Section 0019

     What is hyperspace? Do you understand any of it, this topology stuff?     

     “I should have killed my antagonist,” he declared, “but for the miserable character of your American steel.” He had simply deleted Shuichi.

     What is this world made of?
     Bronze wine vessels of the Shang dynasty. [U]ne pomme.
     
     When I was younger, I wanted my bedroom painted in bright reds and yellows. What I sought, when I struggled out of my hole, then aloft through the stinging air towards an inaccessible boon, was the rapture of vertigo, the letting go, the fall, the gulf, the relapse to darkness, to nothingness, to earnestness, to home, to him waiting for me always, who needed me and whom I needed, who took me in his arms and told me to stay with him always, who gave me his place and watched over me, who suffered every time I left him, whom I have made suffer and seldom contented, whom I have never seen.

     This is why it’s so hard to sit down and stay long enough to write.

     History with her painful and unexpected changes cannot be made to pity or remember; that is our function. And this is where poets can help to fix the economy.

     He made no answer.

     It is winter again, those cold / globes of breath that shape / themselves into bodies. He is still now. In the normal course of subjective time, they would both be dead in a few years. That’s how that was settled. I stand idly, magnanimous and sinister; / fingering the inventory, the adorable ghosts / of little shelf lives that are gone or half- / used up, while the poison pools in my blood / and the mercury lurks in the thermometer: / aspirin, daughter of the willow sap, fidelity / in a pellet; dentifrice, son of the gleaming Swede / who fell in battle and has lain there whitening / ever since; and a grape elixir saved only by codeine, / warlord of the drowsy.

     These sticks are combined with a carrot.