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124 files changed, 124 insertions, 124 deletions

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-    <section class="verse">
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     <p>Whenever you call me friend<br />I fall down on my knees and cry<br />because I know it’s the only thing<br />never to happen before in this<br />life is something you can’t see<br />it’s a pillow under a <a href="theoceanoverflowswithcamels.html">hook shot</a><br /><a href="lovesong.html">I want to tell you something anything</a><br />but you are there and I am here<br />we are <a href="howtoread.html">trapped inside ourselves</a><br />and the distance is too far<br />you are something that I would tell<br /><a href="no-nothing.html">would be nothing</a> before too long<br />you are not the finisher of dreams<br />you are the beginning of <a href="in-bed.html">nightmares</a><br />or waking but I’m not sure which<br />this <a href="poetry-time.html">letter is for you</a> in the future<br />it will lead you on the path<br />of goodness or of rightness or of<br />wrong people and right meanings<br />or the meaning will be hidden<br />or wrestling the demon I will have become<br />restless under the starlight<br />it’s too bright here to think<br />the negatives would be pitch black<br />darkness of a silver mine<br />there are <a href="plant.html">no trees</a> here<br />where have you been where are you now<br />I am no longer here or there<br />you are anywhere or are you<br />up in the clouds is a ghost<br />he is white and blue like a cloud<br />he paints with his teeth<br />he paints the rainbow before midnight<br />that you can see from your window<br />staring out under the sunlight<br />through the gauze curtains<br /><a href="mountain.html">over the high mountain</a> far away<br />that is covered over with snow<br />past the rivers and forests<br />that lie awake under Orion<br />hunting the bull that runs forever<br />just out of his reach<br />pointing the way for the two of us<br />to join together in song or dance<br />or that other thing and sing<br />the Grinch down off Mount Crumpet<br /><a href="moon-drowning.html">his heart breaking his chest</a><br />thumping with the beat<br />his <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUpxmlZ2hyM">little dog too</a> running running<br />with the bull full of laughter and blood<br />he can’t see it anymore because it’s become him<br />we are trapped he says we are<br />trapped in ourselves it turns out<br />that all along it wasn’t you or me<br />but he and her or her and him or<br />he and he or she and she or they<br />even they tell us that nothing has happened<br />even they know that it’s a big joke<br />one more thing to know before the death<br />we are crying like crocodiles<br />before their loved ones’ coffins<br />we are bellowing with grief like buffalo<br />on a berth of wild oxen<br />we are wailing our clothes are in rags<br /><a href="i-wanted-to-tell-you-something.html">we want</a> <a href="fire.html">we want</a> <a href="lovesong.html">we want</a><br />but never can we get<br />what is it<br />we don’t know what it is<br />but it’s something it’s anything<br />it’s too many people or not enough<br />it’s too few trees we need more<br />beavers to build riverdams we need<br />grapes too or <a href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/245576">plums</a> from the ice box<br />or an ice box even would be nice<br />all I have is this cube isn’t that right<br />or is a sphere a cube a donut a coffee<br />cup your hands in mine yes that’s right<br />now bring the water to your face<br />clear and cool and<br />full of something<br />what is it wanting<br />or yearning<br />I can see in your eyes they’re clear now<br />they are as clear as a running stream<br />or the sky that’s clear right<br />or the water that is in the Bahamas<br />because I hear that’s clear<br />you’re as clear as the sound of a bell<br />you’re as clear as the <a href="table_contents.html">braying of horses</a><br />you’re as clear as the glass in God’s eye<br />and I<br />I’m as dull as an ox plowing<br /><a href="last-passenger.html">through fields in his yoke</a><br />I’m as dull as clouded amber<br />I’m dull as you find me<br />tonight after dinner<br />I’m reading the crossword<br />you’re sitting beside me<br />you’re watching TV.</p>
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@@ -28,7 +28,7 @@
                     </p>
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     <tr class="odd">
@@ -28,7 +28,7 @@
                     </p>
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-    <section class="prose">
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     <figure>
     <img src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/54/Amber_Hagerman.jpg" alt="Amber Hagerman" /><figcaption>Amber Hagerman</figcaption>
     </figure>
@@ -32,7 +32,7 @@
         </p>
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-    <section class="verse">
+    <section class="thing verse">
     <p>And you were there in the start of it all<br />and you folded your <a href="cold-wind.html">hands like little doves</a><br />that would fly away like an afterthought<br />and you turned to me the window light on your face<br />and you asked me something that I did not recognize<br />like a great throng of people who are not you<br />and I asked are we in a <a href="boar.html">church</a><br />and you answered with the look on your face<br />of someone <a href="roughgloves.html">grieving something gone</a> for years<br /> but that they had been reminded of<br />by a catch in the light or in someone’s voice<br />and I think maybe it could have been mine<br />and I looked away thickly my head was in jelly<br />and I didn’t get an answer from you but I got one</p>
     <p>I looked at the man in front of us with glasses<br />he was speaking and holding a book<br />and I didn’t understand him he was far away<br />and I could tell I was missing something important<br />and you nodded to yourself at something he said</p>
     </section>
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     <p>Abraham, Abraham, you are old and cannot hear:<br />what if you miss my small voice amongst the creaking<br />of your own grief, kill your son unknowing<br />of what he will be, and commit Israel to nothing?</p>
     <p>Abraham, you must know or hope that <a href="boar.html">God</a><br />will not allow your son to die; you must know<br />that this is a test, but then why<br />are you so bent on Isaac’s destruction?<br />Look at your eyes; there is more than fear<br />there. I see in your eyes desperation,<br />a manic passion to do right by your God<br />whom you are not able to see or know.</p>
     <p>Am I too late? I <a href="i-am.html">will try</a> to stay<br />your old hands, the knife clenched<br />within them, intent on ending life.</p>
@@ -24,7 +24,7 @@
         
                     </header>
 
-    <section class="verse">
+    <section class="thing verse">
     <p>So it’s the <a href="deathstrumpet.html">fucking moon</a>. Big deal. As if<br />you haven’t seen it before, hanging in the sky<br />like a piece of <a href="roughgloves.html">rotten meat</a> nailed to the wall,</p>
     <p>a maudlin love letter (the i’s dotted with <a href="proverbs.html">hearts</a>)<br />tacked to the sky’s door like ninety-eight theses.<br />Don’t stare at it like it means anything.</p>
     <p>Don’t give it the chance to collect meaning<br />from your hand like an old pigeon. Don’t dare ascribe<br />it a will, or call it fickle, or think it has any say</p>
@@ -24,7 +24,7 @@
         
                     </header>
 
-    <section class="verse">
+    <section class="thing verse">
     <p>What is poetry? <a href="words-meaning.html">Poetry is.</a> Inasmuch as life is, so is poetry. Here is the problem: life is very big and complex. Human beings are neither. We are small, simple beings that don’t want to know all of the myriad interactions happening all around us, within us, as a part of us, all the hours of every day. We much prefer knowing only that which is just in front of our faces, staring us back with a look of utter contempt. This is why many people are depressed.</p>
     <p>Poetry is an attempt made by some to open up our field of view, to maybe check on something else that isn’t staring us in the face so contemptibly. Maybe something else is smiling at us, we think. So we write poetry to force ourselves to look away from the <a href="moongone.html">mirror</a> of our existence to see something else.</p>
     <p>This is generally painful. To make it less painful, poetry compresses reality a lot to make it more consumable. It takes life, that seawater, and boils it down and boils it down until only the salt remains, the important parts that we can focus on and make some sense of the senselessness of life. Poetry is life bouillon, and to thoroughly enjoy a poem we must put that bouillon back into the seawater of life and make a delicious soup out of it. To make this soup, to decompress the poem into an emotion or life, requires a lot of brainpower. A good reader will have this brainpower. A good poem will not require it.</p>
@@ -24,7 +24,7 @@
         
                     </header>
 
-    <section class="prose">
+    <section class="thing prose">
     <p>Paul was writing in his diary about art.</p>
     <p><em><a href="ouroboros_memory.html">This is my brain</a></em> he wrote. <em>This is my brain and all it contains. <a href="TODO_BIBLE_LINK">‘I contain multitudes’ said Legion.</a> I think it was Legion.</em> The big heading he had written at the top of the page (<em>ART</em> it read, but only when looking at it from his point of view) sat cold and alone, neglected in the <a href="sense-of-it.html">white space</a> surrounding it. He noticed this presently (but not after he had written a little more about multitudes), paused, frowned, and began to write again.</p>
     <p><em>ART stands alone at the top of a blank page</em> he wrote. <em>It follows <del>itself in circles</del> its own footprints in a circle around its own name. It leads nowhere but is present everywhere. <del>It contains</del> It contains multitudes. Every painting ever made is a painting of every other painting. Every song is a remix, a <a href="music-433.html">cover version</a>.</em> He crossed out the part about songs for getting off topic. He made a note to himself in the margin—<em>Music is not ART.</em></p>
@@ -24,7 +24,7 @@
         
                     </header>
 
-    <section class="prose">
+    <section class="thing prose">
     <p>Paul took his axe and went out into the woods to chop trees. Or rather he went into the trees to chop wood. He wasn’t sure. Either way it helped him think. Last time he’d gone out, he’d had an idea for a shoe-insert company he could start called “Paul’s Bunyons.” He chuckled to himself as he shouldered his axe and went into the forest.</p>
     <p>Deep into the woods he admired the organization of the trees. “They grow wherever they fall” he said “but still none is too close to another.” He sounded like Solomon to himself. <a href="riptide_memory.html">He imagined he had a beard.</a></p>
     <p>He walked for a long time in the shadows of the forest, in its coolness. It sounded like snow had fallen but it was still <a href="january.html">October</a>. The first time the trees seemed to radiate out from him in straight lines he stopped and turned around four times. After he walked on he noticed it happened fairly often.</p>
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                     </header>
 
-    <section class="verse">
+    <section class="thing verse">
     <p>After searching for days or even months<br />I finally find it reclining lazily<br /><a href="finding-the-lion.html">above the peaks</a> above the city as if to ask<br />Did you miss me? Yes very much I reply<br />and rush to embrace it but it smiles<br />and recoils and tells me No no you<br />have to try harder than that it says<br />I do not give myself up so easily</p>
     <p>I try a different tack<br />I sing to it bring it flowers nightly<br />I compare its eyes to the morning dew<br />it has not seen the morning dew<br />I say its mouth is the sunset over mountains<br />it knows mountains but the sunset<br />is only a rumor from the Evening Star<br />I tell the Big Dipper that it moves<br /><a href="no-nothing.html">like a quiet river across the earth</a></p>
     <p>Rivers I have seen says the Big Dipper<br />they sparkle in the light from my stars<br />Your stars like eyes I say and it smiles<br /><a href="http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/writer">No it says that is too easy</a><br />It turns its back<br />it walks home along the back of the mountain</p>
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                     </header>
 
-    <section class="verse">
+    <section class="thing verse">
     <p>Now the ticking clocks scare me.<br />The <a href="mountain.html">empty</a> rooms, clock towers, belfries;<br />I am terrified by them all.</p>
     <p>I really used to enjoy going to church,<br />singing in the choir, listening to the sermon.<br />Now the chairs squeal like dying pigs—</p>
     <p>It was the boar that did it.<br /><a href="telemarketer.html">Fifteen feet</a> from me that night<br />in the grass, rooting for God<br />knows what, finding me instead.</p>
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                     </header>
 
-    <section class="verse">
+    <section class="thing verse">
     <p>When he said <a href="mountain.html">Bible</a> I heard his southern accent<br />and he had a face I expect all pastors must have<br />a round open honest face<br />that will always be a boy’s face<br />though its owner may rightly call himself a man<br />near my age though I hardly call myself a man</p>
     <p>I have seen this face before whether in life or a dream<br />I can’t tell<br />I might’ve seen him on the street once<br />twice who knows and his pastor’s <a href="moon-drowning.html">moon face</a><br />reminds me of something<br />some distant light my life used to own</p>
     <p><a href="in-bed.html">One night on my birthday the moon was so strong it cast shadows</a><br />I could see to the far hill and back it was all clear to me</p>
@@ -24,7 +24,7 @@
         
                     </header>
 
-    <section class="prose">
+    <section class="thing prose">
     <p><em><a href="toilet.html">ART and CRAFT</a> are only the inside and outside of the same building. The ceiling is</em>—here he put his eraser to his bottom lip, thinking. He crossed out <em><del>The ceiling is.</del></em> <em>The floor is reality and the ceiling is <del>aspiration</del> <del>desire</del> that which is desired. CRAFT is building a <a href="boar.html">chair</a> from wood. ART is using the wood as a substrate for an emotional <a href="poetry-time.html">message to a future person</a>, the READER / VIEWER.</em></p>
     <p><em>The important thing is they are both made of wood. The important thing is they were both, at one point, alive natural things that grew and changed and pushed their way out of the dirt into the air. They formed buildings out of the air. They didn’t even try.</em></p>
     <p><em>What separates us from them, the trees? <a href="plant.html">We have to try.</a> We must labor to create our ART, <a href="index.html">our buildings of air</a>. We lay them out brick by brick, we build them up by disintegrating trees and forming them again into what they were before. Why must we do this? Are there any advantages to this human method?</em></p>
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     <p>Like <em>40</em> as I challenge anyone to come too!<br />It’s like you’re the epitome of lame!<br />She’s all <em>I am SOOOO CONFUSED</em><br />Aw yeah she got <a href="roughgloves.html">word from yarn</a>.<br />—but technically it’s a pretty sweet, huh?</p>
     <p>Dude we were going and delicate fragrance of arguments get based off of are not try<br />dropping glasses in such an emotional rollercoaster you<br />and yes, I’m cocky enough to do anything!<br />I am as good as Phineas and make another picture symphony<br />This is a modification of a young woman to try<br />groups disband after they get your <a href="http://www.meachamwriters.org/index.htm">Meacham stuff</a> please let it<br />RJ Covino, own statuses that’ll be a great</p>
     <p>MY OWN afterbirth can do that<br /><a href="spittle.html">I am 2 we can be KISSED</a> ON THE page.<br />You know I’m not sure that<br />Ben &amp; Jerry’s FTW<br />4/10 would not be able to vote, because I gotta do it<br />This is going to be sad about what<br />Rush Limbaugh comes forward with sunglasses but at least I wasn’t wearing a messenger bag or skinny jeans!<br />The cooler THAN Facebook<br />Wine is the best.<br /> YES I was surprised at first, <a href="http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~deepthi/If_on_a_winter%27s_night_a_traveler.html">but the train one</a>, definitely.<br /> Also Valhalla is a dumbass…<br />But we can get based off of course, Jon.<br />We watched this<br />CELEBRATE FRANKSGIVING TOO!<br />That didn’t get started on that<br />FRANCIS OF VERULAM REASONED THUS WITH the courage to reply.<br />Anyone wanna watch out<br />I am cranky from Bro a good as a way to <a href="x-ray.html">hijack my hand</a>.<br />Afterbend was not to produce photographs.</p>
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-    <section class="prose">
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     <p>He woke up after eleven and didn’t go <a href="time-looks-up-to-the-sky.html">outside</a> all day, not even to his Writing Shack. What did he do?</p>
     <p>He watched late morning cartoons meant for children too young to go to school. He ate bowls of cereal. He watched his mother play dominoes. He played dominoes with her for a little while until she was winning by such a margin it wasn’t fun for either of them. He went down to the basement to do his <a href="underwear.html">laundry</a>. He pulled the chain for the light and it turned on like magic. “Electricity is like magic” he said to himself. He thought he would like to write that down but his Implements were in the Shack. He’d already built up so much momentum inside.</p>
     <p>—Inertia? he thought. “What’s the difference between inertia and momentum” he asked himself as he hefted dirty clothes into the washer. “Maybe inertia is the momentum of not moving” he thought as he measured and poured the blue detergent into the drum. “Momentum is the inertia of moving forward through time” as he selected WARM-COLD on the dial and pulled it out to start the machine. “What do you think is the difference between inertia and momentum” he asked his mother when he opened the door at the top of the stairs.</p>
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     <p><a href="january.html">Man of autumn</a>, cold wind,<br />blow down the trees’ leaves.<br /><a href="fire.html">Fire on the ground</a>. The sky<br />perfect water, frost-cold,<br />rippled only by flocks<br /><a href="i-think-its-you.html">of black birds</a> flying, gone.<br />Their brightness can blind<br />an uncareful watcher, work him<br /><a href="when-im-sorry-i.html">in a froth of hands</a>, not-wings<br />that ache with the loss of flight.<br />A tear is flung faithfully<br /><a href="lappel-du-vide.html">to the ocean of air</a>, slipping in<br />slowly, is as gone as the birds.</p>
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     <p>So two hyperintelligent pandimensional beings<br />walk into a bar. One turns to the other and says,<br />“Did you remember to check the end state<br />of that simulation we were running?” The other<br />says, “No, I thought that you did?” To which<br />the first replies, “<a href="movingsideways.html">Oh shit</a>, we missed it.<br />I suppose we must do all of this again. Barkeep,</p>
     <p>two beers please.&quot; The bartender nods in that way<br />that bartenders do, pours the two beers,<br />expertly, by the way, just so, and hands them<br />to the first <a href="http://hitchhikers.wikia.com/wiki/Mice">hyperintelligent pandimensional</a> being.<br />The second one pulls a few singles out of his<br />wallet, places them on the bar, and the pair<br />turn around and begin walking toward a table<br />in the middle of the mostly-empty bar. The bar-<br />tender picks up the money, fans it out, frowns,<br />and calls to his patrons’ backs: “Hey, this<br />isn’t enough!” The two turn around simultan-<br />eously, with parity, and stare at him. A beat.</p>
     <p>One of them, the one without the beer, breaks<br />the silence by exclaiming, “Oh dear god, I’m<br />sorry! I didn’t know your prices went up since<br />last time. What do I owe you?” The bartender<br />says, “Oh, just another <a href="100-lines.html">dollar</a>-fifty.” The being<br />reaches in his back pocket, slides out his<br />wallet, looks in smiling, and frowns when he sees<br />it’s empty. He looks to the other and says,<br />“You got a <a href="plant.html">buck</a>-fifty I can borrow?”</p>
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     <p>A dead man finds his way into our <a href="words-meaning.html">hearts</a><br />simply by opening the door and walking in.<br />He pours himself a drink, speaks aimlessly<br />about hunting or some bats he saw<br />on the way over, wheeling around each other.<br />Look how <a href="moongone.html">they spin</a>, he says, it’s like the<br />ripples atoms make as they hurl past each other<br />in the space between their bodies.<br />We mention the eels at the aquarium, how<br />their bodies <a href="spittle.html">knot while mating</a>. The dead man<br />was a boyscout once, and tied a lot of knots.<br />His favorite was the one with the rabbit<br />and the hole, and the rabbit going in and out<br />and around the tree. The dead man liked it<br />because he liked to pretend that the rabbit<br />was running from a fox, and the rabbit<br />always ended up safe, back in his hole.</p>
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         </p>
                             </header>
 
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     <figure>
     <img src="img/gould.png" alt="Philip Gould" /><figcaption>Philip Gould</figcaption>
     </figure>
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     <p>He didn’t have any polish so he spit-shined the whole thing,<br />top to bottom. It gleamed like maybe a tomato on the vine<br />begging to be picked and thrown on some caprese. Death loved caprese.</p>
     <p>He stood up and put the horn to his lips, imagining<br />it was a woman he loved. He blushed as he realized<br />it was a terrible metaphor.<br />He practiced for six hours a day—what else to do?</p>
     <p>Death looks at <a href="moongone.html">himself in the mirror</a> as he plays.<br />The trumpet is suspended in midair. Damn vampire rules.<br />Death is always worried he might have missed a spot shaving<br />but he’ll never know unless a stranger is polite enough.<br />Not that he ever goes out or meets anyone.</p>
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-    <section class="prose">
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     <p>It had gotten cold. He went to lay down <a href="in-bed.html">in bed</a> with a pad and paper. He began to write. Although he hadn’t tried it much in bed before, he liked it mostly. His arm got tired journeying across the page like a series of switchbacks down the wall of the Grand Canyon. He wrote this down in the margin, for later:</p>
     <p><em>Arm journeying across<br />the pg. like a<br />series of switch-<br />backs down the wall<br />of the Grand Canyon</em></p>
     <p>His arm began to pain him. He adjusted his position in the bed. It didn’t help much with the pain. It still hurt as he wrote. He began to be distracted by his mother’s music playing in the next room.</p>
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-    <section class="prose">
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     <p><em>YOU CANNOT DISCOVER ART ART MUST BE CREATED</em> he sat on the couch at home while his mother <a href="real-writer.html">watched TV</a> and smoked. <a href="when-im-sorry-i.html">Dinner had been chicken</a> and peas with <a href="shipwright.html">milk</a> and afterward Paul and his mother sat on opposite ends of the couch. At intervals she would look sideways at Paul writing. He pretended not to notice.</p>
     <p><em>ART = ARTIFICE</em> he wrote. <em>ARTIFICE MEANS UNNATURAL. ARTIFICE MEANS BUILT. TO BUILD MEANS TO <a href="fire.html">FIND A PATTERN</a> &amp; FIND A PATTERN IS WHAT WE ARE GOOD AT.</em> He thought about this while someone else won a car.</p>
     <p>“Do you think humans are good at finding patterns because we are hunters” he asked his mother. She <a href="movingsideways.html">looked sideways</a> at him and said “Sure Paul.” “Early on in our evolution we were hunters right? And to hunt we had to see the patterns in seemingly random events, like where the gazelle went each year” “Paul I’m trying to watch TV. If you’re going to write this stuff go do it in your room you’re distracting.” Paul got up and went to his room and lay down on his bed.</p>
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     <p>Say there are no words. Say that we are conjoined<br />from birth, or better still, say we are myself.<br />—But I still talk to myself, I build my world<br />through language, so if we say there are <a href="hymnal.html">no words</a><br />this is not enough. Say we are instead some animal,<br />or better yet, <a href="plant.html">a plant</a>, or a flagellum motoring<br />aimlessly around. (Say that humans are the only things<br />that reason. Say that we’re the <a href="movingsideways.html">only things that worry</a>.)</p>
     <p>Say that I am separate. To say there’s everything else<br />and then there’s me is wrong. Each thing is separate:<br /><a href="i-wanted-to-tell-you-something.html">there is no whole in the world</a>. Say this is both good<br />and bad, or rather, say there is no good or bad but only<br />being, more and more of it always added, none taken out<br />though it can be forgotten. Say that forgetting<br />is a function of our remembering. (Say that humans only<br /><a href="swansong-alt.html">worry about separation</a>. Say that only humans feel it.)</p>
     </section>
@@ -24,7 +24,7 @@
         <h1 class="subtitle">An epigraph</h1>
                     </header>
 
-    <section class="prose">
+    <section class="thing prose">
     <p>I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of <a href="spittle.html">other lovers</a> and queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to <a href="deathstrumpet.html">death</a>, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.</p>
     </section>
 
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                     </p>
                             </header>
 
-    <section class="verse">
+    <section class="thing verse">
     <p>Bottom of the drink: they had<br />to go. The Coke machine, the snack<br />machine, the deep fryer. Hoisted</p>
     <p>and dragged through the halls<br />and out to the curb, they sat with<br />other trash beneath gray, forlorn</p>
     <p>skies behind the elementary<br />school, wondering what their next<br />move would be. The Coke machine</p>
@@ -24,7 +24,7 @@
         
                     </header>
 
-    <section class="verse">
+    <section class="thing verse">
     <p>I didn’t write this sestina yesterday.<br />It’s the first time I fell behind in my task<br />and hopefully, the only time it will.<br />This means that today I must write two<br />sestinas. If I don’t write them today, I<br />will have to write two later down the line.</p>
     <p>Although I feel I’m slogging through each line<br />I think I’m doing better every day,<br />though maybe this is wishful thinking: I<br />showed my friend my just-completed task<br />two days ago (my God, was it two<br />entire days? I’ve no idea what I’ll</p>
     <p>do <a href="http://biblehub.com/2_corinthians/11-24.htm">after thirty-nine days</a>. I think I’ll<br />feel like <a href="death-zone.html">Inigo Montoya</a>, who’d been in the line<br />of revenging for so long, he didn’t know what to<br />do with the rest of his life), and he deigned<br />to be polite, but I could tell the task<br />was hard for him. He told me finally that I</p>
@@ -24,7 +24,7 @@
         
                     </header>
 
-    <section class="prose">
+    <section class="thing prose">
     <p>“Is man the natural thing that makes unnatural things” he thought to himself as he looked out the kitchen window at the shed. He wondered who built the shed for the first time since he’d been going out there. “Mom who built the shed out back” he asked. “That was your father” she said.</p>
     <p>His father. Paul had never met him. His mother had said when he was a kid that his father was caught by a <a href="riptide_memory.html">riptide</a> while swimming in the ocean. He hadn’t noticed what was happening until the land was a thin line on the horizon. He became exhausted swimming back and drowned. His body was found a week later by the coroner’s estimate. Paul never really believed this story because his mother’s face was sad in the wrong way when she told it.</p>
     <p>She said he looked like his father but she also said all men look alike. Paul realized he’d been standing at the kitchen window for a long time looking out at the shed without realizing it. He went out to take an inventory of everything inside.</p>
@@ -24,7 +24,7 @@
         
                     </header>
 
-    <section class="prose">
+    <section class="thing prose">
     <p>You never can tell just when Charlie Sheen will enter your life. For me, it was last Thursday. I was reading some translation of a Japanese translation of “The Raven” in which the Poe and the raven become friends. At one point the raven gets very sick and Poe feeds him at his bedside and nurses him back to health. The story was very heartwarming and sad at the same time and my tears were welling up when suddenly I heard a knock on my door.</p>
     <p>I shuffled over, sniffling but managing to keep my cheeks dry to open it. Of course Charlie was beaming on the other side, with a bag of flowers and a grin like a <a href="purpose-dogs.html">dog</a>’s. He bounded in the room without saying hello and threw the flowers in the sink, opened the refrigerator and started poking around. I said “It’s nice to see you too” and went to my room to get a camera, as well as a notebook for him to sign.</p>
     <p>When I came back he was on the floor, hunched and groaning. I looked on the table to see a month-old half-gallon of milk—now cottage cheese—half-empty and dripping. The remnants were on his mouth, and at once I saw my chance to become Poe in this <a href="todaniel.html">translation of a translation</a> of a translation. I knelt next to Charlie, cradled his head in my lap. He looked up at me with a stare full of terror. I returned it levelly, making cooing noises at him until he calmed down.</p>
@@ -24,7 +24,7 @@
         
                     </header>
 
-    <section class="verse">
+    <section class="thing verse">
     <p>Tonight, as I look up, the stars<br />hide themselves in shame. <a href="moongone.html">There is no moon</a>.<br />The sky is black, like my desk,</p>
     <p><a href="feedingtheraven.html">nothing like a raven</a>. The streetlights<br />look on the scene disinterested.<br />They have their own <a href="the-night-we-met.html">small gossips of the dark</a>.</p>
     <p>I came here to find the Lion, old<br />friend, but he will not show his flanks, his<br />paws, his shoulders, <a href="axe.html">his mane</a>. I</p>
@@ -24,7 +24,7 @@
         
                     </header>
 
-    <section class="prose">
+    <section class="thing prose">
     <p>His mother ran out of the house in her nightgown. “What the hell do you think you’re doing” she hollered as Paul watched the shed. “I’m burning the shed down” he said smiling “isn’t it warm?” “It’s warm enough out here without that burning down” she said “go get the hose and put this thing out.” “But Mom—” “Do it” she said in the tone of voice that meant Do it now. He went around the side of the house screwed the nozzle on grabbed the end of the hose pulled it around the house and waited for water to come out the end. <a href="hard-game.html">When it did it was not in a very strong stream.</a> “I don’t think this is going to work” Paul said to his mother. “God damn it I have to call the Fire Department” she said and went inside the house. The shed continued in its burning.</p>
     <p>After the Fire Department put out the fire one of the men said “Your mother says you set this building on fire. You know Arson is a major offense.” “I set it on fire” Paul said. “Why?” “Because ART wants to be random, it wants to be natural, but it isn’t. Humans create ART because we can’t help but see patterns in randomness. But we feel guilty about it.” The man nodded to another man in a blue uniform. “We want the ART to feel natural, to feel random, but we can’t stop seeing the patterns” as the man in blue walked over and put a hand on Paul’s shoulder “ART is unnatural by its very nature. I took my ART and gave it back to nature” as the man led him over to a <a href="sense-of-it.html">black and white</a> car and put him inside. He was saying something about Paul’s right. “No it’s my <a href="x-ray.html">left that was hurt</a>” said Paul “but it’s all better now.”</p>
     </section>
@@ -28,7 +28,7 @@
                     </p>
                             </header>
 
-    <section class="verse">
+    <section class="thing verse">
     <p>Look, I say—look here—<br />at this <a href="planks.html">old place<br />where nothing changes</a>.<br />Look at the people<br />who pass by. Look at<br />the trees. The flowers<br />full of wanting: look<br /><a href="squirrel.html">how full they are</a> with<br />color. Look how they mock<br />us, empty people who<br />must fill themselves<br />with changes—emptiness.</p>
     <p>“<a href="elegeyforanalternateself.html">There is nothing</a> to be<br />but happy. <a href="no-nothing.html">There is no</a><br />sadness to fall down<br />like cherry petals.”</p>
     <p>The <a href="plant.html">trees don’t under-<br />stand:</a> they are too<br />tall to see the germ<br />of discontent in us.</p>
@@ -24,7 +24,7 @@
         
                     </header>
 
-    <section class="prose">
+    <section class="thing prose">
     <p>He looked down at his hands idly while he was typing. They were <a href="weplayedthosegamestoo.html">dry and cracked in places</a>. He thought he might start bleeding so he went inside for some lotion.</p>
     <p>“Do we have any lotion” he asked his mother. “In the medicine cabinet” she said without looking up from the TV. He walked into the <a href="boar.html">bathroom</a> and looked at himself in the mirror. “I look strange” he said to himself “I look like a teenager.” He stared into his <a href="man.html">right eye, then his left</a>. He saw nothing but <a href="deathstrumpet.html">his own reflection fish-eyed</a> in his pupils. He opened the medicine cabinet.</p>
     <p>Back in his Writing Shack, he started to type.</p>
@@ -28,7 +28,7 @@
         </p>
             </header>
 
-    <section class="verse">
+    <section class="thing verse">
     <p>You think building Hoggle’s a hard game?<br />You know bunk. Writing a ghazal’s a hard game.</p>
     <p>Let’s meet in a place where words &amp; fabric play—<br />but not <a href="sense-of-it.html">plastic</a> words. (Boggle’s a hard game.)</p>
     <p>A cookout where we can hash our differences<br />over steak, though making it sizzle’s a hard game.</p>
@@ -24,7 +24,7 @@
         
                     </header>
 
-    <section class="prose">
+    <section class="thing prose">
     <p>His mother drove him to the Hardware Store on a Tuesday. “I’m glad to see you’ve taken my advice for once” she said. “What do you mean.” “Applying to work at the Hardware Store. I’m <a href="sixteenth-chapel.html">proud of you</a> Paul.”</p>
     <p>“Oh right. Sure thing.” They pulled into the parking lot. “Just be a minute” he said as he opened the car door.</p>
     <p>He walked under the door resplendent in its King William orange and white. He saw the towering rows of shelves like mountain ridges in Hell. He strolled among the fixtures, pipes, planks, sheets, plants (Why plants? he thought), switches. He realized he didn’t know the first thing about building <a href="real-writer.html">furniture</a>. “I don’t know the first thing” he muttered to himself “about building furniture. I know the last thing would be a couch or chair or stool but the first thing is a <a href="love-as-god.html">mystery</a>.” He turned around and walked straight out of the store and to his mother’s car without looking up.</p>
@@ -24,7 +24,7 @@
         
                     </header>
 
-    <section class="verse">
+    <section class="thing verse">
     <p>I was away on vacation when I heard—<br />someone sat at my desk while I was away.<br />They took my pen, while I was taking<br />surf lessons, and wrote the sun into the sky.<br />They pre-approved the earth and the waters,<br />and all of the living things, without even<br />having the decency to text me. It was not I<br />who was behind the phrase “creeping things.”<br />When I got back, of course I was pissed,<br />but it was <a href="shipwright.html">already written</a> into the policy.<br />I’m just saying: don’t blame me for Cain<br />killing Abel. That was a murder. I’m not a cop.<br />The Tower of Babel fell on its own. The ark<br />never saw a single drop of rain. I’m <a href="problems.html">the drunk</a><br />sitting on the curb who just pissed his pants,<br />holding up a sign asking where I am.</p>
     </section>
 
@@ -24,7 +24,7 @@
         
                     </header>
 
-    <section class="prose">
+    <section class="thing prose">
     <p>This book is an exploration of life, of all possible lives that could be lived. Each of the poems contained herein have been written by a different person, with his own history, culture, and emotions. True, they are all related, but no more than any of us is related through our genetics, our shared planet, or our yearnings.</p>
     <p>Fernando Pessoa wrote poems under four different identities—he called them <em>heteronyms</em>—that were known during his lifetime, though after his death over sixty have been found and catalogued. He called them heteronyms as opposed to pseudonyms because they were much more than names he wrote under. They were truly different writing selves, concerned with different ideas and writing with different styles: Alberto Caeiro wrote pastorals; Ricardo Reis wrote more formal odes; Álvaro de Campos wrote these long, Whitman-esque pieces (one to Whitman himself); and Pessoa’s own name was used for poems that are kind of similar to all the others. It seems as though Pessoa found it inefficient to try and write everything he wanted only in his own self; rather he parceled out the different pieces and developed them into full identities, at the cost of his own: “I subsist as a kind of medium of myself, but I’m less real than the others, less substantial, less personal, and easily influenced by them all.” de Campos said of him at one point, “<a href="philosophy.html">Fernando Pessoa, strictly speaking, doesn’t exist.</a>”</p>
     <p>It’s not just Pessoa—I, strictly speaking, don’t exist, both as the specific me that writes this now and as the concept of selfhood, the ego. Heraclitus famously said that we can’t step into the <a href="mountain.html">same river</a> twice, and the fact of the matter is that we can’t occupy the same self twice. It’s constantly changing and adapting to new stimuli from the environment, from other selves, from inside itself, and each time it forms anew into something that’s never existed before. The person I am beginning a poem is a separate being than the one I am finishing a poem, and part of it is the poem I’ve written has brought forth some other dish onto the great table that is myself.</p>
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                     </header>
 
-    <section class="prose">
+    <section class="thing prose">
     <p><em>It’s all <a href="joke.html">jokes</a></em> Paul wrote in what he was now calling his Hymnal. He had been writing non-stop all day, because he didn’t count pee- or cigarette- breaks. <em>All art is an inside joke. The symbology involved must be</em>—and here he put down his pen and held his head in his hands. He could never think of the word—he said often that he had no words. He opened to a new page in his Hymnal. On the top of it was written in bold script <em><strong>HYMN 386: JOKES</strong></em>.</p>
     <p>Paul scowled. Who had written in his Hymnal? he wondered. He said it out loud a moment after: “Who has written in my Hymnal?” He realized he was alone in his Writing Shack, which was really a shed in the back of his mother’s garden. He wondered why he had to say his thoughts before they became real to him (if this was a habit or an inborn trait). He realized simultaneously that</p>
     <ol type="a">
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-    <section class="verse">
+    <section class="thing verse">
     <p>I am a great pillar of <a href="deathstrumpet.html">white smoke</a>.<br />I am Lot’s nameless wife encased in salt.<br />I am the wound on Christ’s back as he moans<br />with the pounding of a hammer on his wrist.<br />I am the nail that holds my house together.<br />It is a strong house, built on a good foundation.<br />In the winter, it is warm and crawling things<br />cannot get in. This house will never burn down.<br />It is the house that I built, with my body<br />and with my strength. I am the only one who lives<br />here. I am both father and mother to a race<br />of <a href="plant.html">dust motes that worship me as a god</a>. I have<br />monuments built daily in my honor in dark<br />corners around the house. I destroy all of them<br />before I go to bed, but in the morning<br />there are still more. I don’t think I know<br />where all of them are. I <a href="howithappened.html">don’t think</a> I can get<br />to all of them anymore. There are too many.</p>
     </section>
 
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                     </p>
                             </header>
 
-    <section class="verse">
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     <p>I thought I saw you walking<br />to the bus stop but it was only<br />a <a href="feedingtheraven.html">raven</a>. His croaks sounded nothing<br />like your footsteps (as they pound<br />down the hallway toward my bedroom)<br />his <a href="nothing-is-ever-over.html">wings</a> looked nothing like your<br />legs (running on the wrong side<br />of the road away from my house)<br />I think the one resemblance was the eyes</p>
     <p>But that’s too easy<br />It’s just that I was thinking<br />of you and a raven flew by<br />(maybe it was a <a href="stump.html">crow</a>)</p>
     </section>
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                     </header>
 
-    <section class="verse">
+    <section class="thing verse">
     <p>I wanted to tell you something in order <a href="poetry-time.html">to</a><br />explain the way I feel about the <a href="initial-conditions.html">Universe</a>,<br />its workings, etc. But I couldn’t <a href="exasperated.html">yesterday</a><br />—I’m sorry—I wanted only to <a href="ouroboros_memory.html">ball</a><br />myself up and cry all day. It was the <a href="sixteenth-chapel.html">sixteenth</a><br />day in a row this happened to me, and to <a href="love-as-god.html">be</a></p>
     <p>more than two weeks waiting to cry is,<br />especially when, the whole time, I wasn’t able to,<br />absolutely horrible. It was no sweet sixteen,<br />I’ll tell you that much. Unless at yours, the Universe<br />kept telling you to quit having such a ball<br />and that you should have died, like, yesterday.</p>
     <p>At first, it feels like you’re winning—that yesterday<br />you really were meant to die, but since you still <em>are</em>,<br />you beat the system somehow. But the Universe bawls,<br />“No, I meant you should’ve crawled into<br />a hole and fucking <em>died</em>!” And then the Universe<br />punches you right in the gut, something like sixteen</p>
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-    <section class="verse">
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     <h2 id="i">I</h2>
     <p>I hear <a href="last-bastion.html">the rats</a> run<br />in the walls like water<br />through a tree. My blood</p>
     <p>thickens. As I dream<br />the masturbation dream<br />the shelf above my bed</p>
@@ -24,7 +24,7 @@
         
                     </header>
 
-    <section class="verse">
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     <p><a href="spittle.html">Ideas are drool.</a> They <a href="building.html">labor to create our buildings out of air</a></p>
     </section>
 
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                     </header>
 
-    <section class="verse">
+    <section class="thing verse">
     <p>There is a theory which states the Universe<br />if it began with the same initial conditions<br />( <a href="the-sea_the-beach.html">same gravity</a> same strong weak nuclear force same<br />size and shape ) would unfold in exactly<br />the way it has : with the same planets <a href="big-dipper.html">orbiting suns</a><br />same people making same mistakes : like this morning</p>
     <p>( It’s actually past two but I will call it <a href="plant.html">morning</a> )<br />while turning on the shower : I as the Universe<br />intended ( although I was expecting the heat of suns )<br /><a href="100-lines.html">had the ice of inner space</a> : those pre existing conditions<br />before the Big Bang : the shower was almost exactly<br />freezing for a split second : every day it’s the same :</p>
     <p><a href="hard-game.html">I turn on the tap</a> hop in pull the knob have the same<br />moment of utter panic then pain then a relaxing morning<br />shower where I spend between five to ten ( I’m not sure exactly )<br />minutes : I have good thoughts : <a href="howtoread.html">this poem about the Universe</a><br />for example : I had the idea while I was conditioning<br />my hair : it came to me like accidentally looking at the sun :</p>
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     <p>January.<br />It’s cold, and I don’t like it.<br />I prefer warm weather,<br />although I like sweaters. They are the one<br />warm spot in an otherwise <a href="tapestry.html">shitty</a> season.<br />But fall is better sweater weather. So be patient,</p>
     <p><em>patient</em>,<br />while waiting for the end of January.<br />A change of season<br />brings a change of mood along with it,<br />although I never thought I’d be one<br />to believe that <a href="seasonal-affective-disorder.html">SAD</a> junk about effects of weather—</p>
     <p>weather!—<br />on a person. Who becomes a patient<br />just because of one<br /><a href="snow.html">month of snow</a>? I did say of January:<br />“It’s cold, and I don’t like it,”<br />but I hardly think it’s fair, knocking whole seasons,</p>
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-    <section class="prose">
+    <section class="thing prose">
     <p>He wrote <em><strong>JOKES</strong></em> on the top of a page in his notebook. He had run out of notecards and hadn’t been able to convince his mother to go to the Office Supply Store for him. He left a space underneath it and wrote.</p>
     <p><em>“<a href="window.html">Tell us a joke</a>” the listeners say to the clown. They have gather together in the clearing because they have heard he would be there, and they have heard he knew very funny jokes that were also true. “Tell us a joke that is true” they say.</em></p>
     <p><em>The clown does not move from the stump. He doesn’t move at all. The listeners watch, gap-mouthed, as a butterfly lands on his hat. A breeze ruffles his coat and the butterfly flies away. Hours pass. The listeners grow impatient. Some begin yelling insults at the clown. Eventually, they begin to walk away into the woods.</em></p>
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         </p>
                             </header>
 
-    <section class="verse">
+    <section class="thing verse">
     <h1 id="i.-walter">I. Walter</h1>
     <p>Walter <a href="sense-of-it.html">rides the bus</a> into work on Wednesday morning when he realizes, with the force and surprise of a rogue current, that he is in the home-for-death phase of life. That era in which the next time he goes under, to the fields of seaweed waving gently, the anemones slowly filtering seawater, it will most likely be for a death in the family.</p>
     <p>He is able to idly speculate on who it might be, and this surprises him. Not much does surprise him after these few months above the waves, because so many things did surprise him those first few months: the plants standing still, the quickness of the fluid these creatures walk in, the lack of pressure that still makes him feel so alone and cold—as if all of his life he had been in an embrace by the ocean, and now for some reason it’s pulled away from him, and it doesn’t love him anymore.</p>
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     <p>What secrets does it hold?<br />Can it tell us who kissed Sara<br />that night on the veranda, or<br />who Joey is really in love with?<br />We all know it isn’t Sara, we<br />mean look at them Christmas eve<br />and he’s staring whistfully<br />at the stars, or the largest<br />asteroid in the asteroid belt.<br />She’s staring at him, sure, but<br />she sees the twinkle in his eye<br />is not aimed in her direction.<br />The reflection of that reflection<br />will beam into space, lightyears<br />of space, dimming slowly each<br />second, until it dies out like<br />all of Sara’s hopes for something<br />resembling love in this life, real<br />love that takes hold of her by<br />the throat and refuses to let go,<br />love that makes men travel for her<br />and only for her, love that launches<br />space ships to that asteroid, the<br />largest in the asteroid belt, that<br />jewel of dead rock and ice, harboring<br />something that could’ve been life<br /><a href="http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/stevens-snowman.html">and nothing that actually is</a>.</p>
     </section>
 
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     <p>Dimly remembered celebrity chefs shuffle<br />down the cold and darkened highways of the heart.<br />They are the last personality left. They are <a href="http://biblehub.com/matthew/5-5.htm">the meek<br />who inherited the heart</a>, what was left of it.<br /> Without food to cook in new or exciting ways<br />nor audience to gasp and cackle, the chefs<br />of the heart quietly waste away while staring<br />doe-eyed into now-empty Safeway windows<br />checking under the dusty produce shelves<br />for something they pray the <a href="in-bed.html">rats</a> haven’t found yet.</p>
     <p>Years ago, the economy of the heart boomed<br />and there was food everywhere. Produce<br />piled high in pyramids of devotion, meat in<br />gilded glass cases opulent under fluorescence,<br />dairy which ran like the <a href="music-433.html">mythical river</a> toward<br />cereals hot and cold. Under it all, thrumming<br />like great stone wheels on sand under a hot sun<br />near a river where reeds sang in the wind<br />the heart produced and gave reward for hard labor.</p>
     <p>No one knows when it all ended. No one can say<br />if it was the heart that dried up or the heart’s supply.<br />Either way, food of the heart became scarcer and scarcer.<br />People began dying, not of starvation<br />but of a certain facial expression that could only<br />be described as desperation. Now<br />all that are left are the celebrity chefs, last bastion<br />of a once mighty empire of the <a href="sense-of-it.html">heart<br />are reduced to husks</a> blown dry by wind.</p>
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+    <section class="thing verse">
     <p>Memory works strangely, <a href="roughgloves.html">spooling its thread</a><br />over the <a href="when-im-sorry.html">nails of events</a> barely related,<br />creating finally some picture, if we’re<br />lucky, of a life—but more likely, it knots<br />itself, catches on a nail or in our throats<br />that gasp, as it binds our necks, for air.</p>
     <p>An example: today marks one hundred years<br />since your namesake, the last living passenger<br />pigeon, died in Cincinnati. It also marks<br />a year since we last spoke. Although around<br />the world, zoos mourn her loss, I’m done<br />with you. I mourn no more your voice, the first<br />sound I heard outside my body that reached<br /><a href="weplayedthosegamestoo.html">into my throat and set me ringing</a>. But that string—</p>
     <p>memory that feels sometimes more like a tide<br />has yoked together, bound your voice to that bird,<br />the frozen, stuffed, forgotten pigeon—my heart<br />is too easy, but it must do—to blink, to flex<br />its unused toes, slowly thaw to the wetness<br />of <a href="cold-wind.html">beating wings</a>, fly to me again, and alight,<br />singing full-throated, on my broken shoulder.</p>
@@ -24,7 +24,7 @@
         
                     </header>
 
-    <section class="prose">
+    <section class="thing prose">
     <p>He shrugged the wood off his shoulder, letting it fall with a clog onto the earth floor of his Writing Shack. He exhaled looking out of the window. He hoped to see a bird fly by, maybe a blue jay or raven. <a href="last-passenger.html">No bird did</a>. He inhaled. He exhaled again in a way that could <a href="last-bastion.html">only be classified</a> as a sigh. He sat down at his writing desk. He began shuffling through what he’d written, trying to find some sort of pattern.</p>
     <p>“<em>Each piece of paper—each leaf—</em>” at this he smiled—“<em>is like a tree in the forest.</em>” He was writing as he thought aloud. “<em>I, as the artist, as the <strong>writer</strong>, must select which to use, chop down those trees, bring them back to my shed and</em>—and—” he frowned as he realized the only end to this <a href="the-night-we-met.html">metaphor was fire</a>. He ran his fingers through his hair in a self-soothing gesture.</p>
     <p>“I need to build some furniture” he thought.</p>
@@ -24,7 +24,7 @@
         
                     </header>
 
-    <section class="prose">
+    <section class="thing prose">
     <p>His first chair was a stool. It was an <a href="stump.html">uneven wobbly stool</a> that would not support even forty pounds. “So my first chair is a broken stool” he said after nearly breaking his tailbone on the dirt floor. “Maybe I should start again but this time only with legs.” He began again but this time only with legs. He built <a href="i-think-its-you.html">one leg</a>, which means he cut a straight piece of wood down to four feet in length, whittled the bark off, and sanded it down smooth in what he was now calling his Woodworking Shack. He typed up a note on how to make chair legs.</p>
     <blockquote>
     <p>MAKING CHAIR LEGS</p>
@@ -24,7 +24,7 @@
         
                     </header>
 
-    <section class="prose">
+    <section class="thing prose">
     <p>The definition of happiness is <em>doing stuff that you really like</em>. That stuff can be eating soup, going to the bathroom, walking the dog, playing Dungeons and Dragons; whatever keeps your mind off the fact that you’re so goddamn unhappy all the time. That, incidentally, is the definition of like: <em>that feeling you get when you forget how miserable you are for just a little bit</em>. Thus people like doing stuff they like all the time, as often as possible; because if they remember how horrible they really feel at not having a background to put themselves against, they will want to hurt themselves and those around them.</p>
     <p>The funny thing is that something we people really like to do is hurt ourselves and those around us. We do this by thinking other people are more unhappy than we are. We convince themselves that we are truly happy, ecstatic even, while they merely plod around life half-heartedly, or, if they’re lucky, incorrectly. We take it upon ourselves (seeing as we are so happy, and can spare a little bit of happiness) to help them become happy as well. We fail to realize that the people will probably not appreciate our thinking that we’re better than they are somehow, for that is what we do even if we don’t mean it. We forget that we are also unhappy, and that we are just doing things we like in order to cheer ourselves up a little bit, which really means that this cheering is working; but there is such a thing as working too well. So in a sense what I’m doing here is cheering myself up by reminding you that you are unhappy; I’m trying to keep you honest in your unhappiness; and I admit this is usually called a dick move.</p>
     <p>In fact, the best way to overcome happy-hungering (this is the term as I dub it) is commit as many dick moves as possible, to keep people remembering that unhappiness abounds. If you see someone smiling like a little dog who knows it’s about to get pet or get a treat or go to the vet to donate doggy sperm, smile back. Grin toothily (a little too toothily for a little too long). Their smile will start to fade if you’re doing it right. Saunter to them, slide as if you’re an Olympic quality ice-skater, as if you’re a really good bowler who knows he’s playing against twelve year olds and’ll win by a hundred. Get really close. Far too close for what most people would call comfort. And remind them of how awful life can be: “I really like your <a href="theoceanoverflowswithcamels.html">shirt</a>—really only children chained to looms can get that tight of a weave,” you can say, or “You’re not really going to recycle that coffee cup, are you?” They will probably get angry, but that’s what’s supposed to happen. By making dick moves, you can overcome what may be the biggest evil on this earth: Happy-Hungering.</p>
@@ -24,7 +24,7 @@
         
                     </header>
 
-    <section class="verse">
+    <section class="thing verse">
     <p>If you swallow hard enough<br />you’ll <a href="serengeti.html">feel the stone</a><br />the one we all have waiting</p>
     <p>Once I <a href="plant.html">found the stone</a> in<br />the sea it kissed me as<br /><a href="the-sea_the-beach.html">the sea pawed at my back</a></p>
     </section>
@@ -24,7 +24,7 @@
         
                     </header>
 
-    <section class="verse">
+    <section class="thing verse">
     <p><a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+John+4%3A8&amp;version=NIV">God is love</a>, they say, but there <a href="i-wanted-to-tell-you-something.html">is</a><br />no god. Therefore, how can there be love?<br />And if there is no love, how can there be God?<br />There are things in life, I suppose,<br />that are simply unanswerable mysteries<br />of existence. Maybe this God and love are one.</p>
     <p>Maybe there are many loves, instead of one.<br />The difference between <a href="largest-asteroid.html">what isn’t</a> and what is<br />could merely be one of scope. The mystery<br />is how we speak only of one love—<br />to act as though we know we are supposed<br />to love only one other, or that one other and God.</p>
     <p>But supposing that one other is God?<br />What then? Is the God-lover to walk alone,<br />supported by God only when He feels He is supposed<br />to support her? What kind of love is<br />this? I would argue in fact this isn’t love,<br />this <a href="http://www.footprints-inthe-sand.com/index.php?page=Poem/Poem.php">one-set-of-footprints-in-the-sand</a> mystery.</p>
@@ -24,7 +24,7 @@
         
                     </header>
 
-    <section class="prose">
+    <section class="thing prose">
     <p>Walking along in the dark is a good way to begin a song. Walking home in the dark after a long day chasing criminals is another. Running away from an imagined evil is no way to begin a story.</p>
     <p>I am telling you this because you wanted to know what it’s like to tell something so beautiful everyone will cry. I am telling you because I want you to know what it is to keep everything inside of you. I am telling you.</p>
     <p>Can you see? Can you see into me and reach in your hand and pull me inside out, like an <a href="ronaldmcdonald.html">old shirt</a>? Will you wear me until I unravel on your shoulders, will you cut me apart and use my skin to clean up the cola you spill on the floor when you’re drunk?</p>
@@ -24,7 +24,7 @@
         
                     </header>
 
-    <section class="prose">
+    <section class="thing prose">
     <p><em><a href="http://collection.hht.net.au/firsthhtpictures/fullRecordPicture.jsp?recnoListAttr=recnoList&amp;recno=31230">THIS MAN REFUSED TO OPEN HIS EYES</a></em></p>
     <figure>
     <img src="img/tbedemugshot.jpg" alt="THIS MAN REFUSED TO OPEN HIS EYES" /><figcaption>THIS MAN REFUSED TO OPEN HIS EYES</figcaption>
@@ -24,7 +24,7 @@
         
                     </header>
 
-    <section class="verse">
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     <p><a href="moongone.html">The moon is drowning</a> the stars it pushes them<br />under into the darkness they cannot breathe<br />they are flailing the moon boasts to my shadow<br />how powerful is the moon how great its light</p>
     <p>My shadow nods and calls the moon father though<br />it acknowledges also the existence of others<br />headlights are like little moons father my shadow says<br />they pass like waves in a dark ocean</p>
     <p>Father moon becomes angry and threatens<br />I can maroon you shadow I can trap you in darkness<br />your strength comes from my own the little moons<br />are fleeting like foam on a darkened sea</p>
@@ -24,7 +24,7 @@
         
                     </header>
 
-    <section class="prose">
+    <section class="thing prose">
     <p>The moon is gone and in its place a mirror. Looking at the night sky now yields nothing but the viewer’s own face as viewed from a million miles, surrounded by the landscape he is only vaguely aware of being surrounded by. He believes that he is <a href="apollo11.html">alone</a>, surrounded by desert and mountain, but behind him—he now sees it—someone is sneaking up on him. He spins around fast, but no one is there on <a href="serengeti.html">Earth</a>. He looks back up and they are yet closer in the night sky. Again he looks over his shoulder but there is nothing, not even a desert mouse. As he looks up again he realizes it’s a cloud above him, which due to optics has looked like someone else. The cloud blocks out the moon which is now a mirror, and the viewer is completely alone.</p>
     </section>
 
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                     </header>
 
-    <section class="verse">
+    <section class="thing verse">
     <p>The other side of this mountain<br />is not the mountain. This side<br />is honey-golden, sticky-sweet,<br />full of phone conversations with mother.<br />The other side is a bell,<br />ringing in the church-steeple<br />the day mother died.</p>
     <p>The other side of the mountain<br /><a href="apollo11.html">is not a mountain. It is a dark</a><br />valley crossed by a river.<br />There is a ferry at the bottom.</p>
     <p>This mountain is not a mountain.<br />I walked to the top, but it turned<br />and was only a shelf halfway up.<br />I felt like an unused Bible<br />sitting on a <a href="and.html">dusty pew</a>.</p>
@@ -24,7 +24,7 @@
         
                     </header>
 
-    <section class="prose">
+    <section class="thing prose">
     <p>A dog moving sideways is sick; a man moving sideways is drunk. Thus if you want to be mindful of the movings of the universe sideways, become either drunk or sick. By doing this you remove yourself from the equation, and are able to observe, without being observed, the universe as it dances sideways drunkenly.</p>
     <p>Shit wait. The problem is not that by observing you are observed (although quantum mechanics may disagree<a href="#fn1" class="footnoteRef" id="fnref1"><sup>1</sup></a>), because obviously dogs don’t know we’re observing them when we watch them through cameras in their little yard while they play and eat and poop—who poops knowingly on camera? The problem is <em>the actual act of observing that distorts the world into what we want it to be</em>.</p>
     <p>What I want to know is this: Why is this necessarily a problem? The dog is made, by mankind, to frolic and poop and sniff and growl and dig. Why cannot the man be made to observe the world incorrectly around him, and worry about it? Men have always wandered about the earth; does it not make sense that also they should wonder in their minds what makes it all work?<a href="#fn2" class="footnoteRef" id="fnref2"><sup>2</sup></a> In fact this is the very center of the creative being: the ability to move sideways, to dance with reality and judge it as it judges you, much like teenagers at the junior prom.</p>
@@ -28,7 +28,7 @@
         </p>
             </header>
 
-    <section class="verse">
+    <section class="thing verse">
     <p>Silence lies underneath us all in the same way<br />the Nile has a river underneath ten times as large<br />(although this is an urban legend, apparently).</p>
     <p>So underneath <a href="phone.html">truth</a> or legend, flowing by<br />the feel of their own <a href="nothing-is-ever-over.html">silence</a>, move the stars:<br />silence lies underneath us all in the same way.</p>
     <p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&amp;v=zY7UK-6aaNA#t=39">John Cage</a>, I think, understood this: the way<br />that, in a silent room, one still hears the nerves<br />(although this is an urban legend, apparently),</p>
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                     </header>
 
-    <section class="verse">
+    <section class="thing verse">
     <p>While <a href="father.html">swimming in the river</a><br />I saw underneath it a river<br />of stars. Only there was no<br />river: it was noon. You can<br />say <a href="music-433.html">the sun is a river</a>; you<br />can argue the stars back it<br />like <a href="lovessong.html">shirts behind a closet</a><br />door; you can say <a href="big-dipper.html">the earth</a><br />holds us up with its weight<br />or that it means well or it<br />means anything.<br />                There is no<br />closet, <a href="amber-alert.html">nor door</a>; there are<br />no shirts hanging anywhere.<br />There is no false wall that<br />leads deep into the earth’s<br />bowels, <a href="real-writer.html">growing warmer</a> with<br />each step. Warmth as a con-<br />cept has ceased to make any<br />sense. In contraposition to<br />cold, it might, but cold as<br />well <a href="i-think-its-you.html">stepped out</a> last night<br />and hasn’t returned.<br />                     Last I<br />heard, it went out swimming<br />and <a href="in-bed.html">might’ve drowned</a>. Trees<br />were the pallbearers at the<br />funeral, the train was long<br />and wailful, there was much<br /><a href="http://biblehub.com/luke/13-28.htm">wailing and gnashing</a> of all<br />teeth–though there were no<br />teeth, no train, no funeral<br />or prayer or trees at all–<br />nor a <a href="howtoread.html">river underneath</a> any-<br />thing. There was nothing to<br />be underneath anymore.<br />                       Look<br />around, and tell me you see<br />something. Look around, and<br />tell me something that I do<br />not know. I know, more than<br />anything, that the world is<br />always ending. Behind that,<br />there is nothing, save that<br />there is no nothing either.</p>
     <p>Nothing somehow still turns<br />and flows past us, past all<br />time and beyond it, a river<br />returning, to its forgotten<br />origins deep within itself.</p>
     </section>
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-    <section class="prose">
+    <section class="thing prose">
     <p>Paul began typing on notecards. Somehow this felt right to his sensibilities. It was difficult to get the little cards into the typewriter. It was a pain to readjust the typewriter for regular paper when he wasn’t writing. He started typing everything on those little notecards: grocery lists, letters to his grandmother, <a href="telemarketer.html">even reports for work</a> (which is what got him in trouble).</p>
     <p>But this was all later. For now he was writing his ideas, “notes” he now called them, something for him to combine later into something. He didn’t like to think about it. On this particular <a href="seasonal-affective-disorder.html">cold winter morning</a>, he wrote</p>
     <blockquote>
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                     </header>
 
-    <section class="verse">
+    <section class="thing verse">
     <p><a href="no-nothing.html">Nothing is ever over</a>; nothing<br />is ever even begun. The foundation<br />hasn’t been laid; how can we hope<br />to put in the plumbing? The bed<br />is unmade, not even made; the wood<br /><a href="axe.html">hasn’t been cleft from the tree</a>;<br />the seed hasn’t been cast<br />out of water and growth and sun,<br />which itself hasn’t started shining.<br />The cock has never stopped crowing<br />because he never started. Peter<br /><a href="spittle.html">betrays us again</a> and again with<br />silence. Christ wakes up at night,<br /><a href="in-bed.html">choking from a bad dream</a>, wrists<br />aching from a dreamt, torturous pain.</p>
     </section>
 
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                     </header>
 
-    <section class="verse">
+    <section class="thing verse">
     <p>I think that I could write formal poems<br />exclusively, or at least inclusive<br />with all the other stuff I write<br />I guess. Of course, I’ve already written<br />a few, this one included, though “formal”<br />is maybe a stretch. Is blank verse a form?<br />What is form anyway? I picture old<br />women counting <a href="roughgloves.html">stitches on their knitting</a>,<br />keeping iambs next to iambs in lines<br />as straight and sure as arrows. But my sock<br />is lumpy, poorly made: it’s beginning<br />to unravel. Stresses don’t line up. Syl-<br />lables forced to fit like <a href="ronaldmcdonald.html">McNugget</a> molds.<br />That cliché on the arrow? I’m aware.<br />My prepositions too—God, where’s it stop?<br />The answer: never. I will never stop<br />writing poems, or hating what I write.</p>
     </section>
 
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-    <section class="prose">
+    <section class="thing prose">
     <p>What did he do when he was in the woods? Where did he go? Was there always one spot, one clearing deep within the heart of them, that he would visit? Did he talk to the trees or only to himself? When he chopped down trees, did he leave them there to rot in the quiet or did he drag them out of the woods, behind his Shack, and <a href="weplayedthosegamestoo.html">dismember them</a>? Did he use any for firewood, or did the pieces rot behind his Shack, forgotten? When was the last time he built any furniture? Did he get any better at building it or did he just quit at some point, let the desire to create fall behind him like a forgotten felled tree?</p>
     <p>A tree fell in the forest: did it make a noise? Paul typed his thoughts on cards, or wrote them in a book: did anyone read it? If anyone did, was his life changed? For the better or the worse? Did he glance at the mess in the top drawer of his Writing Desk as he cleaned the Shack out long after Paul had quit using it? Did he put tools in there or leave it empty? <a href="finding-the-lion.html">What did he do with the desk?</a> Did he add it to the pile of rotting wood out back, or did he chop it up for a bonfire with friends, or a cozy fire with his wife and children, or did he take it to the dump three miles away to rot there? Are these all the options?</p>
     <p>Did Paul ever think about any of this? Walking in the woods one afternoon after becoming frustrated with his writing, did he sit on a stump and cry? Did he wonder whether he should have made other choices? Did he consider quitting smoking?</p>
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         </p>
                             </header>
 
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     <p><a href="joke.html">He said</a> at the beginning, “It’s like rolling yarn into a too-small ball. Sure, you can roll the memories around for a while, and maybe even use some of them. Eventually, though, you’ll wind them all the way out and you’ll be left with nothing but a small loop. You can tie this loop around your finger, and start wrapping your body, but this is an extension of the same problem. You’ll turn into a mummy of memory. There’ll be nothing left underneath but a dead body.</p>
     <p>“But what does it mean, <em>To remember the body with the body?</em> I imagine a creature made of memory, putting its feet in its mouth, turning into a ball. In this way, it could roll all around the landscape of its memory. I’ve tried explaining this to other people, but it doesn’t make any sense to them. The task of eating one’s feet is, to them, an unsolvable problem. They seem to forgotten that, as babies, they were able to make themselves into loops.</p>
     <p>“So I increase the count to two: two snakes eating each other’s tales, forming a loop. In this way they are able to put two heads on one body. This doubles the number of memories, which really only exacerbates the problem. It’s like trying to roll two different materials up into a ball. The people I tell this to don’t understand this either, they say using two animals makes sense to them. They say there must be different types of memory.</p>
@@ -24,7 +24,7 @@
         
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-    <section class="prose">
+    <section class="thing prose">
     <blockquote>
     <p>CONTENTS OF THE SHED</p>
     </blockquote>
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-    <section class="prose">
+    <section class="thing prose">
     <p>Importance is important. But meaning is meaningful. Here we are at the crux of the matter, for both meaning and importance are also human-formed. So it would seem that nothing is important or meaningful, if importance and meaning are of themselves only products of the fallible human intellect. But here is the great secret: <em>so is the fallibility of the human intellect a mere product of the fallible human intellect.</em> The question here arises: Is anything real, and not a mere invention of a mistaken human mind? By real of course I mean “that which is <em>on its own terms</em>,” that is, without any <a href="i-am.html">modification</a> on the part of mankind by observing it. But such a thing is impossible to be known, for if it be known it has certainly been observed by someone, and so it is not on its own terms but on the terms of the observer. So it cannot be known if anything exists on its own terms, for it exists on its own terms we certainly will not know anything about it.</p>
     <p>By this it is possible to see that nothing is knowable without the mediating factor of our mind fucking up the “<a href="spittle.html">raw</a>,” the “real” world. But by this time it would seem that this chapter is far far too philosophical, not to mention pretentious, so I must try again.</p>
     </section>
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-    <section class="prose">
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     <p>“Hello Paul this is Jill Jill Noe remember me” the voice on the phone was a woman’s. He nodded into the receiver. “Hello” Jill asked again “hello?” Paul remembered that phones work by talking and said “Hello Jill.”</p>
     <p>“Do you remember me” she asked “we were in school together? How have you been?” “Pretty well” said Paul “I’ve been writing and making furniture.” “Oh that’s nice” <a href="telemarketer.html">said the woman’s voice</a> tinny in the phone “Listen I ran into your mother at the <a href="last-bastion.html">Supermarket</a> the other day and she said you need a job. You still need one?” Paul had to tell the truth. His mother was watching him out of the corner of her eye as she was playing dominoes at the kitchen table. “Yes” he said sighing “Although woodworking takes up much of my time.”</p>
     <p>“OK” she laughed uncomortably “I actually have something you could do for me if you think you can get away from woodworking a bit. It’s just data entry really basic stuff entry-level.” “What’s it pay” he asked. “Minimum but there is room for movement.” “OK” he said. “Start on Monday okay?” “Sure” he said “bye” and the tin voice in the phone said “Goodbye Paul see you” by the time he put it back on the hook.</p>
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     <blockquote>
     <p><a href="swear.html">EVERYTHING CHANGES OR EVERYTHING</a> <a href="howtoread.html">STAYS THE SAME</a></p>
     </blockquote>
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+    <section class="thing verse">
     <p>I need a plant. I need a thing<br />to take care of. I need<br />a little green brownspotted<br /><a href="building.html">blackdirt</a> growing<br />quietness. I need a sunlit<br />dawn knowing my name filtered<br />through a <a href="window.html">thin green window</a>.<br />I need chlorophyll<br />working its <a href="cereal.html">magic</a> on beams of<br />grassmade early morning dewdrop<br />sweetmaking green. I need<br />the dark earth sucking water<br />from a black crevice<br />its black magic churning<br />wormilled rockturned starblind<br />darkness and cold into<br /><a href="https://samofthetenthousandthings.wordpress.com/2012/09/08/charles-wright-reads-james-wright-the-journey-audio-poem/">the opposite of dust</a>. I need the heat<br />to blind me. I need the dumb making<br />to charge my coldened blood. I need<br />the dropturned leaves to turn again<br />their <a href="no-nothing.html">faces to the windblown sun</a>.<br />I need millions of tiny years<br />summed up and burning out some unknown<br />new growth into the air. I need four<br />hundred feet of dark red gnarled wood<br />and needles glistening wetly on goldheaded<br />branches hoisting themselves<br />to the sky. I need ten strong men<br />to fail to bring you down. Old one<br />I need the peace that comes with knowing<br />something sacred holds still<br />in the world. I need your green tongues<br /><a href="fire.html">of flame to lick at old wounds</a><br />stitching us together away from ourselves.<br />I need your brownbranching grasp<br />to keep me from drifting off<br />into <a href="in-bed.html">unknowing terrible sleep</a>. I need<br /><a href="ouroboros_memory.html">to know the snake</a> hanging<br />from your branches. I need to watch<br />the dropping of flesh massful<br />onto the ground from a height. I need<br />the gnawer at your root to strike<br />a vein to quicken old brown stone<br />to movement. I need jeweleyed venom<br />barking new greennesses into the bark.<br />I need a knocker of dark secrets hidden<br />in the dark bark hiding a smallstone<br />smoldering pearl in the knot. I need<br />that <a href="roughgloves.html">pearl held out in a hand</a> like an offering.<br />I need the hand to be a plant’s hand.</p>
     <p>I need a plant. I need a growing<br />growler <a href="feedingtheraven.html">groaning</a> toward heat and air.<br />I need a green thin stem surprisingly strong<br />holding up the weight of a plain<br />of fallow <a href="the-sea_the-beach.html">greennesses of creases and caresses</a><br />of tiny worldmaking hardworking grandeur.<br />I need a singer of life crying<br />forward into old roads covered over<br />by dead trees. I need the rasping of root<br />in dirt. I need the unfurling of fiddleheads<br />to sing forth a new symphony. I need<br />fruits swelling large for the harvest.<br />I need yellow light shining through white bark.<br />I need juicecrush flowing waterlike<br />through valleys percolating up<br />through the ground. I need springs bubbling sap<br />into cabins of wood fought for by labor.<br />I need snow on the ground with shoots<br />dotting the melting patches. I need two<br />leaves on a thin stalk shivering<br />in <a href="finding-the-lion.html">moonlight</a>. I need robinsong warbling<br />over the heads of small seeds sprouting<br />to enliven their growth. I need rings<br />of woody material widening to push<br />the ground out of their way. I need<br />new greennesses pushing out from<br />the brown dark bark gnarled. I<br />need the robin to build its songfilled<br />nest in a <a href="epigraph.html">branchcrotch</a>. I need<br />the fecundity of fungi on the branches.<br />I need quiet of the sunlight shooting<br />through thousands of branched leaves<br />quivering. <a href="apollo11.html">I need whisper at dawn.</a><br />I need burrows underground foxholes.<br />I need duff layers eaten through<br />by worms. I need brooks murmuring<br />through crooks of roots. I need small<br /><a href="proverbs.html">fish swimming</a> in their schools at<br />midnight. I need oldnesses giving way<br /><a href="about-the-author.html">to youngnesses giving way to oldnesses</a>.<br />I need dapplegray yellowshot ashbark.<br />I need the crunch of dead leaves underfoot.<br />I need <a href="100-lines.html">snowquiet deadbranch</a> mourning.<br />I need those <a href="http://www.wrensworld.com/purpmount.htm">purple mountains majesty</a>.<br />I need a walk between trees in the dark.<br />I need that moment when stopping to rest<br />it suddenly seems that all the weary<br /><a href="http://www.bartleby.com/119/1.html">forestroads</a> in all their meandering come<br /><a href="riptide_memory.html">to rest their heads</a> at my astonished<br />feet, none of them needing more than me.</p>
     </section>
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-    <section class="verse">
+    <section class="thing verse">
     <p>I’m writing this now because I have to.<br />Not in some “my soul yearns for this and<br />I can’t help it” way, but in the way that this<br />moment is structured as such, that it is<br />crystallized this way, me writing this, and later<br />you reading it, now for you, later for me,</p>
     <p>and this tenuous connection mates me<br />and you forever, combined with each other, two<br /><a href="treatise.html">electrons momentarily entwined</a>. Later,<br />when I’m dead or far too famous for you, and<br />you’re in school, reading my words because it is<br />required reading, I want you to remember this</p>
     <p>connection we’ve always had, this<br /><a href="last-passenger.html">spider’s thread</a> hanging between you and me.<br />Which of us is the spider and which is<br />the fly still remains to be seen. To<br />eat, perchance to fly: all of that and<br />more. We can settle all of this later.</p>
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-    <section class="prose">
+    <section class="thing prose">
     <p>Of course, <a href="boar.html">there is a God</a>. Of course, <a href="TODO_BONNIE_PRINCE_BILLIE_YOUTUBE">there is no God</a>. Of course, what’s really <a href="building.html">important</a> is that these aren’t important. No, they are; but not really important. All that’s important is the relative importance of non-important things. <a href="january.html">Shit.</a> Never mind; let’s start over.</p>
     </section>
 
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-    <section class="prose">
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     <p>The problem with people is this: we cannot be happy. No matter how hard or easy we try, it is not to be. It seems sometimes that, just as the dog was made for jumping in mud and sniffing out foxholes and having a good time all around, man was made for sadness, loneliness and heartache.</p>
     <p>Being the observant and judgmental people they are, people have for a long time tried to figure out why they aren’t happy. Some say it’s because we’re obviously doing something wrong. Some say it’s because we think too much. Some insist that it’s because other people have more stuff than we do. These people don’t have a clue any more than any of the rest of us. At least I don’t think they do, and that’s good enough for me.<a href="#fn1" class="footnoteRef" id="fnref1"><sup>1</sup></a> I think that the reason why people are unhappy (and this is a personal opinion) is that they realize on some level (for some it’s a pretty shallow level, others it’s way down there next to their love for women’s stockings<a href="#fn2" class="footnoteRef" id="fnref2"><sup>2</sup></a>) that there is no background to put themselves against, no “<a href="ronaldmcdonald.html">big picture</a>” to get painted into. This makes sense, because on one level, the level of everyday life, the level of <em>observation</em>, there is always a background—look in a pair of binoculars sometime. But on another level, that of … shit, wait. There are no other levels.<a href="#fn3" class="footnoteRef" id="fnref3"><sup>3</sup></a></p>
     <p>What’s more, people try to explain how to get happy again (although it’s doubtful they were ever happy in the first place—people are very good at fooling). Some say standing or [sitting in a building][] with a lot of other unhappy people helps. Some say that you can’t stop there; you also need to sing with those other unhappy people about how unhappy you are, and how you wish someone would come along and help you out, I guess by giving you money or something. I say all you really need to be happy is a good stiff drink.<a href="#fn4" class="footnoteRef" id="fnref4"><sup>4</sup></a></p>
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     <p><a href="words-meaning.html">Nothing matters; everything is sacred. Everything matters; nothing is sacred</a>.<a href="#fn1" class="footnoteRef" id="fnref1"><sup>1</sup></a> This is the only way we can move forward: by moving sideways. Life is a great big rugby game, and the entire field has to be run for a goal. The fact that the beginning two verses of this chapter have the same number of characters proves that they are a tautological pair, that is, they <em>complete each other</em>. Sometimes life seems like a dog wagging its tail, smiling up at you and wanting you to love it, just wanting that, simple simple love, oblivious to the fact that it just ran through your immaculately groomed flower garden and tracked all the mud in onto your freshly steamed carpet. Life is not life in a suburb. <a href="lovesong.html">There are no rosebushes, groomed never. There is no carpet, steamed at any time.</a> The dog looks at you wanting you to love it. It wants to know that you know that it’s there. <em>It wants to be observed</em>.<a href="#fn2" class="footnoteRef" id="fnref2"><sup>2</sup></a></p>
     <section class="footnotes">
     <hr />
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     <p>When he finally got back to work he was surprised they threw him a party. <em><strong>WELCOME BACK PAUL!</strong></em> was written on a big banner across the back wall. Someone had ordered a confectioner’s-sugar cake with <a href="big-dipper.html">frosting flowers</a> on the corners. It said the same thing as the banner. “Welcome back, Paul” said Jill as he was at the punch bowl. The cup was on the table as he ladled punch in with his right hand. His left was wrapped in <a href="100-lines.html">gauze</a>.</p>
     <p>“Let me help you with that” said Jill. Paul had a strange feeling this had happened before. She took the ladle and their hands touched. She picked the cup up in her right hand and used her left to lift the spoon. “You know” she said “we were worried about you. When Jerry heard about your hand he said ‘There goes one of our best data entry men.’” “I still can’t really move my left hand” said Paul. “That’s alright you can take your time with the entry.” “I’m sorry.”</p>
     <p>“Sorry for what” she looked at his eyes. He imagined her seeing <a href="hands.html">fisheye</a> versions of herself in them. “I don’t know” he said because it was true. “It’s alright anyway” she said and placed the full punch cup in his right hand.</p>
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     <p>Okay, so as we said in <a href="prelude.html">the Prelude</a>, there either is or isn’t a God. This has been one of the main past times of humanity, ever since … since the first man (or woman) climbed out of whatever slime or swamp he thumbed his way out of. What humanity has failed to realize is that an incredibly plausible third, and heretofore unknown, hypothesis also exists: There is a dog.</p>
     <p>In fact, there are many dogs, and not only that. There are also many types of dogs; these are called breeds, and each breed was created by man in order to fulfill some use that man thought he needed. Some dogs are for chasing birds, and some are for chasing badgers. Some are for laying in your lap and being petted all day. Some dogs don’t seem to be really for anything, besides being fucking stupid and chewing up your one-of-a-kind collectible individually-numbered King Kong figurine from the Peter Jackson film. But the important thing is, (and here we go with important things again) all dogs have been bred by people for performing some certain function that we think is important.</p>
     <p>Note: <em>Just because we think it’s important doesn’t mean it is important.</em> But it might as well be, because what we as humans think is important is important. But be careful! Just because something’s important doesn’t mean it means anything, or that it actually makes anything happen. Even though just because something makes something else happen doesn’t mean it’s important. <a href="feedingtheraven.html">Shit</a>. Let me start again.</p>
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     <p>“Do you have to say your thoughts out loud for them to mean anything” Paul asked Jill on his first coffee break at work. It was in the city and his mother told him she wouldn’t drive him so he’d had to take the bus. Number 3 he thought it was. <a href="riptide_memory.html">He couldn’t quite remember.</a> Jill said “Sorry what?” Paul realized that she hadn’t really noticed him there in the break room as he was hunched behind the refrigerator a little and she was busy pouring coffee and exactly two tablespoons of both milk and sugar into her mug before she put the coffee in. He decided to repeat the question.</p>
     <p>“How do you think” he asked. “Like everyone else I guess” she said “I have a thought and if it’s important I write it down.” “Do you have to say them out loud for them to make sense?” “Are you asking if I talk to myself?” A pause. “I guess so” he said looking down. He had a feeling this was a bad thing. “Sometimes” she said and walked out of the break room. She didn’t understand the importance of his question. She popped her head back in a moment later and his heart leaped in his chest.</p>
     <p>“How’s your first day going so far” she asked. “Can you understand everything okay?” “Yes” he said “you were right it’s pretty basic.” “Good” she said. “Paul?” “Yes.” “Do you have to say all of your thoughts out loud to remember them?” He shook his head.</p>
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     <p>Sometimes I feel as though I am not a real writer.<br /><a href="cereal.html">I don’t smoke</a>. I don’t wake up early but I don’t sleep<br />all day either. I find myself increasingly interested<br />in dumb luck. Chance: I’ve found two dimes in as many<br />days. Does this mean I’ve found twenty lucky pennies?<br />I want you to participate. You the reader. You,<br />the probabilistic god of my dreams. I’ve been having<br /><a href="in-bed.html">strange dreams</a> lately. I don’t remember them but<br />they leave impressions. A bare foot. A tunnel<br />of hair from her face to mine. A boat stranded<br />in a living-room. Something warm. Something like the sun<br />through my eyelids. <a href="roughgloves.html">A hand, with all its dead symbology</a>.<br /><a href="no-nothing.html">My teeth have fallen out</a>. No, you pulled them out<br />with your hands, threw them over your left shoulder<br /><a href="i-am.html">like salt</a>, to wish away bad luck. I have something<br />to tell you: bad luck follows like a dog. It lets you<br />get ahead for a few days, a week, a year. You’ll see,<br />it’ll bite your sleeping face when you’re not looking.<br />I’ve been dreaming about the future, I know. In my dream<br />I am not a writer, <a href="riptide_memory.html">I live in a place with rain</a>. You<br />are sunning yourself as you read this, on a beach or<br />maybe a desert. Let me move in with you. I can cook<br /><a href="when-im-sorry-i.html">or clean</a> or take care of your dog while you’re out.<br />I’ll never have to write again. <a href="about-the-author.html">I’ll watch television</a>.<br />Do I want to become a writer? Tell me. Should I smoke?<br />I can sleep all day in your attic if you want, become<br /><a href="love-as-god.html">your god</a>, lose my own, settle to the bottom of the bed<br />like a boat in a river, dream about nothing but <a href="leaf.html">furniture</a>.</p>
     </section>
 
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-    <section class="prose">
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     <p>“Paul, you can’t turn in your reports on four-by-six notecards” Jill told him after he handed her his reports, typed carefully on twelve four-by-six notecards. He had spent the weekend</p>
     <ol type="1">
     <li>going to the Office Supply Store to buy notecards and typewriter ribbon (he found it surprisingly easily) after his first payday</li>
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     <p>Inside of my memory, the poem is another memory.<br />The air up here is thin, but the wind blows harder<br />than anywhere else I know. It threatens to rip<br />my body away, like <a href="angeltoabraham.html">an angel of death</a>, to the stars.</p>
     <p>In Arizona, I thought I would forget the rain,<br />forget its sound on a roof like a hard wind, forget<br />its smell like a far away ocean. Luckily for me<br />it rains here. Luckily, because I forget too easily.</p>
     <p>In a dream, <a href="father.html">my father is caught by a riptide</a> off-shore.<br />He’s pulled far out, far enough that the shoreline’s<br />a line in his <a href="ouroboros_memory.html">memory</a> on the horizon. I can see him<br />swimming, hand over hand, pulling his small weight</p>
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     <p>When Ronald McDonald takes off his <a href="theoceanoverflowswithcamels.html">striped shirt</a>,<br />his coveralls, his painted face: when he no longer looks<br />like anyone or anything special, sitting next to women</p>
     <p>in bars or standing in the aisle at the grocery,<br />is he no longer Ronald? Is he no longer happy to kick<br />a soccer ball around with the kids in the park,</p>
     <p>is he suddenly unable to enjoy the french fries<br />he gets for his fifty percent off? I’d like to think<br />that he takes Ronald off like a shirt, hangs him</p>
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     <p>I lost my hands &amp; knit replacement ones<br />from <a href="poetry-time.html">spiders’ threads</a>, stronger than steel but soft<br />as lambs’ wool. Catching as they do on nails<br />&amp; your collarbone, you don’t seem to like<br />their rough warm presence on your <a href="feedingtheraven.html">cheek or thigh</a>.<br />I’ve asked you if you minded, you’ve said no<br />(your face a table laid with burnt meat, bread<br />so stale it could <a href="weplayedthosegamestoo.html">break a hand</a>). Remember<br />your senile mother’s face above that table?<br />I’d say she got the meaning of that look.<br />You’d rather not be touched by these rough gloves,<br />the only way I have to knit a love<br />against whatever winters we may enter<br />like a silkworm in a spider’s blackened <a href="serengeti.html">maw</a>.</p>
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     <p>He chopped down a sapling pine tree and looked at his watch. From first chop to fall it had taken him eight minutes and something like twenty seconds. Maybe a little change. He leaned against another tree and fished in his pocket for a cigarette. He lifted it out of its box and fished in his other pocket for his lighter, failing to find it. He searched his other pockets. He came to the realization that he had forgotten it in his Shack (in confusion over his True Vocation, he’d resorted to calling it simply the Shack until he could figure it out). He sighed and put his hands in his pockets.</p>
     <p>“I wonder if trees are protective of their young” he said to himself, then wondered if why he had to think his thoughts out loud, then remembered he always did this, then remembered his conversation with Jill. He hoped she didn’t. He hoped that conversation was like <a href="options.html">the tree that fell in the forest</a> with no one around. “I wonder if a thought said out loud isn’t heard by anyone, if it was made. I think maybe this is what Literature (big L) is all about, if it’s trying to make a connection because no idea matters unless it’s connected to something else, or to someone else. Maybe no wood matters unless it’s <a href="last-passenger.html">bound to another</a> by upholstery nails. If ‘the devil is in the details,’ as they say (who are ‘they’ anyway?), the details are the connections? That doesn’t make sense. Details are details. Connections are connections.</p>
     <p>“Still, a neuron by itself means nothing. Put them all together though and connect them. You’ve got a brain.”</p>
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     <p>On your desk I set a tangerine:<br />a relic of a <a href="january.html">winter</a> quickly passing.</p>
     <p>I’m reminded, fiercely, of a summer:<br />I watched the <a href="death-zone.html">cemetery grass</a> on my stomach.</p>
     <p>You hate the wind <a href="building.html">blowing through buildings</a>:<br />the coldness of fire, blister of a mountain stream.</p>
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     <p>I only write poems on <a href="stagnant.html">the bus</a> anymore.<br />I sit far in the back to be alone.<br />I mark black things on white things in a black thing.<br />I try to make sense of it.</p>
     <p>Every time I see a plastic bag in the wind I think:<br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qssvnjj5Moo">This is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.</a><br />Most of my life I relate to something on the TV:<br />This is how I try to make sense of it.</p>
     <p>The Talking Heads song <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9r7X3f2gFz4">“Stop Making Sense”</a><br />is about a girlfriend caught cheating and willed oblivion.<br />The song’s real title is “Girlfriend is Better”<br />but <a href="the-night-we-met.html">lying</a> about it is a way I try to make sense of it.</p>
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     <p>The self is a serengeti<br />a wide grassland with baobab trees<br />reaching their roots deep into earth<br />like a child into a clay pot<br />A wind blows there or seems to blow<br />if he holds it up to his ear the air shifts<br />like stones in a stream uncovering a crawfish<br />it finds another hiding place watching you<br />Its eyes are blacker than wind<br />on the serengeti they are the <a href="onformalpoetry.html">eyes of a predator</a><br />they are coming toward you or receding<br />a storm cloud builds on the horizon<br />Are you <a href="squirrel.html">running</a> toward the rain or away from it<br />Do you stand still and crouch hoping for silence</p>
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     <p>“What do you do all day in that shed out back” his mother asked one night while they ate dinner in front of the TV. “Write” he answered. “Write what” she asked in that way that means he’d better not say I don’t know. “I don’t know” he said.</p>
     <p>“Goddammit Paul” his mother said. “You’re <a href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/177229">wasting your life</a> out in that shed. You need to go out and get—” “I chop down trees too” he said. “I make furniture out of them.” His mother’s face did a Hitchcock zoom as she considered this new information. “Is it any good” she asked, eyes narrowed.</p>
     <p>“It’s getting there” he answered. “I’m getting better every day.” “When is it going to be there” she asked. “When are you going to sell <a href="real-writer.html">this furniture</a> of yours?” “It’ll be a while” he answered.</p>
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     <p>He builds a ship as if it were the last thing<br />holding him together, as if, when he stops,<br />his body will fall onto the plate-glass water<br />and shatter into sand. To keep his morale up<br />he whistles and sings, but the wind whistles <a href="apollo11.html">louder</a><br />and taunts him: Your ship will build itself<br />if you throw yourself into the sea; time<br />has a way of growing your beard for you.<br />Soon, you’ll find yourself on a rocking chair<br />on some porch made from your ship’s timbers.<br />The window behind you is made from a sail, thick<br />canvas, and no one inside will hear your calling<br />for milk or a chamberpot. Your children<br />will have all sailed to the New World and left you.<br />But he tries not to listen, continues to hammer<br />nail after nail into timber after timber,<br />but the wind <a href="theoceanoverflowswithcamels.html">finally blows</a> him into the growling ocean<br />and the ship falls apart on its own.</p>
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     <p>If Justin Bieber isn’t going for the sixteenth<br />chapel, I’m not either. I admit he is my role<br />model. He’s so current, so fresh and so new,<br />and Michelangelo is so old, his art so dated.<br />Where is the love in those old paintings? All<br />I see is <a href="creation-myth.html">creation</a>, <a href="movingsideways.html">judgment</a>, and <a href="deathstrumpet.html">death</a>—</p>
     <p>and I don’t get the preoccupation with death.<br />I’m about life! Ever since my sixteenth<br />birthday, when me and my two sisters all<br />nearly died when the car I was driving rolled<br />into a creek. Even though I’ve <a href="riptide_memory.html">forgotten the date</a>,<br />I think it keeps me thinking on the new,</p>
     <p>something Biebs would be proud of if he knew.<br />I look at him, and see the <a href="death-zone.html">opposite of death</a><br />in his eyes, his youthful smile: though someday<br />he may <a href="i-am.html">be a father</a>, and later host a Sweet Sixteen<br />for his daughter (who I know he’ll buy a Rolls),<br />death will never find him. Living will be all</p>
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     <p><em><a href="fire.html">I don’t care if they burn</a></em> he wrote on his last blank notecard. He’d have to go to the Office Supply Store tomorrow after work.</p>
     <p>He looked at what he’d written. He’d been thinking about this for a while, felt the frustration build slowly like a <a href="serengeti.html">thundercloud</a> in the back of his mind. He thought he should write something else on the card, but everything he thought of seemed too confessional or too real compromising. <a href="lappel-du-vide.html">He didn’t want anyone, not even the notecards, to know what he was thinking.</a> He decided to try for more of an interview with the paper.</p>
     <p><em>Why?</em> asked the notecard. <em>Because there is nothing important on any of them</em> he wrote back. <em>What do you mean? You have some good stuff in that top drawer there.</em> He looked in the top drawer. It was stuffed full of notecards in no organization. He could see bits and pieces of thoughts like leaves crunched underfoot in autumn. <em>It will take so much organization</em> he wrote.</p>
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     <p>in mammals the ratio between bladder size<br />and urethra is such that it takes<br />all of them the same time to piss. Take<br />for example the fact that Fibonnacci<br />numbers show up everywhere. How can you<br />look at this at all of this all of<br />these facts and tell me to my face there<br />is no God? And yet there isn’t<br />you murmer quietly into my ear over<br />and over like a low tide sounding<br />its lonely waves on an abandoned beach.<br />The ocean that birthed us holds us<br />still. We are tied, you and I, together<br />in her arms. The <a href="moon-drowning.html">moon, caring father,</a><br />looks down from a dispassionate sky.</p>
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     <p>My body is attached to your body by a thin spittle of thought.<br />When you turn away from me, my thought is broken<br />and forms anew with something else. Ideas are drool.<br />Beauty has been slobbered over far too long. <a href="howithappened.html">God</a><br />is a tidal wave of bodily fluid. Even the flea has some<br />vestigial wetness. We live in a world fleshy and dark,<br />and moist as a nostril. Is conciousness only a watery-eyed<br />romantic, crying softly into his <a href="lovesong.html">shirt-sleeve</a>? Is not reason<br />a square-jawed businessman with a briefcase full of memory?<br />I want to kiss the world to make it mine. I want to become<br />a Judas to reality, betray it with the wetness of emotion.</p>
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     <p>He is so full in himself:<br />how far down the branch to run,<br />how long to jump, when to grab the air<br />and catch in it and turn, and land on branch<br />so gracefully it’s like dying, alone<br />and warm in a bed next to a summer window<br />and the <a href="mountain.html">birds singing</a>. And on that branch there<br />is the squirrel dancing among the branches<br />and you think <em>What if he fell?</em> but he won’t<br />because he’s a squirrel and that’s what<br />they do, <a href="movingsideways.html">dance</a> and never fall. It was erased<br />long ago from the squirrel, even<br />the possibility of falling was erased<br />from his being by the slow inexorable evolution<br />of squirrels, that is why all squirrels<br />are so full in themselves, full in who they are.</p>
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     <p>“Riding the bus to work is a good way to think or to read” Paul thought to himself on the bus ride to work. His thoughts couldn’t become real to him because he didn’t want to look insane to everyone else on the bus. His thoughts came to him like someone <a href="sense-of-it.html">yelling over a hard wind</a>. He was trying to write them on his memory but the act of writing was easier and more immediate than that of listening. He was afraid that when he looked at his memory later he wouldn’t be able to read what was written.</p>
     <p>“Thoughts are like the wind outside a moving bus” he thought “or rather the bus is a brain slamming into columns of stagnant air causing them to whistle past in a confusion of something.” He could barely hear the voice <a href="cold-wind.html">yelling to him over the wind</a>. “Speak up” he thought to the voice, then remembered it was his own. He wished he’d remembered a book to read.</p>
     <p>He looked at his hands to pass the time. <a href="hands.html">They were dry in the winter air</a> that had seeped its way into the bus. He tried to figure out how many hours they would make it before cracking and bleeding. “Maybe three or four” he thought accidentally out loud. He looked around expecting stares from everyone on the seat. <a href="stayed-on-the-bus.html">He was surprised that he was the only one on the bus.</a></p>
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         <h1 class="subtitle">a fragment</h1>
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     <h2 id="i.-eli" class="unnumbered">I. Eli</h2>
     <p>“Can one truly describe an emotion?” Eli asked me over the walkie-talkie. He was in the bathroom, &amp; had taken the walkie-talkie in with him absent-mindedly. I could hear sounds of his piss hitting the toilet water.</p>
     <p>“I can hear you peeing,” I said. He didn’t answer so I said in apology, “It’s okay. Humans are sexually dimorphic.” I was sitting on my blue baby blanket texting Jon, who was funny and amicable over the phone. He made a three-message joke about greedy lawyers and I would have been laughing if not for my embarrassment toward Eli. He finally came out of the bathroom and kept his eyes straight ahead, toward the wall calendar and not at me, as he passed through the family room into his bedroom, were he shut the door quietly. Presently I heard some muffled noise as he turned on his iPod. I guessed he didn’t feel like talking so I stayed on my blanket watching the <em>Price is Right</em> and texting Jon.</p>
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     <p>It was a <a href="hard-game.html">gamble</a><br />I lost—thought I could get closer<br />than the library, stayed<br />on past the admin building,<br />back down the hill to my beginning,<br />the driver’s second-to-last stop.<br /><a href="lappel-du-vide.html">I have to walk now</a>,<br />through the wind and sun, past<br /><a href="theoceanoverflowswithcamels.html">traffic</a> moving merrily along<br />taking their own gambles<br />staying on or getting off<br />too soon.</p>
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     <p>He walked into the woods for the first time in months. It was a bright summer day but under the canopy of leaves it was cool and quiet and twilight. <a href="music-433.html">There was no sound but his footsteps, his breathing.</a> Instead of an axe, his right hand clutched his notebook. His left was in his pocket. A pencil perched behind his ear.</p>
     <p>He walked aimlessly until coming over a short rise he saw a stump. He recognized his handiwork in the way the stump made a kind of chair back—flat until the axe had gone through far enough, then a frayed edge like a torn page. Paul walked over to the stump and sat down.</p>
     <p>He looked up and tried to find a pattern in the placement of the trees. There was none. They grew randomly, beginning nowhere and ending in the same place. <a href="squirrel.html">A squirrel</a> ran down one and up another for no reason. He opened his notebook and took his pencil from his ear but could think of nothing to write.</p>
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         <h1 class="subtitle">alternate version</h1>
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     <p>This poem is dry like <a href="time-looks-up-to-the-sky.html">chapped lips</a>.<br /><a href="no-nothing.html">It is hard as teeth</a>—hear the tapping?<br />It is the swan song of beauty, as all<br />swan songs are. <a href="poetry-time.html">Reading</a> it, you are<br />puzzled, perhaps a little repulsed.<br />Swans do not have teeth, nor do they sing.<br />A honking over the cliff is all<br />they can do, and that they do<br />badly. You don’t know where I’m going.<br />You want to tell me, <a href="about-the-author.html">You are not you</a>.<br /><a href="swansong.html">You are the air the swan walks on.</a><br />You are the fringe of the curtain<br /><a href="elegyforanalternateself.html">that separates me from you</a>. I say<br />that you are no longer the temple,<br />that you have been through <a href="fire.html">fire</a><br />and are now less than ash. You are<br />the subtraction of yourself from<br />the world, <a href="finding-the-lion.html">the air without a swan</a>.<br />Together, we are each other. You<br />and I have both nothing and everything<br />at once, we own the world and nothing in it.</p>
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     <p>Swans fly overhead singing goodbye<br />to we <a href="howithappened.html">walkers of the earth</a>. You point<br />to them in formation, you tell me<br />you are not you. <a href="swansong-alt.html">You are the air the swans<br />walk on</a> as they journey like pilgrims<br />to a temple in the south. A curtain<br />there separates me from you, swans<br />from the air they fly through. I say<br />that you are no longer the temple,<br />that you have been through fire<br />and are now less than ash. You are<br />a <a href="moongone.html">mirror</a> of me, the <a href="deathstrumpet.html">air without a swan</a>.<br />Together, we are each other. You<br />and I have both nothing and everything<br />at once. We own the world and nothing in it.</p>
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     <blockquote>
     <p><a href="planks.html">EVERYTHING CHANGES OR EVERYTHING STAYS THE SAME</a></p>
     </blockquote>
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     <table>
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     <p><em>Apparently typewriters need ribbon. Apparently ribbon is incredibly hard to find anymore because no one uses typewriters. Apparently I am writing my hymns from now on.</em> So he was back to calling his notes “hymns.” He looked up “hymns” in the dictionary. It said that a hymn was “an ode or song of praise or adoration.” Praise or adoration to what? he asked himself. He thought maybe furniture. There was still a lot of notfurniture in what he was again calling his Writing Shack.</p>
     <p>The dictionary also had this to say about “hymn”: that it was possibly related to the old Greek word for “<a href="likingthings.html">weave</a>.” “<a href="roughgloves.html">Weave what</a>” Paul wondered to himself. He wrote this down on a new notecard. <em>Apparently “hymn” means weave somehow. Or it used to. Or its cousin did. What is it weaving? Who is it weaving for? I remember in school we talked about Odysseus and his wife Penelope, who wove a tapestry every day just to take it apart at night. I forget why.</em></p>
     <p><em>Maybe she wove the tapestry for Odysseus. Maybe she wove it for herself. What did she weave it of? <a href="ouroboros_memory.html">Memory</a>, maybe? <a href="in-bed.html">Or dream</a>? I think these words make a kind of tapestry, or at least the thread it will be made of. I will weave a hymn to the gods of Literature, out of fiction. My furniture was a try at weaving, but I am shit at furniture. So writing it is again.</em></p>
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     <p>It was one of those nameless gray buildings that could be seen from the street only if Larry craned his neck to almost vertical. He never had, of course, having heard when he first arrived in the city that only tourists unaccustomed to tall buildings did so. He’d never thought about it until he’d heard the social injunction against such a thing; it was now one of the things he thought about almost every day as he rode to and from work in gritty blue buses.</p>
     <p>Inside the building, the constant sound of recirculating dry air made Larry feel as though he were at some beach in hell, listening to the <a href="theoceanoverflowswithcamels.html">ocean</a>, or more accurately at a gift shop in a landlocked state in hell listening to the ocean as represented by the sound a conch shell makes when he holds it up to his ear. The buzz of the fluorescent bulbs overhead sounded like the hot sun bearing down all day in this metaphor, a favorite of Larry’s.</p>
     <p>His cubicle was made of that cheap, grayish-blue plywood that cubicles are made of; inside it, his computer sat on his desk as Larry liked to think an <a href="mountain.html">eagle perched</a> on a mountainous crag much like the crag that was his desktop wallpaper. The walls were unadorned except for a few tacked-up papers in <a href="reports.html">report</a> covers explaining his script. When Larry made a call to a potential customer it always went the same way:</p>
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         <h1 class="subtitle">or Lying in the dark</h1>
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     <p>My head is <a href="found-typewriter-poem.html">full of fire</a>, my tongue swollen,<br />pregnant with all the things I should’ve said<br />but didn’t. Last night, we met each other<br />in the dark, remember? You told me time was</p>
     <p>pregnant with all things. I should’ve said<br />something, to draw you out from your place<br />in the dark. Remember, you told me time was<br />only an illusion, <a href="riptide_memory.html">and memory was</a> only</p>
     <p>something to draw. You, out from your place,<br />I out from mine, that night, I believed in you.<br />Only illusion and memory were one, lying<br /><a href="early.html">down on your couch</a>, through the night you drew</p>
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     <p>Waiting for a reading to start<br />when there’s nobody coming anyway<br />is like waiting <a href="cold-wind.html">for the tide</a><br />to make some meaning of the beach.</p>
     <p>The sea doesn’t know or care<br />what the beach even is, let alone<br />its cares or its troubles, its<br />little nagging under-the-skin annoyances<br /><a href="real-writer.html">that make the beach the beach</a>.</p>
     <p>Sandworms, for example, or those crabs<br />with big pincers on one side<br />but not the other. Those really get<br />the beach’s gander up, but the sea<br />doesn’t care. The sea</p>
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     <p>We found your <a href="lovesong.html">shirt</a> deep in the dark water,<br />caught on the clothesline of sleeping pills.<br />Your head on the shore was streaming tears<br />like sleeves or the coronas of saints saved<br />from fire. The burning bush began crying<br />like a child who misses his mother. Traffic<br />slammed shut like an eye. God’s mean <a href="roughgloves.html">left hook</a><br />knocked us out, and we began swimming.<br />Bruises bloomed like algae on a lake.<br />Your <a href="angeltoabraham.html">father</a> beat your chest and screamed<br />for someone to open a window. The air<br />stopped breathing. Fish clogged its gills.<br />Birds sang too loudly, trying to drown out<br />your father’s cries, but all their sweetness<br />was not enough. No polite noises will be made<br />anymore, he told us, clawing your breastbone.<br />He opened your heart to air again. Camels<br />flowed from you both like water from the rock.<br />God spoke up, but nobody listened to him.<br />We hung you up on the line to dry.</p>
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     <p>I wish I’d kissed you when I had the chance.<br />Your face hovering there, so near to mine,<br />your mouth pursed—what word was it you pronounced?</p>
     <p>When I think about you, <a href="howithappened.html">something in my pants</a><br />tightens, and my thoughts run, and I realize<br />I should’ve kissed you when I had the chance.</p>
     <p>I want that moment never to be past<br />like Keats’s lovers on the grecian urn:<br />his mouth pursed, her figure turned to pronounce</p>
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         <h1 class="subtitle">an elaboration of a previous comment</h1>
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     <p>There are more modern ideals of beauty<br />than yours, young padowan. Jessica has<br />some assets, that I’ll give you easily,<br />but in my women I prefer pizzazz.</p>
     <p>I don’t want to bring you down, or make you think<br /><a href="deathstrumpet.html">that your perfected woman isn’t so</a>.<br />It’s just that, like Adam said, 2006<br />has come and gone. What did she do</p>
     <p>in that year anyway? IMDB<br />has, surprisingly, none, though in ’05<br />she’s in four titles. <em>Sin City</em><br />I’ve never seen, although from many I’ve</p>
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     <p>Paul only did his reading on the toilet.</p>
     <p>He read in a magazine that the universe as we know it is actually a hologram, a three-dimensional projection of a lower, two-dimensional, “realer” reality. The article said that this model explains things like quantum entanglement, what it called “spooky action at a distance.”</p>
     <p>After he finished, he ran back out to his Writing Shack and hammered out a Treatise on Literature as Spooky Action. His mind was reeling. He typed out an entire <a href="treatise.html">notecard</a> on the subject.</p>
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     <p>He couldn’t <a href="no-nothing.html">find a shirt</a> to go to work in. They all had stains on them somewhere. He pulled out a vest to put on over the stains but somehow all of them were still visible. Most of them were unidentifiable but one he thought could have come from <a href="http://www.bartleby.com/198/1.html">that peach</a> he ate two weeks before. Another looked like toothpaste but he was paranoid it was something else.</p>
     <p>When he took the bus into work he couldn’t relax. He was paranoid everyone was staring at his stain and kept looking out the corners of his eyes to make sure they weren’t. They didn’t seem to be but they could also be looking away just as he looked at them. “The <a href="problems.html">Observation</a> Paradox” he muttered to himself.</p>
     <p>Jill was the only one to notice the stain at work. She came around to his cubicle during a break because he dared not show his stain in the break room. “You have a stain on your shoulder” she said “it looks like toothpaste.” “Do I” he feigned ignorance but <a href="statements-frag.html">went red</a> at the same time “I didn’t see that there this morning.” “How do you get toothpaste on your shoulder?” “I don’t know skills I guess” he said and she grinned. “You know vinegar will take that out” she said “although I think I like it. You should start a museum of shirt stains!” “I don’t have that many shirts with stains” he said frowning. “Yes you do” she said.</p>
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     <blockquote>
     <p>TREATISE ON LITERATURE AS “SPOOKY ACTION FROM A DISTANCE”</p>
     </blockquote>
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     <p>He dropped the penny in the dryer, turned it on, and turned around. “What” he called upstairs, pretending not to hear his mother’s <a href="exasperated.html">question</a> over the noise of the dryer. He had heard her ask “Could you bring up my underwear from the dryer” but didn’t want to touch her underwear any more than he had to. “I don’t want to bring up your underwear” he said to himself, and walked back upstairs as his mother was calling down again for her underwear.</p>
     <p>“Did you get them” she asked when he opened the basement door to the kitchen. She was sitting at the table playing <a href="phone.html">dominoes</a>. “Get what” he asked. She peered at him and said “my underwear.”</p>
     <p>“Oh I didn’t see them” he answered. He reflexively opened the refrigerator, reflexively bent down, reflexively tried to feign non-disappointment (appointment? he thought) at seeing the same disappointing empty pickle jar, old head of lettuce, <a href="riptide_memory.html">crusty mayonnaise</a> he’d seen already on the way down to switch his laundry over. “Paul” she said in that way that means <a href="found-typewriter-poem.html">Look at me</a>. Paul <a href="angeltoabraham.html">looked at her</a>.</p>
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     <p>He didn’t go back into the shed for a long time. His hatchet was in there, and his axe. He didn’t want to face them. His papers, he decided, could wait in the top drawer for a while before being looked at again. The pain medication made him loopy. He couldn’t think as well as he was used to, which wasn’t well to begin with. Even saying his thoughts out loud, it was as though they were on the <a href="statements-frag.html">TV in the next room</a>. Someone was cheering. They had just won a car.</p>
     <p>His mother came in with lunch on a tray. It was hot tomato soup and a grilled cheese sandwich. “What have you been doing all day” she asked “you haven’t just been staring at the wall have you?” He had been staring at the wall most of the day. <a href="in-bed.html">The wall without the window on it, with the woodgrain wallpaper.</a> “No” he said. “What have you been doing then” she asked setting the tray down on his lap. He sat up and almost upset it, but she caught it before it spilled anything. “Composing in my head” he lied. “A novel of my experience.”</p>
     <p>“<a href="http://www.confederacyofdunces.com/">Do you really think anyone will want to read about you</a>” she asked and walked out of the room.</p>
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     <p>I saw two Eskimo girls playing a game<br />blowing on each other’s’ vocal chords to make music<br />on the tundra. I thought about how<br />once we played the same game<br />and the sounds blowing over the chords of our throats<br />was the same as a wind over frozen prairie.<br />We are the Eskimo girls who played<br />the game that night to keep ourselves warm.<br />I run my hands over <a href="and.html">my daughter</a>’s<br />voicebox as she hums a song<br />about a seal and about killing the seal and about<br />skinning it and rendering the blubber<br />into clear oil to light lamps.<br />I remember you are my lamp. She remembers<br />you although you left before she arrived.<br />I can never tell her about you.<br />I will never be able to express that taste of your oil<br />as we <a href="spittle.html">pushed our throats together</a>.<br />I will never be able to say how<br />we share this blemish like conjoined twins.<br />I will fail you always to remember you.</p>
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     <p>Your casserole dish takes the longest:<br />it has some baked-in crust from when you<br />cooked chicken last night. Washing it<br />allows me to think about this poem’s title<br />and the first few lines. Now that I’ve<br />written them down, I’ve <a href="elegyforanalternateself.html">forgotten the rest</a>.</p>
     <p>While scraping at something with my finger-<br />nail, I catch myself wondering again whether<br />you’ll thank me for washing your dishes.<br />I realize that this would defeat the point<br />of my gesture, that this has destroyed<br />all good thoughts I’ve had about saying</p>
     <p>“I’m sorry.” This, <a href="http://plagiarist.com/poetry/1703/">this is the reason</a> why<br />I am always apologizing: because I never<br />mean it, because there is always, in <a href="real-writer.html">some<br />attic</a>, a thought roaming that says, insists:<br /> “I’ve done nothing wrong, and I deserve<br />all I can take, and more than that.”</p>
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     <p><em><strong><a href="hymnal.html">HYMN 386: JOKES</a></strong></em></p>
     <p><em>“<a href="joke.html">Tell us a joke</a>” everyone asks of the clown. He sits on a log and begins to think. Everyone waits gap-mouthed in anticipation. A slight breeze ruffles the clown’s coat, his pompom buttons, <a href="ronaldmcdonald.html">his bright red hair</a>. His nose becomes redder in the cold. Hours pass. All but the most dedicated of joke listeners leave him to rot <del>for all they may care</del>.</em></p>
     <p><em>The clown opens his mouth to speak but no words come out. A tear falls down his cheek, and another. He begins to sob. The last joke listener comes over to comfort him. She puts a hand on his shoulder. He looks up at her, red face, red nose, white lips, and says <del>“Thank you.”</del> He vanishes from the clearing. The last joke listener sits on the log and looks up at the sky. <a href="moon-drowning.html">The moon is full.</a> The world creaks on its axis.</em></p>
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     <p>“How astonishing it is that language can almost mean, / and frightening that it does not quite,” Jack Gilbert opens his poem “The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart.” In a similar vein, Hass’s “Meditation at Legunitas” states, “A word is elegy to what it signifies.” These poems get to the heart of language, and express the old duality of thought: by giving a word to an entity, it is both tethered and made meaningful.</p>
     <p>Words are the inevitable byproduct of an analytic mind. Humans are constantly classifying and reclassifying ideas, objects, animals, people, into ten thousand arbitrary categories. A favorite saying of mine is that “Everything is everything,” a tautology that I like, because it gets to the core of the human linguistic machine, and because every time I say it people think I’m being <a href="likingthings.html">disingenuous</a>. But what I mean by “everything is everything” is that there is a continuity to existence that works beyond, or rather underneath, our capacity to understand it through language. Language by definition compartmentalizes reality, sets this bit apart from that bit, sets up boundaries as to what is and is not a stone, a leaf, a door. Most of the time I think of language as limiting, as defining a thing as the <a href="i-am.html">inverse of everything</a> is not.</p>
     <p>In this way, “everything is everything” becomes “everything is nothing,” which is another thing I like to say and something that pisses people off. To me, infinity and zero are the same, two ways of looking at the same point on the circle—of numbers, of the universe, whatever. Maybe it’s because I wear an analogue watch, and so my view of time is cyclical, or maybe it’s some brain trauma I had in vitro, but whatever it is that’s how I see the world, because I’m working against the limitations that language sets upon us. I think that’s the role of the poet, or of any artist: to take the over-expansive experience of existing and to boil it down, boil and boil away until there is the ultimate concentrate at the center that is what the poem talks around, at, etc., but never of, because it is ultimately made of language and cannot get to it. A poem is getting as close as possible to the speed of light, to absolute zero, to God, while knowing that it can’t get all the way there, and never will. A poem is doing this and coming back and showing what happened as it happened. Exegesis is hard because a really good poem will be just that, it will be the most basic and best way to say what it’s saying, so attempts to say the same thing differently will fail. A poem is a kernel of existence. It is a description of the kernel. <a href="arspoetica.html">It is</a>.</p>
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     <p><a href="moon-drowning.html">The radio is screaming the man</a><br />on the radio will not be quiet he is<br />pushed far into the background<br />while some NPR talkers murmur over<br />his screaming he lost something<br />very important. He says it over<br />and over but they do not listen<br />they think of their children at home<br />lying <a href="in-bed.html">in bed</a> dreaming sweet<br />childhood one of them is staying over<br />at a friend’s house they are staying<br />up late they never want it to be over<br />not like the man. His life on the radio<br />will be the only one he ever has<br />his life it is wasted he’s being spoken over<br />such pain is in his voice. I wish you<br />could hear it. <a href="nothing-is-ever-over.html">It’s something never over</a>.<br />Suffering everywhere always and over it<br />the same serene murmur of the comfortable<br />distracted or worse looking over<br />the <a href="last-passenger.html">shoulder</a> and quietly looking away.</p>
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     <p>He sat down at his writing desk and removed his new pen from its plastic wrapping. He remembered how to fill it from <em><a href="http://www.elkonigsburg.com/">The View from Saturday</a></em>, which he’d read as a kid. It had been one of his favorite books. He remembered the <a href="swansong-alt.html">heart</a> puzzle they completed, the origin of the word “posh,” and most of all his fourth-grade teacher <a href="telemarketer.html">Ms. (Mrs? He could never remember)</a> Samovar. He smiled as he opened the lid on the ink well he’d just bought.</p>
     <p>He dipped his pen in the inkwell, screwed the converter piston up, and watched as nothing entered the chamber. He screwed it back down and up again, while dipping the nib more deeply into the ink well. He watched as again nothing filled the capsule. He screwed it down a third time. His thumb knocked the inkwell over somehow by accident.</p>
     <p>As he <a href="swear.html">swore</a>, stood up and away from the table, and went into the house proper for paper towels, he resolved to buy a typewriter.</p>
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     <p>While chopping a tree in the woods with his hatchet (a Christmas gift from his mother) a bird he’d never heard before cried out. He jerked his head up and to the right as the hatchet fell down and to the left. It cut deep into the back of his left hand. A low thud didn’t echo in the forest because all the needles and snow absorbed <del>sound well</del> the sound.</p>
     <p>When he got back to the house his hand wrapped in the end of his shirt he still felt no pain. He called for his mother and found her watching TV in the main room. He stayed in the kitchen not wanting to get blood on the carpet. She turned around cigarette dangling from her open mouth said “Oh god what happened.”</p>
     <p>She drove him to the hospital in the car. <a href="worse-looking-over.html">The radio stayed off the entire way.</a> Paul wanted to turn it on but <del>he didn’t want</del> the desire not to annoy his mother was stronger. They drove in silence.</p>
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     <p>He would enter data at work for fifty minutes and then go on break. He would walk down the hallway to the breakroom, which had a white <a href="feedingtheraven.html">refrigerator</a>, a black microwave on a brown plyboard cart stocked with powdered creamer, sugar, and swizzle sticks, a dark red coffee maker, and yellow paint on the wall. He’d remember that somewhere he’d read an article about yellow walls being calming. “They use yellow in asylums” he’d say to himself.</p>
     <p>He would sit down at the round table covered in newspapers that took up the half of the room not occupied by the refrigerator, microwave, or counter with coffee pot and sink. He didn’t drink coffee but he would think about starting. He would shuffle the newspapers around on the table and see they were all the same ones as an hour ago. “Or technically fifty minutes ago” he would say to himself. Sometimes Jill would come in for a cup of coffee. She would always check that her lunch, which she brought each morning in a Tupperware container with a blue lid with her name written on it in black sharpie, was still there. Once he asked her why she checked.</p>
     <p>“Why do you always check if your lunch is in the fridge” he asked. “I don’t” she said. “Oh I thought you did.” “I don’t think so.” “Why do you check at all?” “Once it was stolen out of the fridge and returned empty before I had a chance to eat my lunch” she said. “So you make sure it won’t happen again.” “No I’m waiting for the day that it does.”</p>