless pool / when it comes to water / i’m much more comfortable listening / in real life: letting go / things with shorter names / if aligned more properly with the weather / you might say / irreducible.
ILK journal 