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+---
+title: About the author
+subtitle: (not pictured)
+genre: table
+
+id: about-the-author
+toc: "About the author (not pictured)"
+
+epigraph:
+    content: The body that surrounds him is his, but his insides are not.
+
+project:
+    title: Stark Raving
+    class: stark
+    order: 19
+    prev:
+    - title: Something about all music being performances of _4′33″_ in places where other bands happen to be playing
+      link: music-433
+    - title: Riptide of memory
+      link: riptide_memory
+...
+
+----------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------
+[He was born][] on a few separate occasions                              _[green traffic lights][] at night_
+
+There was the day of his conception \                                      _[a TV in front of a dumpster][]_
+a wintery affair saved for those involved
+
+The day he wriggled forth \
+from the dark tunnel of nothing \                                      _surprise photo of you at Walgreen's_
+[his mother's womb][]
+
+The founding of his little city \
+deep inside by the small builders \                        _a [pink dress in the alley][] behind your house_
+alien as they were and still \
+somehow intimately familiar
+
+Like any city it had its ups \
+and downs the fever of 1994 \                          _me buying a Reese's peanut butter cup for a child_ \
+was especially devastating \                                           _[whose family couldn't afford it]_ \
+but they were a hardy folk \                                       _[in front of me in line at Safeway][]_
+not much given to flight
+
+As all things must pass the \
+little city began slowly to decay \                                       _trees at night their skeletons_ \
+the [old ones claimed the young][] \                                          _revealed by a camera flash_
+had no respect for culture anymore
+
+They began to die off slowly \
+more quickly than being born \                                 _[two earthworms on pavement after a rain][]_
+the end was coming closer
+
+As the [last breath][] was made \
+the last accounts closed in the city                                 _keys tacked to a sign in Buffalo Park_
+
+It was given over to other builders                     _man flipping a [four-wheeler][] and walking it off_
+
+----------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------
+
+[two earthworms on pavement after a rain]: the-sea_the-beach.html
+[He was born]: sixteenth-chapel.html
+[a TV in front of a dumpster]: options.html
+[his mother's womb]: death-zone.html
+[green traffic lights]: stayed-on-the-bus.html
+[pink dress in the alley]: in-bed.html
+[in front of me in line at Safeway]: last-bastion.html
+[old ones claimed the young]: creation-myth.html
+[last breath]: last-passenger.html
+[four-wheeler]: deadman.html
@@ -0,0 +1,309 @@
+---
+title: Autocento of the breakfast table
+subtitle: about this site
+genre: prose
+
+id: about
+toc: "_about Autocento_"
+
+project:
+    title: Front matter
+    css:   front-matter
+...
+
+## Introduction
+
+_Autocento [of the breakfast table][]_ is a hypertextual exploration of the workings of revision across time.
+Somebody^[[citation needed][]]^ once said that every relationship we have is part of the same relationship; the same is true of authorship.
+As we write, as we continue writing across our lives, patterns thread themselves through our work: images, certain phrases, preoccupations.
+This project attempts to make those threads more apparent, using the technology of hypertext and the opposing ideas of the _hapax legomenon_ and the _cento_, held in tension with each other.
+
+I'm also an MFA candidate at [Northern Arizona University][NAU].
+This is my thesis.
+Let me tell you about it.
+
+[of the breakfast table]: http://www.ibiblio.org/eldritch/owh/abt.html
+[citation needed]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citing_sources#Dealing_with_unsourced_material
+[NAU]: http://nau.edu/CAL/English/Degrees-Programs/Graduate/MFA/
+
+### [Hapax][] legomenon, or _You are special_
+
+_Hapax legomenon_ ([ἅπαξ][] λεγόμενον) is Greek for "something said only once."
+It comes from the field of corpus linguistics, where it causes problems for translators of ancient texts.
+Because it only happens once in its corpus, a _hapax legmonenon_ is an enigma: there's only one context to guess its meaning from.
+This means that many _hapax legomena_ remain untranslated, as in Mayan tablets, or are questionably translated, as in the Bible.
+
+Given the way we use language every day, treading over the same words and thoughts in a way that is nonetheless comforting, and given the fact that a _hapax legomenon_ is, by its definition, the rarest word in the place it appears, you might think that _hapax legomena_, as phenomena, are rare.
+You'd be wrong.
+In the Brown Corpus of American English Text, which comprises some fifty thousand words, [about half are _hapax legomena_][].
+In most large corpora, in fact, between forty and sixty per cent of the words occur only once, and another ten to fifteen per cent occur only twice, a fact that I imagine causes translators all sorts of [grief][].
+
+This seeming paradox is reminiscent of another in biology, as summed up by this infographic I keep seeing around the Internet[^1]\:
+![Really.  I see it everywhere.](https://i.imgur.com/Dub8k.png)
+
+Apparently, the chances of you, dear Reader, being born is [something][s1] like one in 10^2,685,000^.
+The chances of me [being born][] is [something][s2] like one in 10^2,685,000^.
+The chances of the guy you stood behind in line [for your coffee][] this morning?
+His chance of being born was [something][s3] like one in 10^2,685,000^.
+The thing is, a number like one in 10^2,685,000^ stops meaning so much when we take the number of times such a "rare" event occurs.
+There are about seven billion (or $7 \times 10^{9}$) people on Earth---and all of them have that same small chance of one in 10^2,685,000^ of being born.
+And they all were.
+
+It stops seeming so special after thinking about it.
+
+[Hapax]: hapax.html
+[ἅπαξ]: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.04.0057:entry=a%28/pac
+[about half are _hapax legomena_]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hapax_legomenon#cite_note-6
+[grief]: one-hundred-lines.html
+[being born]: about-the-author.html
+[for your coffee]: yellow.html
+[s1]: music-433.html
+[s2]: poetry-time.html
+[s3]: dollywood.html
+
+### _Cento_, or _just like everyone else_
+
+_Cento_ is Latin, stolen from the Greek κέντρόνη, which means "patchwork garment."
+A _cento_ is a poem composed completely from parts of other poems, a mash-up that makes up for its lack of originality in utterance with a novelty in arrangement.
+
+If we apply the _cento_ to biology, we can win back some of that uniqueness, we can resolve some of that paradox of the _hapax legomenon_.
+Sure, [nothing is new under the sun][], but it can be made new if we say it differently, or if we put it next to something it hasn't met before.
+We can become hosts to the parties of our lives, and rub elbows with the same tired celebrities everyone's rubbed elbows with, but make it different.
+Because _we_ put the [tables on roller skates][].
+Because _we_ told [the joke][] this time with a Rabbi.
+Because _we_ are special [snowflakes][], and it doesn't matter that there's more of us than there is sand on the beaches at Normandy.
+Because _we_ are still all different somehow.
+
+[nothing is new under the sun]: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ecclesiastes+1%3A9&version=NIV
+[tables on roller skates]: call-me-aural-pleasure.html
+[the joke]: creation-myth.html
+[snowflakes]: snow.html
+
+### On _n_-grams
+
+What we have so far:
+- A _hapax legomenon_ technically refers only to _one word_ in a corpus.
+- A _cento_ technically refers to a poem with _whole phrases_ taken from others, patchwork-style.
+
+These concepts get more interesting as we play with their scopes.
+To do that, we need to take a look at the _n_-gram.
+
+In linguistics and computational probability, an _n_-gram is a [contiguous system of _n_ items from a given sequence of text or speech][ngram-def].
+By looking at _n_-grams, linguists can look at deeper trends in language than with single words alone[^2].
+_N_-grams are also incredibly useful in natural language processing---for example, they're how your phone can guess what you're going to [text your mom][] next[^3].
+They're also the key to fully reconciling the _hapax legomenon_ and the _cento_.
+
+If the definition of _hapax legomena_ is expanded to include _n_-grams of arbitrary lengths,
+  including full utterances, complete poems, or the [collected works of, say, Shakespeare][],
+  then we can say that all writing is a _hapax legomenon_,
+  because no one else has said the [same words in the same order][].
+In short, everything written or in existence is individual.
+Everything is differentiated.
+Everything is an [island][].
+
+If the definition of what comprises a _cento_ is minimized to individual trigrams, bigrams, or even unigrams (individual words), or even parts of words, we arrive again at Solomon's lament: that no writing is original; that every utterance has, in some [scrambled][] way at least, been uttered before.
+To put it another way, [nothing][] is individual.
+We're stranded [afloat on an ocean][] of language we did nothing to create, and the best we can hope to accomplish is to find some combination of flotsam and jetsam that hasn't been put together too many times before.
+
+This project, _Autocento of the breakfast table_, works within the tension caused by _hapax legomena_ and _centi_, between the first and last half of the statement _we are all unique, just like everyone else_.
+
+[ngram-def]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-gram
+[text your mom]: mountain.html
+
+[same words in the same order]: http://www.thisdayinquotes.com/2011/07/poetry-best-words-in-best-order.html
+[collected works of, say, Shakespeare]: http://shakespeare.mit.edu/
+[island]: island.html
+
+[scrambled]: howtoread.html
+[nothing]: no-nothing.html
+[afloat on an ocean]: riptide_memory.html
+
+## Process
+
+In compiling this text, I've pulled from a few different projects:
+
+- [Elegies for alternate selves][elegies-link]
+- [The book of Hezekiah][hez-link]
+- [Stark raving][stark-link]
+- [Buildings out of air][paul-link]
+
+as well as [new poems][], written quite recently.
+As I've compiled them into this project, I've linked them together based on common images or language, disregarding the order of their compositions.
+What I hope to have accomplished with this hypertext is an approximation of my self as it's evolved, but [all at one time][].
+Ultimately, _Autocento of the breakfast table_ is a [long-exposure photograph][] of my mind.
+
+[elegies-link]: elegyforanalternateself.html
+[hez-link]: prelude.html
+[stark-link]: table_contents.html
+[paul-link]: art.html
+[new poems]: last-passenger.html
+[long-exposure photograph]: building.html
+[all at one time]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJjcF2DmFFY
+
+### A note on terminology
+
+_Autocento of the breakfast table_ comprises work of multiple genres, including prose, verse, tables, lists, and hybrid forms.
+Because of this, and because of my own personal hang-ups with terms like [_poem_][] applying to works that aren't verse (and even some that are[^4]), _piece_ applying to anything, really (it's just annoying, in my opinion---a piece of what?), I've needed to find another word to refer to all the _stuff_ in this project.
+While the terms "literary object" and "intertext," à la Kristeva et al., more fully describe the things I've been writing and linking in this text, I'm worried that these terms are either too long or too esoteric for me to refer to them consistently when talking about my work.
+I believe I've found a solution in the term _page_, as in a page or [leaf][] of a book, or a page on a website.
+After all, the term _page_ is accurate as it refers to the objects herein--each one is a page---and it's short and unassuming.
+But it's probably pretty pretentious, too.
+
+[_poem_]: on-genre-dimension.html
+[leaf]: leaf.html
+
+### The inevitable creep of technology
+
+Because this project lives online (welcome to the Internet!), I've used a fair amount of technology to get it there.
+
+First, I typed all of the objects present into a human-readable markup format called [Markdown][] by John Gruber, using a plain-text editor called [Vim][].[^5]
+Markdown is a plain-text format that uses unobtrusive mark-up to signal semantic meaning around a text.
+A text written with markup can then be passed to a compiler, such as John Gruber's `Markdown.pl` script, to turn it into functioning HTML for viewing in a browser.
+
+As an example, here's the previous paragraph as I typed it:
+
+~~~markdown
+First, I typed all of the objects present into a human-readable markup format
+called [Markdown][] by John Gruber, using a plain-text editor called [Vim][].
+[^5]  Markdown is a plain-text format that uses unobtrusive mark-up to signal
+semantic meaning around a text.  A text written with markup can then be passed
+to a compiler, such as John Gruber's original Markdown.pl script, to turn it
+into functioning HTML for viewing in a browser.
+
+[Markdown]: http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/
+[Vim]: http://www.vim.org
+
+[^5]: I could've used any text editor for the composition step, including
+      Notepad, but I personally like Vim for its extensibility, composability,
+      and honestly its colorschemes.
+~~~
+
+And here it is as a compiled HTML file:
+
+~~~html
+<p>
+  First, I typed all of the objects present into a human-readable markup format
+  called <a href="http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/">Markdown</a>
+  by John Gruber, using a plain-text editor called <a href="http://www.vim.org">
+  Vim</a>. <a href="#fn1" class="footnoteRef" id="fnref1"> <sup>1</sup></a>
+  Markdown is a plain-text format that uses unobtrusive mark-up to signal
+  semantic meaning around a text. A text written with markup can then be passed
+  to a compiler, such as John Gruber's original Markdown.pl script, to turn it
+  into functioning HTML for viewing in a browser.
+</p>
+
+<section class="footnotes">
+  <hr />
+  <ol>
+    <li id="fn1">
+    <p>
+      I could've used any text editor for the composition step, including
+      Notepad, but I personally like Vim for its extensibility, composability,
+      and honestly its colorschemes.
+      <a href="#fnref1">↩</a>
+    </p>
+    </li>
+  </ol>
+</section>
+~~~
+
+For these files, I opted to use John McFarlane's [pandoc][] over the original `Markdown.pl` compiler, because it's more consistent with edge cases in formatting, and because it can compile the Markdown source into a wide variety of different formats, including DOCX, ODT, PDF, HTML, and others.
+I use an [HTML template][] for `pandoc` to correctly typeset each object in the web browser.
+The compiled HTML pages are what you're reading now.
+
+Since typing `pandoc [file].txt -t html5 --template=_template.html --filter=trunk/versify.exe --smart --mathml --section-divs -o [file].html` over 130 times is highly tedious, I've written a [GNU][] [Makefile][] that automates the process.
+In addition to compiling the HTML files for this project, the Makefile also compiles each page's backlinks (accessible through the &phi; link at the bottom of each page), and the indexes of [first lines][], [common titles][], and [_hapax legomena_][hapaxleg] of this project.
+
+Finally, this project needs to enter the realm of the Internet.
+To do this, I use [Github][], an online code-collaboration tool that uses the version-control system [git][] under the hood.
+`git` was originally written to keep track of the source code of the [Linux][] kernel.[^6]
+I use it to keep track of the revisions of the text files in _Autocento of the breakfast table_, which means that you, dear Reader, can explore the path of my revision even more deeply by viewing the [Github repository][] for this project online.
+
+For more information on the process I took while compiling _Autocento of the breakfast table_, see my [Process][] page.
+
+[Markdown]: http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/
+[Vim]: http://www.vim.org
+[pandoc]: http://johnmcfarlane.net/pandoc/
+[HTML template]: https://github.com/duckwork/autocento/blob/gh-pages/template.html
+[GNU]: https://www.gnu.org/software/make/
+[Makefile]: https://github.com/duckwork/autocento/blob/gh-pages/makefile
+[first lines]: first-lines.html
+[common titles]: common-titles.html
+[hapaxleg]: hapx.html
+[Github]: https://github.com
+[git]: http://www.git-scm.com
+[Linux]: http://www.linux.org
+[Github repository]: https://github.com/duckwork/autocento
+[Process]: process.html
+
+### Motivation
+
+Although `git` and the other tools I use were developed or are mostly used by programmers, engineers, or other kinds of scientists, they're useful in creative writing as well for a few different reasons:
+
+1. **Facilitation of revision.**
+   By using a VCS like `git` and plain text files, I can revise a poem (for example, "[And][]") and keep both the current version and a [much older one][old-and].
+   This lets me hold onto every idea I've had, and "throw things away" without _actually_ throwing them away.
+   They're still there, somewhere, in the source tree.
+2. **Future proofness.**
+   By using a simple text editor to write out my files instead of a proprietary word processor, I've ensured that no matter what may happen to the stocks of Microsoft, Apple, or Google in the following hundred years, my words will stay accessible and editable.
+   Also, I don't know how to insert links in Word.
+3. **Philosophy of intellectual property.**
+   I use open-source, or libre, tools like `vim`, `pandoc`, and `make` because information should be free.
+   This is also the reason why I'm releasing _Autocento of the breakfast table_ under a Creative Commons [license][].
+
+[And]: and.html
+[old-and]: https://github.com/duckwork/autocento/commit/61baf210a9d0d4fffcd82751ba3419dd2feb349d#diff-8814290de165531212020a537e341e44
+[license]: license.html
+
+## _Autocento of the breakfast table_ and you
+
+### Using this site
+
+Since all of the objects in this project are linked, you can begin from, say, [here][possible-start] and follow the links through everything.
+But if you find yourself lost as in a funhouse maze, looping around and around to the same stupid [fountain][] at the entrance, here are a few tips:
+
+- The &xi; link at the bottom of each page leads to a random article.
+- The &phi; link at the bottom of each page leads to its back-link page, which lists the titles of pages that link back to the page you were just on.
+- Finally, if you're really desperate, the &loz; link sends you back to the [cover page][], where you can start over.
+  The cover page links you to the [table of contents][toc], as well as the indexes of [first lines][fl], [common titles][ct], and [_hapax legomena_][hl].
+
+[possible-start]: in-bed.html
+[fountain]: dollywood.html
+[cover page]: index.html
+[toc]: _toc.html
+[fl]: first-lines.html
+[ct]: common-titles.html
+[hl]: hapax.html
+
+### Contact me
+
+If you'd like to contact me about the state of this work, its history, or its future; or about my writing in general, email me at [case dot duckworth plus autocento at gmail dot com][email].
+
+[email]: mailto:case.duckworth+autocento@gmail.com
+
+[^1]: Which apparently, though not really surprisingly given the nature of the Internet, has its roots in [this][born-blog] blog post.
+
+[born-blog]: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/abinazir/2011/06/15/what-are-chances-you-would-be-born/
+
+[^2]: For more fun with _n_-grams, I recommend the curious reader to point their browsers to the [Google Ngram Viewer][], which searches "lots of books" from most of history that matters.
+
+[Google Ngram Viewer]: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=technically+refers&case_insensitive=on&year_start=1600&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t4%3B%2Ctechnically%20refers%3B%2Cc0%3B%2Cs0%3B%3Btechnically%20refers%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BTechnically%20refers%3B%2Cc0
+
+[^3]: For fun, try only typing with the suggested words for a while.
+    At least for me, they start repeating "I'll be a bar of the new York NY and I can be a bar of the new York NY and I can."
+
+[^4]: For more discussion of this subject, see "[Ars poetica][ars]," "[How to read this][how-read]," "[A manifesto of poetics][manifesto]," "[On formal poetry][formal-poetry]," and [The third section] of "Statements: a fragment."
+
+[ars]: arspoetica.html
+[how-read]: howtoread.html
+[manifesto]: manifesto_poetics.html
+[formal-poetry]: onformalpoetry.html
+[The third section]: statements-frag.html#declaration-of-poetry
+
+[^5]: I could've used any text editor for the composition step, including Notepad, but I personally like Vim for its extensibility, composability, and honestly its colorschemes.
+
+[^6]: As it happens, the week I'm writing this (6 April 2015) is `git`'s tenth anniversary.
+    The folks at Atlassian have made an [interactive timeline][] for the occasion, and Linux.com has an interesting [interview with Linus Torvalds][], `git`'s creator.
+
+[interactive timeline]: https://www.atlassian.com/git/articles/10-years-of-git/
+[interview with Linus Torvalds]: http://www.linux.com/news/featured-blogs/185-jennifer-cloer/821541-10-years-of-git-an-interview-with-git-creator-linus-torvalds
@@ -0,0 +1,28 @@
+---
+title: About Case Duckworth
+genre: prose
+
+id: about_author
+toc: "About the author"
+
+project:
+    title: Autocento of the breakfast table
+    class: autocento
+...
+
+Case Duckworth is the cowardly but lovable Great Dane who solves mysteries on TV.
+Maybe you've seen him while watching commercials for Pine-Sol or Orange-Glo cleaners.
+These products dress as monsters to lure only the right kind of venture capitalist, but Duckworth believes in the right of all [venture capitalists][] to invest in products they believe in.
+His mortal enemy is the evil Old Man Jenkins, who believes that the only venture capitalists that should be allowed to invests are from the Meddling Kids gang of Edo.
+
+When not being a Great Dane, Duckworth is a Christmas ham, spreading good cheer and pork products to underprivileged gangs of venture capitalists in winter.
+He keeps them warm with his questionable farming practices and threat of Trichinosis, as well as with his own brand of firestarter called Duckworth Stax.
+He usually steals his Stax from dog food factories, making him a modern Robin Hood in addition to a Great Dane and Christmas Ham.
+
+Case Duckworth truly is a jack-of-all-trades.
+The only thing missing from his repertoire is the ability to begin a word with anything but an "R" sound, although given the fact he is a dog, it's remarkable he can speak at all.
+Duckworth was voiced by [Don Messick][] until his death in 1997, when [Frank Welker][] took over, to the dismay of fans everywhere.
+
+[venture capitalists]: love-as-god.html
+[Don Messick]: http://www.behindthevoiceactors.com/Don-Messick/
+[Frank Welker]: http://www.behindthevoiceactors.com/Frank-Welker/
@@ -0,0 +1,34 @@
+---
+title: Autocento of the breakfast table
+subtitle: abstract
+genre: prose
+
+id: abstract
+toc: "_abstract_"
+
+project:
+    title: Front matter
+    class: front-matter
+...
+
+## Brief Description
+
+_Autocento of the breakfast table_ is my Master's thesis, an inter/hypertextual exploration of the workings of inspiration, revision, and obsession.
+I've compiled this work over multiple years, and recently linked it all together to form a (hopefully) more cohesive whole.
+To make this easier than collating everything by hand, I've relied on a process that leverages open-source technologies to publish my work onto a web platform.
+
+## Things to notice
+
+Take a look around the site.
+See how it's navigable: there are links within each article to other articles and to the wider web, mapping common images, themes, or inspirations;
+  there's also navigation links at the bottom of each page:
+
+- The **&phi;** shows you the backlinks to each page.
+- The **&loz;** takes you back to the cover of the project, to start over.
+- The **&xi;** takes you to a random article in the project.
+- Some pages also have _previous_ and _next_ links.  These take you to other articles in their original project-order.  It's another way to navigate the page.
+
+Check out my [process narrative][] for the technical details of putting this site together, or see my [about page][] for an artist's statement.
+
+[process narrative]: process.html
+[about page]: about.html
@@ -0,0 +1,41 @@
+---
+title: AMBER alert
+genre: prose
+
+id: amber-alert
+toc: "AMBER alert"
+
+epigraph:
+    content: Apparently it does nothing.
+    link: 'http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/07/20/abducted/?page=full'
+
+ekphrastic:
+    image: amber.jpg
+    title: Amber Hagerman
+    link: 'https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMBER_alert'
+
+project:
+    title: Stark Raving
+    class: stark
+    order: 6
+    next:
+    - title: Exasperated
+      link: exasperated
+    - title: The Death Zone
+      link: death-zone
+    prev:
+    - title: Last bastion
+      link: last-bastion
+    - title: Something about the nature of poetry and time
+      link: poetry-time
+...
+
+[Lost things][] have a way of [staying lost][].
+They have to want to be found---is that why we tack up signs, hang socks from hooks in the park, have a box for what's been lost but now is found?
+Maybe the lost *want* to be found but we're looking in the wrong places.
+Maybe we speak the wrong language, the language of the found, to call to them.
+Maybe we should [try another door][].
+
+[Lost things]: lappel-du-vide
+[staying lost]: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/176996
+[try another door]: statements-frag.html
@@ -0,0 +1,59 @@
+---
+title: And
+genre: verse
+
+id: and
+toc: "And"
+
+epigraph:
+    content: |
+        "What is your favorite word?"
+
+        "And.  It is so hopeful."
+    attrib: Margaret Atwood
+    link: 'http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2011/oct/28/margaret-atwood-q-a'
+
+project:
+    title: Elegies for alternate selves
+    class: elegies
+    order: 3
+    next:
+    - title: Words and meaning
+      link: words-meaning
+    prev:
+    - title: How to read this
+      link: howtoread
+...
+
+| And you were there at the start of it all
+| and you were there at the end bitter as a [nail][]
+
+| and you folded your [hands like little doves][]
+| that flew away like an afterthought
+
+| when you turned to me and the window light
+| on your face when you told me and I did not
+
+| recognize you in the throng of those who
+| are not you and I asked [are we in a church][church]
+
+| and you answered with the look on your face
+| like birds [caught in a snare][] like on a voice
+
+| and I think it might have been my voice
+| and I could not do but look away my head
+
+| was not my head anymore or hold my thoughts
+| I never did get an answer from you but from
+
+| the [man on the radio][] murmuring all night
+| and I couldn't understand him so far away
+
+| and I could tell I was missing something important
+| and you nodded to yourself at something he said
+
+[church]: boar.html
+[hands like little doves]: cold-wind.html
+[nail]: last-passenger.html
+[caught in a snare]: roughgloves.html
+[man on the radio]: worse-looking-over.html
@@ -0,0 +1,47 @@
+---
+title: The angel to Abraham
+genre: verse
+
+id: angeltoabraham
+toc: "The angel to Abraham"
+
+ekphrastic:
+    image: "Sacrifice_of_Isaac-Caravaggio.jpg"
+    title: "Abraham, Abraham!"
+    link: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham#/media/File:Sacrifice_of_Isaac-Caravaggio_%28Uffizi%29.jpg"
+
+project:
+    title: Elegies for alternate selves
+    class: elegies
+    order: 10
+    prev:
+    - title: Dead man
+      link: deadman
+    next:
+    - title: Feeding the raven
+      link: feedingtheraven
+...
+
+| Abraham, Abraham, you are old and cannot hear:
+| what if you miss my small voice amongst the creaking
+| of your own grief, kill your son unknowing
+| of what he will be, and commit Israel to nothing?
+
+| Abraham, you must know or hope that [God][]
+| will not allow your son to die; you must know
+| that this is a test, but then why
+| are you so bent on Isaac's destruction?
+| Look at your eyes; there is more than fear
+| there.  I see in your eyes desperation,
+| a manic passion to do right by your God
+| whom you are not able to see or know.
+
+| Am I too late?  I [will try][] to stay
+| your old hands, the knife clenched
+| within them, intent on ending life.
+
+| Will you hear my small voice amongst the creaking,
+| or will it be the chance bleating of a passing ram?
+
+[God]: boar.html
+[will try]: i-am.html
@@ -0,0 +1,59 @@
+---
+title: On seeing the panorama of the Apollo 11 landing site
+genre: verse
+
+id: apollo11
+toc: "On seeing the panorama of the Apollo 11 landing site"
+
+ekphrastic:
+    image: "panorama-apollo11.jpg"
+    title: "Big deal."
+    link: "http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap141220.html"
+
+project:
+    title: Elegies for alternate selves
+    class: elegies
+    order: 5
+    next:
+    - title: Ars poetica
+      link: arspoetica
+    prev:
+    - title: And
+      link: and
+...
+
+| So it's the [fucking moon][].  Big deal.  As if
+| you haven't seen it before, tacked to the sky
+| like a [rotten hunk of meat][], a maudlin love
+
+| letter (the _i_'s dotted with hearts) hung
+| on the sky like ninety-eight theses.
+| Don't stare at it like it means anything.
+
+| Walk past it quickly, eyes averted.
+| Don't give it the chance to collect meaning
+| from your [outstretched hand like a pigeon][].
+
+| Ascribing it a will, calling it fickle, or
+| thinking it has any say or even an opinion
+| of your affairs is a mistake: it's separated
+
+| from you by three hundred eighty thousand miles
+| of emptiness, staring at you blankly like a child
+| or your reflection when you found your love broken
+
+| in the dark, when time fell apart, broke down,
+| started following you around everywhere, [moonfaced][],
+| doggedly asking where you're going, like you know.
+
+| Don't try side stepping time, either: it's only
+| a river you're stuck in, [carrying you][] under the glare
+| of the moon nuzzling closer, cooing in your ear
+
+| like a dove that escapes into the empty sky at dawn.
+
+[fucking moon]: deathstrumpet.html
+[rotten hunk of meat]: roughgloves.html
+[outstretched hand like a pigeon]: last-passenger.html
+[moonfaced]: boy_bus.html
+[carrying you]: music-433.html
@@ -0,0 +1,50 @@
+---
+title: Ars poetica
+genre: prose
+
+id: arspoetica
+toc: "Ars poetica"
+
+project:
+    title: Elegies for alternate selves
+    class: elegies
+    order: 6
+    prev:
+    - title: On seeing the panorama of the Apollo 11 landing site
+      link: apollo11
+    next:
+    - title: The ocean overflows with camels
+      link: theoceanoverflowswithcamels
+...
+
+What is poetry?
+[Poetry is.][is]
+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.
+
+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 [mirror][] of our existence to see something else.
+
+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.
+
+What this means is: a poem should be self-extracting.
+It should be a rare vanilla in the bottle, waiting only for someone to open it and sniff it and suddenly there they are, in the orchid that vanilla came from, in the tropical land where it grew next to its brothers and sister vanilla plants.
+They feel the pain of having their children taken from them.
+A good poem leaves a feeling of loss and of intense beauty.
+The reader does nothing to achieve this---they are merely the receptacle of the feeling that the poem forces onto them.
+In a way, poetry is a crime.
+But it is the most beautiful crime on this crime-ridden earth.
+
+[is]: words-meaning.html
+[mirror]: moongone.html
@@ -0,0 +1,40 @@
+---
+title: Art
+genre: prose
+
+id: art
+toc: "Art"
+
+project:
+    title: "Buildings out of air: Paul in the Woods"
+    class: paul
+    order: 1
+    next:
+    - title: Hymnal
+      link: hymnal
+    - title: Axe
+      link: axe
+...
+
+Paul was writing in his diary about art.
+
+_[This is my brain][]_ he wrote.
+_This is my brain and all it contains.
+['I contain multitudes' said Legion.][]
+I think it was Legion._
+The big heading he had written at the top of the page (_ART_ it read, but only when looking at it from his point of view) sat cold and alone, neglected in the [white space][] surrounding it.
+He noticed this presently (but not after he had written a little more about multitudes), paused, frowned, and began to write again.
+
+_ART stands alone at the top of a blank page_ he wrote.
+_It follows ~~itself in circles~~ its own footprints in a circle around its own name.
+It leads nowhere but is present everywhere.
+~~It contains~~ It contains multitudes.
+Every painting ever made is a painting of every other painting.
+Every song is a remix, a [cover version][]._
+He crossed out the part about songs for getting off topic.
+He made a note to himself in the margin---_Music is not ART._
+
+[This is my brain]: ouroboros_memory.html
+['I contain multitudes' said Legion.]: TODO_BIBLE_LINK
+[white space]: sense-of-it.html
+[cover version]: music-433.html
@@ -0,0 +1,46 @@
+---
+title: Axe
+genre: prose
+
+id: axe
+toc: "Axe"
+
+project:
+    title: "Buildings out of air: Paul in the Woods"
+    class: paul
+    order: 5
+    next:
+    - title: Leaf
+      link: leaf
+    - title: Building
+      link: building
+    prev:
+    - title: Dream
+      link: dream
+    - title: Art
+      link: art
+...
+
+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.
+
+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.
+[He imagined he had a beard.][]
+
+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 [October][].
+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.
+
+Still, after he felled his first tree that day he realized they grew from the epicenter of his axe.
+He paused in the [small dark sound][] of the forest quiet.
+
+[He imagined he had a beard.]: riptide_memory.html
+[October]: january.html
+[small dark sound]: last-bastion.html
@@ -0,0 +1,52 @@
+---
+title: The Big Dipper
+genre: verse
+
+id: big-dipper
+toc: "The big dipper"
+
+project:
+    title: Stark Raving
+    class: stark
+    order: 2
+    next:
+    - title: The Moon is drowning
+      link: moon-drowning
+    - title: Something about the nature of poetry and time
+      link: poetry-time
+    prev:
+    - title: The Death Zone
+      link: death-zone
+    - title: Table of Contents
+      link: table_contents
+...
+
+| After searching for days or even months
+| I finally find it reclining lazily
+| [above the peaks][] above the city as if to ask
+| Did you miss me?  Yes very much I reply
+| and rush to embrace it but it smiles
+| and recoils and tells me No no you
+| have to try harder than that it says
+| I do not give myself up so easily
+
+| I try a different tack
+| I sing to it bring it flowers nightly
+| I compare its eyes to the morning dew
+| it has not seen the morning dew
+| I say its mouth is the sunset over mountains
+| it knows mountains but the sunset
+| is only a rumor from the Evening Star
+| I tell the Big Dipper that it moves
+| [like a quiet river across the earth][]
+
+| Rivers I have seen says the Big Dipper
+| they sparkle in the light from my stars
+| Your stars like eyes I say and it smiles
+| [No it says that is too easy][]
+| It turns its back
+| it walks home along the back of the mountain
+
+[above the peaks]: finding-the-lion.html
+[like a quiet river across the earth]: no-nothing.html
+[No it says that is too easy]: http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/writer
@@ -0,0 +1,42 @@
+---
+title: The boar
+genre: verse
+
+id: boar
+toc: "The boar"
+
+project:
+    title: Elegies for alternate selves
+    class: elegies
+    order: 8
+    prev:
+    - title: The ocean overflows with camels
+      link: theoceanoverflowswithcamels
+    next:
+    - title: Dead man
+      link: deadman
+...
+
+| Now the ticking clocks scare me.
+| The [empty][] rooms, clock towers, belfries;
+| I am terrified by them all.
+
+| I really used to enjoy going to church,
+| singing in the choir, listening to the sermon.
+| Now the chairs squeal like dying pigs---
+
+| It was the boar that did it.
+| [Fifteen feet][] from me that night
+| in the grass, rooting for God
+| knows what, finding me instead.
+
+| I ran, not knowing where or how,
+| not looking for his pursuit of me.
+| I ran to God's front door, found
+| it locked, found the [house][] empty
+
+| with a note saying, "Condemned."
+
+[empty]: mountain.html
+[Fifteen feet]: telemarketer.html
+[house]: i-am.html
@@ -0,0 +1,50 @@
+---
+title: Boy on the bus
+genre: verse
+
+id: boy_bus
+toc: "Boy on the bus"
+
+project:
+    title: Stark Raving
+    class: stark
+    order: 9
+    next:
+    - title: I think it's you (but it's not)
+      link: i-think-its-you
+    - title: Last Bastion
+      link: last-bastion
+    prev:
+    - title: L'appel du vide
+      link: lappel-du-vide
+    - title: Exasperated
+      link: exasperated
+...
+
+| When he said [Bible][] I heard his southern accent
+| and he had a face I expect all pastors must have
+| a round open honest face
+| that will always be a boy's face
+| though its owner may rightly call himself a man
+| near my age though I hardly call myself a man
+
+| I have seen this face before whether in life or a dream
+| I can't tell
+| if I've seen him on the street once
+| twice who knows and his pastor's [moon face][]
+| reminds me of something
+| some distant light my life used to own
+
+| [One night on my birthday the moon was so strong it cast shadows][]
+| I could see to the far hill and back it was all clear to me
+
+| The moon hasn't done that in a long time
+| [its face has been obscured by clouds][] for weeks
+| and that boy on the bus his face I've forgotten
+| I thought I recognized a good number of people
+| on that bus who I didn't know at all
+
+[its face has been obscured by clouds]: moongone.html
+[One night on my birthday the moon was so strong it cast shadows]: in-bed.html
+[moon face]: moon-drowning.html
+[Bible]: mountain.html
@@ -0,0 +1,54 @@
+---
+title: Building
+genre: prose
+
+id: building
+toc: "Building"
+
+project:
+    title: "Buildings out of air: Paul in the Woods"
+    class: paul
+    order: 28
+    next:
+    - title: Yellow
+      link: yellow
+    - title: Cereal
+      link: cereal
+    prev:
+    - title: Stagnant
+      link: stagnant
+    - title: Axe
+      link: axe
+...
+
+_[ART and CRAFT][] are only the inside and outside of the same building.
+The ceiling is_---here he put his eraser to his bottom lip, thinking.
+He crossed out _~~The ceiling is.~~_
+_The floor is reality and the ceiling is ~~aspiration~~ ~~desire~~ that which is desired.
+CRAFT is building a [chair][] from wood.
+ART is using the wood as a substrate for an emotional [message to a future person][], the READER / VIEWER._
+
+_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._
+
+_What separates us from them, the trees?
+[We have to try.][]
+We must labor to create our ART, [our buildings of air][].
+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?_
+
+_Our advantage is [memory][].
+Our advantage is the reaching-out over space and time to others with our words, our ART.
+Our buildings last for generations, and after they are demolished they are written about, [photographs][] are taken, we **remember**.
+The [act of memory][] is our only ART._
+
+[ART and CRAFT]: toilet.html
+[chair]: boar.html
+[message to a future person]: poetry-time.html
+[We have to try.]: plant.html
+[our buildings of air]: common-titles.html
+[photographs]: man.html
+[memory]: ouroboros_memory.html
+[act of memory]: riptide_memory.html
@@ -0,0 +1,59 @@
+---
+title: Call me
+subtitle: aural pleasure
+genre: verse
+
+id: call-me-aural-pleasure
+toc: "Call me aural pleasure"
+
+epigraph:
+    content: |
+        compiled thru Facebook statuses of the author
+    link: 'https://www.facebook.com/kittensruleforever38'
+
+project:
+    title: Autocento of the breakfast table
+    class: autocento
+...
+
+| Like _40_ as I challenge anyone to come too!
+| It's like you're the epitome of lame!
+| She's all _I am SOOOO CONFUSED_
+| Aw yeah she got [word from yarn][].
+| ---but technically it's a pretty sweet, huh?
+
+| Dude we were going and delicate fragrance of arguments get based off of are not try
+| dropping glasses in such an emotional rollercoaster you
+| and yes, I'm cocky enough to do anything!
+| I am as good as Phineas and make another picture symphony
+| This is a modification of a young woman to try
+| groups disband after they get your [Meacham stuff][] please let it
+| RJ Covino, own statuses that'll be a great
+
+| MY OWN afterbirth can do that
+| [I am 2 we can be KISSED][] ON THE page.
+| You know I'm not sure that
+| Ben & Jerry's FTW
+| 4/10 would not be able to vote, because I gotta do it
+| This is going to be sad about what
+| Rush Limbaugh comes forward with sunglasses but at least I wasn't wearing a messenger bag or skinny jeans!
+| The cooler THAN Facebook
+| Wine is the best.
+
+| YES I was surprised at first, [but the train one][], definitely.
+
+| Also Valhalla is a dumbass...
+| But we can get based off of course, Jon.
+| We watched this
+| CELEBRATE FRANKSGIVING TOO!
+| That didn't get started on that
+| FRANCIS OF VERULAM REASONED THUS WITH the courage to reply.
+| Anyone wanna watch out
+| I am cranky from Bro a good as a way to [hijack my hand][].
+| Afterbend was not to produce photographs.
+
+[word from yarn]: roughgloves.html
+[I am 2 we can be KISSED]: spittle.html
+[but the train one]: http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~deepthi/If_on_a_winter%27s_night_a_traveler.html
+[hijack my hand]: x-ray.html
+[Meacham stuff]: http://www.meachamwriters.org/index.htm
@@ -0,0 +1,48 @@
+---
+title: Cereal
+genre: prose
+
+id: cereal
+toc: "Cereal"
+
+project:
+    title: "Buildings out of air: Paul in the Woods"
+    class: paul
+    order: 21
+    next:
+    - title: Man
+      link: man
+    - title: Dream
+      link: dream
+    prev:
+    - title: Sapling
+      link: sapling
+    - title: Building
+      link: building
+...
+
+He woke up after eleven and didn't go [outside][] all day, not even to his Writing Shack.
+What did he do?
+
+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 [laundry][].
+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.
+
+---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.
+
+"When you switch over your laundry could you bring up my underwear from the dryer" she asked not looking up from her dominoes.
+A [thread of smoke][] curled from her cigarette and spread out on the ceiling.
+
+[outside]: time-looks-up-to-the-sky.html
+[laundry]: underwear.html
+[thread of smoke]: last-passenger.html
@@ -0,0 +1,33 @@
+---
+title: Cold wind
+genre: verse
+
+id: cold-wind
+toc: "Cold wind"
+
+dedication: Justin
+
+project:
+    title: Autocento of the breakfast table
+    class: autocento
+...
+
+| [Man of autumn][], cold wind,
+| blow down the trees' leaves.
+| [Fire on the ground][].  The sky is
+| perfect water, frost-cold,
+| rippled only by flocks
+| [of black birds][] flying and gone.
+| Their brightness can blind
+| an uncareful watcher, work him
+| [in a froth of hands][], not-wings
+| that ache with the loss of flight.
+| A tear is flung faithfully
+| [to the ocean of air][], slipping in
+| slowly, is as gone as the birds.
+
+[Man of autumn]: january.html
+[Fire on the ground]: fire.html
+[of black birds]: i-think-its-you.html
+[in a froth of hands]: when-im-sorry-i.html
+[to the ocean of air]: lappel-du-vide.html
@@ -0,0 +1,93 @@
+---
+title: Instrumented
+subtitle: a collage
+genre: prose
+
+id: collage-instrument
+toc: "Instrumented: a collage"
+
+project:
+    title: Autocento of the breakfast table
+    class: autocento
+...
+
+[`tr`][] has been a part of the Unix toolset since the late 70s.
+Short for translate or transliterate, `tr` takes two strings as arguments, and replaces incidences of the first with the second while reading a byte stream.
+It also supports ranges of characters, in formats such as `A-Z` as well as the POSIX-compliant `[:alpha:]`.
+Although [`sed`][] has more options and features, for a quick search-and-replace, `tr` is more than sufficient.
+
+The [wind blows hard up here][]---far harder than anywhere else I've been.
+I wonder, at times, if it might [pick me up like an angel][] and carry me into the night.
+
+The secret to truly great [rolls is mayonnaise][].
+Although I have received looks of disgust at this assertion, I think the explanation is enough to expel doubt: mayonnaise includes the fat, cream and egg content rolls need to be any good, plus in mayonnaise they come premeasured and perfectly blended, which makes for incredibly easy and delicious rolls.
+After I explain myself, the looks of disgust usually remain.
+
+My mother used to make me mayonnaise rolls, and hers will always be the best.
+I had a teacher in college who explained xenophobia as "Mother's cooking is best."
+
+One of my favorite fictional theories is the [Shoe Event Horizon][], an economic truth which states that as a society progresses, shoe stores become more and more prevalent.
+The demand for shoes raises slowly, almost imperceptibly, causing shoe manufacturers to make more and cheaper shoes.
+This begins a vicious cycle during which more and more shoes are made, more and more cheaply, causing more shoes to be bought, and thus made, until finally the society reaches the Shoe Event Horizon.
+This is the point at which it becomes economically impossible for any stores but shoe stores to exist.
+After the economy collapses, the society's people invariably turn [into birds][], never to touch ground again.
+
+***
+
+[`awk`][] is often used as a command-line stream-editing tool, but it is actually an entire interpreted language.
+It supports multiple variables and logical structuring, and has been the inspiration for [Perl][], which has largely replaced it.
+It was originally written in 1977, but over the years has evolved, with multiple implementations made for different uses.
+
+The best shoes I ever owned were Franco Fortinis, a brand I have yet to find anywhere else.
+Sometimes I wonder if I dreamed the shoes, like in stories where the protagonist buys a powerful object from a mysterious store and try to return it after it backfires in some tragic way, only to find the spot where the store stood is an empty lot, or worse, a [blank brick wall][].
+
+After having moved to Arizona, I fear I will forget what rain is like.
+I don't think it's sandbags falling on the body, and I believe it is cold.
+I think _Daredevil_, that piss of a film, has endeared itself to me forever with its depiction of rain.
+
+Recent studies have proven eyewitness testimony to be utterly unreliable.
+It turns out that memory is not a record set down on the tablet of the brain, but rather a series of impressions, emotions, and physical states that changes even with access.
+One of my students is having a hard time finding arguments in favor of the use of eyewitness testimony for a paper.
+This is how obvious the workings of memory are.
+
+And yet.
+[Without our memory we are nothing][].
+Memory is the tether to the floor of the ocean of our past, the ocean is our collective subconscious, which we float on, on the inner tube of individual perception, slathering on the suntan lotion of our prejudices, wearing the sunglasses of self-deception, all underneath the sun of technology.
+The seagulls of death circle slowly, calling to each other the call of their society, secret in its machinations.
+
+My father told me that once, when swimming, a rip tide pulled him far out to sea.
+He said it was impossible to tell until it was too late.
+The shore simply receded too slowly.
+He never told me how he made it back, but I imagine him, bearded, beached, coughing up saltwater: a new shipwrecked victim.
+
+***
+
+[`grep`][] is a basic search tool for UNIX-based systems.
+It has a robust syntax, though I've had trouble remembering the regex nuances between it, `sed`'s, and `perl`'s.
+There is a POSIX standard, but no one follows standards.
+
+My mother loves Annie Dillard.
+She always talks about the praying mantis egg case scene: Dillard could never find a praying mantis egg case, until she finally saw one by accident.
+After that, she saw them everywhere.
+
+My mother showed me an egg case once.
+I haven't seen one since.
+
+My friend Steven has over three hundred pairs of shoes.
+He tells me his goal is eventually to obtain a calendar of shoes, and wear a different one each day of the year.
+He doesn't include the forty days of Lent, however.
+[He goes barefoot those forty days][].
+
+[`tr`]: http://man.cx/tr
+[`sed`]: http://man.cx/sed
+[wind blows hard up here]: cold-wind.html
+[pick me up like an angel]: lappel-du-vide.html
+[rolls is mayonnaise]: riptide_memory.html
+[Shoe Event Horizon]: http://www.voxday.blogspot.com/2015/02/mailvox-marxism-and-shoe-event-horizon.html
+[into birds]: statements-frag.html
+[`awk`]: http://man.cx/awk
+[Perl]: http://www.perl.org/
+[blank brick wall]: building.html
+[Without our memory we are nothing]: early.html
+[`grep`]: http://man.cx/grep
+[He goes barefoot those forty days]: leg.html
@@ -0,0 +1,52 @@
+---
+title: Creation myth
+genre: verse
+
+id: creation-myth
+toc: "Creation myth"
+
+project:
+    title: Autocento of the breakfast table
+    class: autocento
+...
+
+| So two hyperintelligent pandimensional beings
+| walk into a bar.  One turns to the other and says,
+| "Did you remember to check the end state
+| of that simulation we were running?"  The other
+| says, "No, I thought that you did?"  To which
+| the first replies, "[Oh shit][], we missed it.
+| I suppose we must do all of this again.  Barkeep,
+
+| two beers please."  The bartender nods in that way
+| that bartenders do, pours the two beers,
+| expertly, by the way, just so, and hands them
+| to the first [hyperintelligent pandimensional][] being.
+| The second one pulls a few singles out of his
+| wallet, places them on the bar, and the pair
+| turn around and begin walking toward a table
+| in the middle of the mostly-empty bar.  The bar-
+| tender picks up the money, fans it out, frowns,
+| and calls to his patrons' backs: "Hey, this
+| isn't enough!"  The two turn around simultan-
+| eously, with parity, and stare at him.  A beat.
+
+| One of them, the one without the beer, breaks
+| the silence by exclaiming, "Oh dear god, I'm
+| sorry!  I didn't know your prices went up since
+| last time.  What do I owe you?"  The bartender
+| says, "Oh, just another [dollar][]-fifty."  The being
+| reaches in his back pocket, slides out his
+| wallet, looks in smiling, and frowns when he sees
+| it's empty.  He looks to the other and says,
+| "You got a [buck][]-fifty I can borrow?"
+
+| The second hyperintelligent pandimensional being
+| considers this.  He sets the beers down
+| on the table, pulls out his own wallet, opens
+| it, and frowns.  "I'm broke too," he says.
+
+[hyperintelligent pandimensional]: http://hitchhikers.wikia.com/wiki/Mice
+[Oh shit]: movingsideways.html
+[dollar]: one-hundred-lines.html
+[buck]: plant.html
@@ -0,0 +1,77 @@
+---
+title: Dead man
+genre: verse
+
+id: deadman
+toc: "Dead man"
+
+project:
+    title: Elegies for alternate selves
+    class: elegies
+    order: 9
+    prev:
+    - title: The boar
+      link: boar
+    next:
+    - title: The angel to Abraham
+      link: angeltoabraham
+...
+
+| The dead man finds [his way into our hearts][]
+| by [opening the door][] and walking in.
+
+| He pours himself [a drink][], something like
+| German cognac, from the mini-bar.  He starts talking
+
+| aimlessly about hunting or some bats he saw
+| on the way over, wheeling around each other
+
+| like [x-rays][] around bones and soft tissue.
+| The dead man can see x-rays now, he says,
+
+| a perk of his [condition][].
+| It's not so bad, he says, though
+
+| he stops short of saying it's as good as
+| being alive, an omission we can, ultimately,
+
+| forgive.  There's [a short silence][] where nothing
+| is said, we're just looking at him as he looks
+
+| at the ceiling or through it.  He looks good
+| for being dead.  We mention this to him
+
+| but he just looks embarrassed.  He mentions
+| eels he saw in the aquarium earlier, how they knot
+
+| while mating.  For hours, it's just a huge mass
+| of [eel flesh, he says, undulating in the water][].
+
+| We nod, waiting for what he'll say next.  He seems
+| uncomfortable carrying the conversation, but we
+
+| can't think of anything either.  Now it's his turn
+| to look at us, and [ours to stare at the ceiling][]
+
+| or wherever.  Finally, we mention the knots we tied
+| in Boy Scouts, especially the loop---a noose? he asks---
+
+| but we say no, the one with the rabbit in its hole
+| and the tree it goes around.  The dead man
+
+| knows that knot, he says, it's a good knot.  But what
+| he really likes is the rabbit, coming out of its hole
+
+| in the morning, eating some grass, and a fox creeping
+| out of its hiding place and chasing the rabbit around
+
+| the tree, back into its hole, where it always ends up safe.
+
+[his way into our hearts]: last-bastion.html
+[opening the door]: words-meaning.html
+[a drink]: ex-machina.html
+[x-rays]: x-ray.html
+[condition]: initial-conditions.html
+[a short silence]: creation-myth.html
+[eel flesh, he says, undulating in the water]: spittle.html
+[ours to stare at the ceiling]: moongone.html
@@ -0,0 +1,64 @@
+---
+title: The Death Zone
+genre: verse
+
+id: death-zone
+toc: "The death zone"
+
+epigraph:
+    content: And my life became death.
+    attrib: Philip Gould
+    link: http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2013/11/19/245996903/embracing-life-and-death
+
+ekphrastic:
+    image: gould.png
+    title: Philip Gould
+    link: 'http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2013/11/19/245996903/embracing-life-and-death'
+
+project:
+    title: Stark Raving
+    class: stark
+    order: 7
+    next:
+    - title: The Big Dipper
+      link: big-dipper
+    - title: Exasperated
+      link: exasperated
+    prev:
+    - title: Exasperated
+      link: exasperated
+    - title: AMBER alert
+      link: amber-alert
+...
+
+| When I think of death I think
+| of Peter Falk in _The Princess Bride_ patting
+| [his pockets][] as he leaves the room
+
+| Life is a series of doors or so
+| they say but I ask them this
+| where does that last door lead?
+
+| For Falk maybe it leads backstage
+| a black-walled catered affair with stage
+| lights slowly baking stale muffins
+
+| [Sweaty cheese][] leaking onto dried-out
+| grapes a chocolate fountain clogged
+| by some errant strawberry crown
+
+| but this is not where it leads for you or
+| for me that door opens onto darkness marked
+| only by a trellis or the lid of a casket
+
+| the door of the [earth's womb][] opening
+| finally to accept us and with us the dirt
+| not to grow more strawberries for Falk
+
+| but to pad his feet as he walks overhead
+| to visit someone he certainly cares about
+| but whose name is lost to posterity.
+
+[his pockets]: creation-myth.html
+[Sweaty cheese]: i-wanted-to-tell-you-something.html
+[earth's womb]: about-the-author.html
@@ -0,0 +1,58 @@
+---
+title: "Death's trumpet"
+genre: verse
+
+id: deathstrumpet
+toc: "Death's trumpet"
+
+project:
+    title: Elegies for alternate selves
+    class: elegies
+    order: 28
+    prev:
+      title: 'To Daniel: an elaboration'
+      link: todaniel
+
+epigraph:
+    content: |
+        So Death plays his little fucking trumpet.
+        So what, says the boy.
+    attrib: Larry Levis
+    link: "http://michaelduke.org/2014/07/20/larry-levis-boy-in-video-arcade/"
+...
+
+| He didn't have any polish so he spit-shined the whole thing
+| until it gleamed like a [tomato on the vine][] that was begging
+| to be picked and thrown on some caprese.  Death loved caprese.
+
+| He stood up to put the horn to his lips, trying to imagine
+| it was a woman he loved.  He blushed as he realized how bad
+| [the metaphor was][].  He practiced anyway for six hours a day
+| in front of the mirror---what else to do with all the time?
+
+| Death looked at [himself in the mirror][] as he played, the trumpet
+| suspended in midair.  _Damn vampire rules_, he thought.
+| He was always worried he might have [missed a spot][] while shaving
+| but he'd never know unless a stranger---he had no friends---
+| was kind enough.  Not that he goes out anyway or meets people.
+
+| He started waking up late, staying in bed later.
+| He started thinking he was depressed.  He never did eat
+| that caprese, and it started getting soggy, green spots
+| spreading on the mozzarella like bedsores.  The sun
+| filtered through the [kitchen blinds like smoke][]. He had
+| to get out of the house.  He decided to go to the arcade.
+
+| When he got there, it was empty except for a boy
+| [with dead eyes][].  So far so good, Death thought.
+| He was playing a first-person shooter, something violent.
+| Death walked past him and watched out of the corner
+| of his eye.  The kid was good.  Death decided
+| to congratulate him.  He had his trumpet in his hand.
+
+[himself in the mirror]: moongone.html
+[with dead eyes]: big-dipper.html
+[tomato on the vine]: wallpaper.html
+[the metaphor was]: leaf.html
+[missed a spot]: january.html
+[kitchen blinds like smoke]: what-we-are-made-of.html
@@ -0,0 +1,183 @@
+---
+title: Something
+subtitle: about my tenure as a bear
+genre: prose
+
+id: dollywood
+toc: "Something about my tenure as a bear"
+
+project:
+    title: Autocento of the breakfast table
+    class: autocento
+...
+
+I turned off the TV as soon as the end credits began.
+I stretched in the La-Z-Boy&trade; I grew up in, pushing its back until I lay horizontal, feet slightly elevated.
+I stared at the light, at the bugs silhouetted inside it.
+I relaxed, thought about sleeping in the chair with the light on.
+I decided against it, pulled the lever to pull the chairback up and the footrest down, stood up, went around the corner, turned off the light, [stripped to my underwear][], and got [in bed][].
+I made sure my alarm was set for 8:00 and lay face-up in the dark.
+Eventually I slept.
+
+I still consider this to be the best summer I ever had, in terms of my sleep schedule.
+Every night I went to bed at midnight, after Stewart and Colbert.
+Every morning I woke up at eight, took a shower, ate my Frosted Mini-Wheats&trade;, and brushed my teeth.
+I took my time because I didn't have to leave for work until 9:30.
+My shift at Dollywood started at 10:00.
+It was my second summer there---I worked as Larry the Cucumber&trade; mostly, though sometimes I would pick up the shift for one of the official Dollywood mascots when they had their day off.
+
+I went outside when the wall clock read 9:32.
+The day was already beginning to warm up.
+I walked across the road to my car, a Saturn&reg;, my first, started it, pulled into the road, and looked up at my window, the only one on the second floor of my house.
+I said "So long" [in my head][] to my room, the house, and my two sisters still sleeping inside, and drove down the road.
+
+***
+
+My morning commute was rural, through farms, creeks, hills, and hollows; past tourist cabin resorts and used Christian bookstores; nearly getting to Pigeon Forge but stopping before any of the Strip was visible.
+Like Las Vegas, Pigeon Forge has a Strip; it was second only to Vegas in terms of marriages performed; it was first in the country including Vegas to feature two Cracker Barrels&reg;.
+I went into Pigeon Forge only if I couldn't help it, which was rare; usually it was only if family from out-of-state were visiting, or the one time I and two friends went to the Buy-One-Pair-Get-Two-Pair-Free Boot Store and got a deal.
+
+I turned left before I got to any of Pigeon Forge, into the employee entrance of Dollywood.
+I drove down a small road: to my left a hill covered in kudzu; to my right a fence past which I could hear people riding The River Rampage&trade; or Rockin' Roadway&trade;.
+I turned left again, drove past HR and the Dollywood doctor's office, and checked for parking at the bottom of the hill.
+There wasn't any, so I drove up the hill, found a parking spot, and got out of my car.
+I thought about waiting for an employee shuttle until I realized it was 9:55, so I trotted down the hill and past HR.
+I crossed the road in front of the gazebo, walked down a little path, and met Tim the security guard as I was crossing the main road.
+He asked to see my ID, which I had ready for him.
+I showed it to him, he looked me up and down (I wasn't in costume, usually a no at Dollywood, but since my costume was green, expensive, and required at least two people to put on, I didn't have to wear it onto the park), and finally let me through.
+I walked through the employee entrance and clocked in at 9:58.
+
+I had only figured out how to clock in my second summer.
+The first summer I worked at Dollywood was also the first summer I worked a job, and due to the placement of the Atmosphere Characters in the hierarchy of Park management we got paid by the day.
+This confused me into thinking that I didn't need to clock in and out, especially since I still got paid.
+My confusion deepened when I walked onto Park one day with Chance, who also worked Veggie Tales&trade;, and he clocked in, but this was midway through the summer and I was too nervous to ask anyone about what I should do.
+I was worried that if I started clocking in it would cause suspicion, and I was terrified that my not clocking in would be caught and punished somehow.
+For about a month I lived in mild terror each morning and afternoon, avoiding my coworkers as they entered or left so they wouldn't see me walk past the red time clocks, each day wondering if the hammer would fall.
+I found out later that my manager Charlie had been paying me based on the days he'd scheduled me, clocking me in and out himself from his computer.
+He said it wasn't a big deal but to clock in next summer, this summer.
+So I clocked in and out every day, and these short sessions with the red time clock became favorite moments.
+
+I walked onto the park, past Jukebox Junction&trade;, over the bridge, under the rope that disallowed guests to visit the area until the Park opened at 10:00, down Showstreet, and into the back of Showstreet Palace Theater, where we characters shared a dressing room with the Veggie Tales&trade; actors.
+Our "dressing-room" was a part of backstage partitioned off by curtains, where the empty shells of Bob the Tomato&trade; and Larry the Cucumber&trade; lay, inside-out so the sweat inside could evaporate, between shifts.
+I grabbed my off-brand UnderArmour&trade; "slicks" from the laundry basket and went to the bathroom to change.
+
+After I changed I came out of the bathroom and knocked on the women's dressing room door, to see if Nina or Stacy were in yet.
+Nina opened the door.
+"Hey Case," she said.  "How's it going?"
+"I'm good.  Am I Larry today?"
+I had been off the day before, so I wasn't sure of the rotation.
+"Yeah I think so," said Stacy, putting on makeup in the mirror.
+So she was handling with Chance, while Nina and I were the vegetables.
+I liked this arrangement; I preferred to be Larry&trade; because I didn't have to talk to anyone, and I could make faces in the costume while families took pictures.
+Nina preferred the same thing, although she was slightly too tall to fit comfortably inside Bob&trade;.
+Stacy actually preferred to handle; her personality was bubbly and talkative; I don't think Chance liked any part of the job, really, and handling was less hot than being in the suit.
+
+"When's our first run?" I asked.
+"Well, the first show is at 10:20, so we were thinking about 11?"
+I nodded.
+"Where's Chance?"
+"I think he went out back to smoke," Nina said.
+"I'll go with you."
+The actors for the Veggie Tales show were coming in to use their dressing room, so we left Stacy with them.
+We walked through backstage, behind all the curtains, and through the side door into a sort of garage with ratty couches, a refrigerator, and an old TV mounted high up on the wall.
+Chance was sitting, smoking, and watching Jeopardy while thumbing through a magazine.
+"Hi Chance," I said.
+"Hey guys!" he flicked his smile, always somewhere between genuine and mocking, at us.
+
+"Think it'll rain today?"
+he asked, indicating the direction of the sky.
+It wasn't really visible from within the garage, due to the high fence keeping the guests on the path toward Timber Tower&trade; and Mystery Mine&trade;, and the tree just outside the garage.
+"I don't think there's a cloud in the sky," I said, but walked out of the garage and looked up to be sure.
+There were wisps of cirrus like stray brush strokes on a blue canvas, but that was all.
+"I think we'll have to do all of our runs today."
+"Damn," said Chance, and stubbed out his cigarette.
+We watched Jeopardy in silence for a few minutes.
+Chance checked his watch.
+"It's 10:19," he said, "we should get inside before the show starts."
+
+We went back to the dressing room, behind the curtains backstage, past the skins of Larry&trade; and Bob&trade;, their feet, and their battery packs, past the water fountain where I drank, and into the women's dressing room.
+Stacy had finished applying her makeup and was already in overalls, flannel, boots and cowboy hat.
+Seeing her, Chance said, "I'd better go put my outfit on."
+He left and came back, costumed.
+We killed time.
+Nina turned her wrist and looked at her watch.
+"It's 10:50," she said, looking at me and jerking her head toward the door.
+"Let's get ready."
+
+We went out and down the hall.
+The Veggie Tales were singing about Mr. Nezzer&trade; loving the bunny.
+Nina went to Bob&trade;, and I to Larry&trade;.
+We set to work pulling them right-side-out.
+When this was done we put on the backpacks that served as interior shells for the characters and held the battery packs.
+As Nina pulled on Bob&trade;'s legs, I pulled on Larry&trade;'s.
+I put my shoes in Larry&trade;'s feet---a concession made to the forms of us humans inside the suits (Bob&trade; and Larry&trade; on the show had no arms or legs).
+We clipped each other's batteries into the packs.
+We put our hands through the vegetables' arms.
+At this point, the vegetables' faces were sagging from our waists, like deflated balloons.
+We waddled over to the hallway outside the dressing rooms.
+Chance helped me put Larry's hands on, which were three-fingered like a cartoon, although in the cartoon the Veggie Tales characters don't have hands.
+He snapped them onto the arm.
+He helped me pull the head up and over my pack, and clipped the battery to the fan inside the suit.
+He zipped the back zipper, and the suit started to inflate---Bob&trade; and Larry&trade; were inflatable to cut down on their weight.
+Stacy had done the same with Nina and Bob&trade;.
+She asked, "Ready?"
+We said, "Ready."
+Chance got ahead of us, opening the door.
+I had to push my hands into my chest to deflate the suit so it could fit through the door.
+We stepped into the dappled sunlight of Dollywood.
+
+***
+
+The first few minutes of the run were fairly peaceful.
+A few families walking by saw us and walk over, forming a small line for their children to say hello, get a hug and a picture.
+One of the kids, about three, got about five feet from me, pass some sort of magic barrier, and suddenly become terrified.
+She screamed and run back to her parents.
+I tried to get eye-contact (it was hard to tell exactly where Larry&trade; was looking, since his eyes were about a foot above my head and were fixed forward), get small, and hold out my hand, but she had seen quite enough.
+She shook her head and hid behind her mother's leg.
+I waved with my fingers and stepped back to receive the next child.
+
+Sometimes, doing this job, I felt like a priest giving some sort of communion.
+Sometimes I felt like a celebrity, especially when children asked for an autograph (this happened fairly often, and Chance had to guide my hand with the Sharpie&trade; in it).
+Sometimes I felt like Santa Claus, or some other mythical creature come to Earth.
+Mostly, I felt a little hot and slightly bored.
+The boredom crystallized into stress when the Veggie Tales show let out.
+
+Showstreet Palace held something like four hundred people, and for a show like Veggie Tales, around half were children.
+For this run our post was around the side of the theater, so we didn't get the full press of the crowd, but there were quite a few people streaming out of the side door, fresh from seeing Larry&trade;, Bob&trade; and friends performing in a show.
+Of course they were excited to see them giving out hugs in the street.
+Chance and Stacy became busy trying to form the crowd into some semblance of a line while I and Nina were hugging children, trying to take our time with each but painfully aware of the next in line.
+This was the worst part of the job---I felt like I was on a factory line gluing widgets onto a product all day.
+I was always looking ahead, always at the next kid, barely noticing what the ones old enough to talk were saying to me, trying to show me.
+I felt callous and aloof from humanity, and a deep unease passed over me.
+
+With all of this on my mind, of course I didn't see the teenager running toward me from my left.
+Chance and Stacy can't be blamed; they were busy with crowd control.
+I don't know what happened to the kid afterward.
+All I know is what happened to me: suddenly a great weight on my left side, the hiss of air being forced out of Larry&trade;, me almost falling over.
+The weight fell off.
+I turned around, too stunned to yell, though Chance had caught it out of the corner of his eye.
+"Hey!  Don't do that!" he said, his eyes on the fallen teenager.
+The kid was maybe fifteen, tall, with a white T-shirt and dark hair.
+He had an indescribable look on his face---surprise, satisfaction, and something else I couldn't identify.
+Before Chance could reach him he ran off.
+
+"You okay?"
+he turned to me and asked.
+I said in a low voice, "Yeah I'm fine."
+"We're going in," he said to Stacy.
+She checked her watch, said, "Yeah, it's been twenty minutes."
+To the crowd: "We have time for just two more pictures!"
+A wave of disappointment went through the people there.
+Most stayed, hoping for an extension of the rule, but we took two more pictures, turned around, and began walking inside.
+Some family tried to follow us in; Chance hollered over his shoulder, "I'm sorry folks, we have to go in.
+Bob&trade; and Larry&trade; need a break."
+The father asked, "When will you be back out?"
+"After the next show," Chance said as Stacy opened the door.
+
+I deflated Larry&trade;'s face again, to get in the door, and was safe in the darkness of the hallway.
+Chance unzipped me, allowing real, cool air to wash over my body.
+Nina and I waddled down the hallway to peel the vegetables off ourselves, and to repeat the process of waiting, dressing, and standing again.
+
+[stripped to my underwear]: underwear.html
+[in bed]: in-bed.html
+[in my head]: hymnal.html
@@ -0,0 +1,52 @@
+---
+title: Dream
+genre: prose
+
+id: dream
+toc: "Dream"
+
+project:
+    title: "Buildings out of air: Paul in the Woods"
+    class: paul
+    order: 4
+    next:
+    - title: Axe
+      link: axe
+    - title: Early
+      link: early
+    prev:
+    - title: Underwear
+      link: underwear
+    - title: Cereal
+      link: cereal
+...
+
+It had gotten cold.
+He went to lay down [in bed][] 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:
+
+_Arm journeying across \
+the pg. like a \
+series of switch- \
+backs down the wall \
+of the Grand Canyon_
+
+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.
+
+"Could you turn that down please" he hollered across the wall to his mother.
+She made no reply ([music too loud][]).
+He gave his arm a break to look at what he'd written.
+He couldn't make heads or tails of it.
+It looked like Arabic.
+
+He woke up gasping in a sweat.
+
+[in bed]: in-bed.html
+[music too loud]: music-433.html
@@ -0,0 +1,53 @@
+---
+title: Early
+genre: prose
+
+id: early
+toc: "Early"
+
+project:
+    title: "Buildings out of air: Paul in the Woods"
+    class: paul
+    order: 35
+    next:
+    - title: Toothpaste
+      link: toothpaste
+    - title: Father
+      link: father
+    prev:
+    - title: Stump
+      link: stump
+    - title: Dream
+      link: dream
+...
+
+_YOU CANNOT DISCOVER ART ART MUST BE CREATED_ he sat on the couch at home while his mother [watched TV][] and smoked.
+[Dinner had been chicken][] and peas with [milk][] 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.
+
+_ART = ARTIFICE_ he wrote.
+_ARTIFICE MEANS UNNATURAL.
+ARTIFICE MEANS BUILT.
+TO BUILD MEANS TO [FIND A PATTERN][] & FIND A PATTERN IS WHAT WE ARE GOOD AT._
+He thought about this while someone else won a car.
+
+"Do you think humans are good at finding patterns because we are hunters" he asked his mother.
+She [looked sideways][] 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.
+
+"If the gazelle went [to the same place][] every year" he thought "did they know the pattern too?
+Or was it random for them, did they think each year 'This seems like a good spot let's graze here' without knowing?"
+
+He wrote _PATTERN = MEMORY_ in his notebook.
+
+[watched TV]: real-writer.html
+[Dinner had been chicken]: when-im-sorry-i.html
+[milk]: shipwright.html
+[FIND A PATTERN]: fire.html
+[looked sideways]: movingsideways.html
+[to the same place]: serengeti.html
@@ -0,0 +1,38 @@
+---
+title: Elegy for an alternate self
+genre: verse
+
+id: elegyforanalternateself
+toc: "Elegy for an alternate self"
+
+project:
+    title: Autocento of the breakfast table
+    class: autocento
+...
+
+| Say there are no words.  Say that we are conjoined
+| from birth, or better still, say we are myself.
+| ---But I still talk to myself, I [build my world][]
+| through language, so if we say there are [no words][]
+| this is not enough.  Say we are instead some animal,
+| or better yet, [a plant][], or a flagellum motoring
+| aimlessly around.  (Say that humans are the only things
+| that reason.  Say that we're the [only things that worry][].)
+
+| Say that I am separate.  To say there's everything else
+| and then there's me is wrong.  Each thing is separate:
+| [there is no whole in the world][].  Say this is both good
+| and bad, or rather, say there is no good or bad but only
+| being, [more and more of it always added][], none taken out
+| though it can be forgotten.  Say that forgetting
+| is a [function of our remembering][].  (Say that humans only
+| [worry about separation][].  Say that only humans feel it.)
+
+[no words]: hymnal.html
+[a plant]: plant.html
+[only things that worry]: movingsideways.html
+[there is no whole in the world]: i-wanted-to-tell-you-something.html
+[worry about separation]: swansong-alt.html
+[build my world]: i-am.html
+[more and more of it always added]: no-nothing.html
+[function of our remembering]: collage-instrument.html
@@ -0,0 +1,34 @@
+---
+title: epigraph
+subtitle: "&ndash; Sylvia Plath"
+genre: prose
+
+id: epigraph
+toc: "_epigraph_"
+
+project:
+    title: Elegies for alternate selves
+    class: elegies
+    order: 1
+    next:
+    - title: How to read this
+      link: howtoreadthis
+    prev:
+    - title: Death's Trumpet
+      link: deathstrumpet
+...
+
+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 [other lovers][] 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 [death][], 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.
+
+[other lovers]: spittle.html
+[death]: deathstrumpet.html
+[green fig tree]: peaches.html
@@ -0,0 +1,55 @@
+---
+title: Ex machina
+genre: verse
+
+id: ex-machina
+toc: "Ex machina"
+
+epigraph:
+    content: with lines from National Geographic
+    link: 'http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2013/08/sugar/cohen-text'
+
+project:
+    title: Autocento of the breakfast table
+    class: autocento
+...
+
+| Bottom of the drink: they had
+| to go.  The Coke machine, the snack
+| machine, the deep fryer.  Hoisted
+
+| and dragged through the halls
+| and out to the curb, they sat with
+| other trash beneath gray, forlorn
+
+| skies behind the elementary
+| school, wondering what their next
+| move would be.  The Coke machine
+
+| had always wanted to live
+| the life of a [hobo][], jumping trains,
+| eating from garbage, making fire
+
+| in old oil drums.  It had some
+| strange romantic notions of being homeless,
+| is what the deep fryer thought.
+
+| Its opinion was to head to court,
+| sue the bastards at the school for early
+| termination of contract.  It was
+
+| the embodiment of [justifiable anger][].
+| It believed privately that it was an incarnation
+| of Nemesis, the goddess of divine
+
+| retribution.  What the snack machine
+| thought, it kept to itself, but it did say
+| that [nothing ever ends][].  The others
+
+| were confused, then angry, but finally
+| understood, or thought they did.  The snack
+| machine's candy melted in the sun.
+
+[hobo]: prelude.html
+[justifiable anger]: table_contents.html
+[nothing ever ends]: no-nothing.html
@@ -0,0 +1,74 @@
+---
+title: Exasperated
+genre: verse
+
+id: exasperated
+toc: "Exasperated"
+
+project:
+    title: Stark Raving
+    class: stark
+    order: 8
+    next:
+    - title: The Death Zone
+      link: death-zone
+    - title: Boy on the bus
+      link: boy_bus
+    prev:
+    - title: AMBER alert
+      link: amber-alert
+    - title: The Death Zone
+      link: death-zone
+...
+
+| I didn't write this sestina yesterday.
+| It's the first time I fell behind in my task
+| and hopefully, the only time it will.
+| This means that today I must write two
+| sestinas.  If I don't write them today, I
+| will have to write two later down the line.
+
+| Although I feel I'm slogging through each line
+| I think I'm doing better every day,
+| though maybe this is wishful thinking: I
+| showed my friend my just-completed task
+| two days ago (my God, was it two
+| entire days?  I've no idea what I'll
+
+| do [after thirty-nine days][].  I think I'll
+| feel like [Inigo Montoya][], who'd been in the line
+| of revenging for so long, he didn't know what to
+| do with the rest of his life), and he deigned
+| to be polite, but I could tell the task
+| was hard for him.  He told me finally that I
+
+| had made a noble effort, but that ultimately I
+| failed.  [So my question][]: when will
+| I be a decent sestina writer?  For this is my task.
+| Maybe if I just keep cranking out line after line
+| I'll finally figure it out.  Maybe one more day
+| or another week will do it, or maybe I'll need two,
+
+| or maybe it'll never happen.  Maybe a sestina's too
+| involved, too much [weaving][] of words too fine, and I
+| will never write a good one, even on my best day,
+| even if I employ all my skill and all my will.
+| I'm not used to writing poems with thirty-nine lines,
+| that must be the problem, must be why this task
+
+| is Herculean.  He only had to finish twelve tasks,
+| and I have one less one thousand, five hundred twenty-two,
+| and it's nothing but complaining lines
+| about [how hard it is to be a person][].  I
+| am getting sick of myself with these poems, and will
+| soon be loathe to get out of bed every day.
+
+| But I tasked myself with this, which may be the worst I
+| ever do to myself.  I thought a poem NaNoWriMo would
+| be fun, would line my resume, give me something I could publish someday.
+
+[after thirty-nine days]: http://biblehub.com/2_corinthians/11-24.htm
+[Inigo Montoya]: death-zone.html
+[So my question]: question.html
+[weaving]: tapestry.html
+[how hard it is to be a person]: deathstrumpet.html
@@ -0,0 +1,45 @@
+---
+title: Father
+genre: prose
+
+id: father
+toc: "Father"
+
+project:
+    title: "Buildings out of air: Paul in the Woods"
+    class: paul
+    order: 37
+    next:
+    - title: Paul
+      link: paul
+    - title: Fire
+      link: fire
+    prev:
+    - title: Toothpaste
+      link: toothpaste
+    - title: Early
+      link: early
+...
+
+"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.
+
+His father.
+Paul had never met him.
+His mother had said when he was a kid that his father was caught by a [riptide][] 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.
+
+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.
+
+"Where you going" asked his mother.
+"To the shed.
+I'll be back in a bit" he said.
+
+[riptide]: riptide_memory.html
@@ -0,0 +1,48 @@
+---
+title: Feeding the raven
+genre: prose
+
+id: feedingtheraven
+toc: "Feeding the raven"
+
+project:
+    title: Elegies for alternate selves
+    class: elegies
+    order: 11
+    prev:
+    - title: The angel to Abraham
+      link: angeltoabraham
+    next:
+    - title: On formal poetry
+      link: onformalpoetry
+...
+
+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.
+
+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 [dog][]'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.
+
+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 [translation of a translation][] 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.
+
+When he was calm he excused himself to be sick on my toilet.
+He wouldn't let me follow but said he would sign whatever I liked when he got back.
+After half an hour passed and all I'd had for company was the ticking of the [clock][], I went to the bathroom door.
+I knocked carefully---once, then twice---to no beaming face, no flowers.
+I opened the door.
+There was shit on the floor and the window was open.
+There was a breeze blowing.
+
+[dog]: purpose-dogs.html
+[translation of a translation]: todaniel.html
+[clock]: boar.html
@@ -0,0 +1,42 @@
+---
+title: Finding the Lion
+genre: verse
+
+id: finding-the-lion
+toc: "Finding the lion"
+
+project:
+    title: Autocento of the breakfast table
+    class: autocento
+...
+
+| Tonight, as I look up, the stars
+| hide themselves in shame.  [There is no moon][].
+| The sky is black, like my desk,
+
+| [nothing like a raven][].  The streetlights
+| look on the scene disinterested.
+| They have their own [small gossips of the dark][].
+
+| I came here to find the Lion, old
+| friend, but he will not show his flanks, his
+| paws, his shoulders, [his mane][].  I
+
+| can hear him laughing from his hiding-place
+| behind the moon, nonexistent, under
+| the cold dead earth.  The mountain is in front
+
+| of me now, a hole of stars daring me
+| to pierce it with my sight.  The lion's still
+| laughing; the streetlamps talk about
+
+| me amongst themselves, and go out.  There
+| never was any lion, they tell me.
+| [You only hear the wind][] [on the mountain][].
+
+[There is no moon]: moongone.html
+[nothing like a raven]: feedingtheraven.html
+[small gossips of the dark]: the-night-we-met.html
+[his mane]: axe.html
+[You only hear the wind]: cold-wind.html
+[on the mountain]: mountain.html
@@ -0,0 +1,49 @@
+---
+title: Fire
+genre: prose
+
+id: fire
+toc: "Fire"
+
+project:
+    title: "Buildings out of air: Paul in the Woods"
+    class: paul
+    order: 39
+    next:
+    - title: Hands
+      link: hands
+    prev:
+    - title: Paul
+      link: paul
+    - title: Father
+      link: father
+...
+
+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.
+[When it did it was not in a very strong stream.][]
+"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.
+
+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 [black and white][] car and put him inside.
+He was saying something about Paul's right.
+"No it's my [left that was hurt][]" said Paul "but it's all better now."
+
+[When it did it was not in a very strong stream.]: hard-game.html
+[black and white]: sense-of-it.html
+[left that was hurt]: x-ray.html
@@ -0,0 +1,48 @@
+---
+title: Look
+subtitle: a found typewriter poem
+genre: verse
+
+id: found-typewriter-poem
+toc: "Look: a found typewriter poem"
+
+epigraph:
+    content: |
+        [Is he older](http://books.google.com/books?id=ALdlAAAAMAAJ&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=older+than)?  I asked her.
+        And I never got an answer, because at the moment she disappeared in a puff of smoke.
+        I like to think nothing ever happened to her save that she went over to the spirit realm.
+        I usually know better though.
+
+project:
+    title: Autocento of the breakfast table
+    class: autocento
+...
+
+| Look, I say---look here---
+| at this old place
+| [where nothing changes][old-place].
+| Look at the people
+| who pass by.  Look at
+| the trees.  The flowers
+| full of wanting: look
+| [how full they are][] with
+| color.  Look how they mock
+| us, empty people who
+| must fill themselves
+| with changes---emptiness.
+
+| "[There is nothing][] to be
+| but happy.  [There is no][]
+| sadness to fall down
+| like cherry petals."
+
+| The [trees don't under-
+| stand:][trees] they are too
+| tall to see the germ
+| of discontent in us.
+
+[old-place]: planks.html
+[how full they are]: squirrel.html
+[There is nothing]: elegeyforanalternateself.html
+[There is no]: no-nothing.html
+[trees]: plant.html
@@ -0,0 +1,53 @@
+---
+title: Hands
+genre: prose
+
+id: hands
+toc: "Hands"
+
+project:
+    title: "Buildings out of air: Paul in the Woods"
+    class: paul
+    order: 10
+    next:
+    - title: Toilet
+      link: toilet
+    - title: Hardware
+      link: hardware
+    prev:
+    - title: Shed
+      link: shed
+    - title: Fire
+      link: fire
+...
+
+He looked down at his hands idly while he was typing.
+They were [dry and cracked in places][].
+He thought he might start bleeding so he went inside for some lotion.
+
+"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 [bathroom][] and looked at himself in the mirror.
+"I look strange" he said to himself "I look like a teenager."
+He stared into his [right eye, then his left][].
+He saw nothing but [his own reflection fish-eyed][] in his pupils.
+He opened the medicine cabinet.
+
+Back in his Writing Shack, he started to type.
+
+> What is it about hands that gives
+> them such power?  It is that their
+> power is hidden in the arm.  Push
+> on the inside of the wrist--the
+> hand closes.  Reach under the skin
+> and pull on the outside tendons--
+> the hand opens again.  Hands are
+> only [machines][] for grasping,
+> controlled by the arm, not the
+> mind.
+
+[dry and cracked in places]: weplayedthosegamestoo.html
+[bathroom]: boar.html
+[right eye, then his left]: man.html
+[his own reflection fish-eyed]: deathstrumpet.html
+[machines]: ex-machina.html
@@ -0,0 +1,35 @@
+---
+title: A hard game
+genre: verse
+
+id: hard-game
+toc: "A hard game"
+
+dedication: Jim Henson
+
+project:
+    title: Autocento of the breakfast table
+    class: autocento
+...
+
+| You think building Hoggle's a hard game?
+| You know bunk.  Writing a ghazal's a hard game.
+
+| Let's meet in a place where words & fabric play---
+| but not [plastic][] words.  (Boggle's a hard game.)
+
+| A cookout where we can hash our differences
+| over steak, though making it sizzle's a hard game.
+
+| Let's go to a brothel, [rub shoulders][] with bare
+| shoulders, or a bar.  Being wastrel's a hard game.
+
+| Maybe we could switch professions, you and I,
+| you write the poems, I'll puppet Fozzie---a hard game.
+
+| When you call me, you never say my name.
+| Creativity's [a hose][]---shutting the nozzle's the hard game.
+
+[a hose]: fire.html
+[plastic]: sense-of-it.html
+[rub shoulders]: finding-the-lion.html
@@ -0,0 +1,48 @@
+---
+title: Hardware
+genre: prose
+
+id: hardware
+toc: "Hardware"
+
+project:
+    title: "Buildings out of air: Paul in the Woods"
+    class: paul
+    order: 14
+    next:
+    - title: Treatise
+      link: treatise
+    - title: Hymnal
+      link: hymnal
+    prev:
+    - title: Planks
+      link: planks
+    - title: Hands
+      link: hands
+...
+
+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 [proud of you][] Paul."
+
+"Oh right.
+Sure thing."
+They pulled into the parking lot.
+"Just be a minute" he said as he opened the car door.
+
+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 [furniture][].
+"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 [mystery][]."
+He turned around and walked straight out of the store and to his mother's car without looking up.
+
+"How'd it go" she asked starting the car.
+"Great" he said.
+
+[proud of you]: sixteenth-chapel.html
+[furniture]: real-writer.html
+[mystery]: love-as-god.html
@@ -0,0 +1,38 @@
+---
+title: How it happened
+genre: 'verse'
+
+id: howithappened
+toc: "How it happened"
+
+project:
+    title: Elegies for alternate selves
+    class: elegies
+    order: 14
+    prev:
+    - title: I am
+      link: i-am
+    next:
+    - title: Love Song
+      link: lovesong
+...
+
+| I was away on vacation when I heard---
+| someone sat at my desk while I was away.
+| They took my pen, while I was taking
+| surf lessons, and wrote the sun into the sky.
+| They pre-approved the earth and the waters,
+| and all of the living things, without even
+| having the decency to text me.  It was not I
+| who was behind the phrase "creeping things."
+| When I got back, of course I was pissed,
+| but it was [already written][] into the policy.
+| I'm just saying: don't blame me for Cain
+| killing Abel.  That was a murder.  I'm not a cop.
+| The Tower of Babel fell on its own.  The ark
+| never saw a single drop of rain.  I'm [the drunk][]
+| sitting on the curb who just pissed his pants,
+| holding up a sign asking where I am.
+
+[already written]: shipwright.html
+[the drunk]: problems.html
@@ -0,0 +1,104 @@
+---
+title: How to read this
+genre: prose
+
+id: howtoread
+toc: "How to read this"
+
+project:
+    title: Elegies for alternate selves
+    class: elegies
+    order: 2
+    next:
+    - title: And
+      link: and
+    prev:
+    - title: epigraph
+      link: epigraph
+...
+
+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.
+
+Fernando Pessoa wrote poems under four different identities---he called them *heteronyms*---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, "[Fernando Pessoa, strictly speaking, doesn't exist.][pessoa-exist]"
+
+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 [same river][] 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 was when beginning a poem is distinct from the person who finished the poem, largely due to the poem itself.
+In a way, it's been the waiter that brought the next course into the great meal that is myself.
+
+In the same way, with each poem you read of this, you too could become a different person.
+Depending on which order you read them in, you could be any number of possible people.
+If you follow the threads I've laid out for you, there are so many possible selves; if you disregard those and go a different way there are quite a few more.
+However, at the end of the journey there is only one self that you will occupy, the others disappearing from this universe and going maybe somewhere else, maybe nowhere at all.
+
+There is a scene in *The Neverending Story* where Bastian is trying to find his way out of the desert.
+He opens a door and finds himself in the Temple of a Thousand Doors, which is never seen from the outside but only once someone enters it.
+It is a series of rooms with six sides each and three doors: one from the room before and two choices.
+In life, each of these rooms is a moment, but where Bastian can choose which of only two doors to enter each time, in life there can be any number of doors and we don't always choose which to go through---in fact, I would argue that most of the time we aren't allowed the luxury.
+
+What happens to those other doors, those other possibilities?
+Is there some other version of the self that for whatever complexities of circumstance and will chose a different door at an earlier moment?
+The answer to this, of course, is that we can never know for sure, though this doesn't keep us from trying through the process of regret.
+We go back and try that other door in our mind, extrapolating a possible present from our own past.
+This is ultimately unsatisfying, not only because whatever world is imagined is not the one currently lived, but because it becomes obvious that the alternate model of reality is not complete: we can only extrapolate from the original room, absolutely without knowledge of any subsequent possible choices.
+This causes a deep disappointment, a frustration with the inability to know all possible timelines (coupled with the insecurity that this may not be the best of all possible worlds) that we feel as regret.
+
+In this way, every moment we live is an [elegy][] to every possible future that might have stemmed from it.
+Annie Dillard states this in a biological manner when she says in *Pilgrim at Tinker Creek*, "Every glistening egg is a memento mori."
+Nature is inefficient---it spends a hundred lifetimes to get one that barely works.
+The fossil record is littered with the failed experiments of evolution, many of which failed due only to blind chance: an asteroid, a shift in weather patterns, an inefficient copulation method.
+Each living person today has twenty dead standing behind him, and that only counts the people that actually lived.
+How many missed opportunities stand behind any of us?
+
+The real problem with all of this is that time is only additive.
+There's no way to dial it back and start over, with new choices or new environments.
+Even when given the chance to do something again, we do it *again*, with the reality given by our previous action.
+Thus we are constantly creating and being created by the world.
+The self is never the same from one moment to the next.
+
+A poem is like a snapshot of a self.
+If it's any good, it captures the emotional core of the self at the time of writing for communication with future selves, either within the same person or outside of it.
+Thus revision is possible, and the new poem created will be yet another snapshot of the future self as changed by the original poem.
+The page becomes a window into the past, a particular past as experienced by one self.
+The poem is a remembering of a self that no longer exists, in other words, an elegy.
+
+A snapshot doesn't capture the entire subject, however.
+It leaves out the background as it's obscured by foreground objects; it fails to include anything that isn't contained in its finite frame.
+In order to build a working definition of identity, we must include all possible selves over all possible timelines, combined into one person: identity is the combined effect of all possible selves over time.
+A poem leaves much of this out: it is the one person standing in front of twenty ghosts.
+
+A poem is the place where the selves of the reader and the speaker meet, in their respective times and places.
+In this way a poem is outside of time or place, because it changes its location each time it's read.
+Each time it's two different people meeting.
+The problem with a poem is that it's such a small window---if we met in real life the way we met in poems, we would see nothing of anyone else but a square the size of a postage stamp.
+It has been argued this is the way we see time and ourselves in it, as well: Vonnegut uses the metaphor of a subject strapped to a railroad car moving at a set pace, with a six-foot-long metal tube placed in front of the subject's eye; the landscape in the distance is time, and what we see is the only way in which we interact with it.  It's the same with a poem and the self: we can only see and interact with a small kernel.
+This is why it's possible to write more than one poem.
+
+Due to this kernel nature of poetry, a good poem should focus itself to extract as much meaning as possible from that one kernel of identity to which it has access.
+It should be an atom of selfhood, irreducible and resistant to paraphrase, because it tries to somehow echo the large unsayable part of identity outside the frame of the self.
+It is the [kernel][] that contains a universe, or that speaks around one that's hidden; if it's a successful poem then it makes the smallest circuit possible.
+This is why the commentary on poems is so voluminous: a poem is tightly packed meaning that commentators try to unpack to get at that universality inside it.
+A fortress of dialectic is constructed that ultimately obstructs the meaning behind the poem; it becomes the foreground in the photograph that disallows us to view the horizon beyond it.
+
+With this in mind, I collect these poems that were written over a period of four years into this book.
+Where I can, I insert cross-references (like the one above, in the margin) to other pieces in the text where I think the two resonate in some way.
+You can read this book in any way you'd like: you can go front-to-back, or back-to-front, or you can follow the arrows around, or you can work out a complex mathematical formula with Merseinne primes and logarithms and the 2000 Census information, or you can go completely randomly through like a magazine, or at least the way I flip through magazines.
+If writing is a communication of the self, then this is the best way to communicate mine in all its multiversity.
+
+[pessoa-exist]: philosophy.html
+[same river]: mountain.html
+[elegy]: words-meaning.html
+[kernel]: arspoetica.html
@@ -0,0 +1,44 @@
+---
+title: Hymnal
+genre: prose
+
+id: hymnal
+toc: "Hymnal"
+
+project:
+    title: "Buildings out of air: Paul in the Woods"
+    class: paul
+    order: 2
+    next:
+    - title: Underwear
+      link: underwear
+    - title: Joke
+      link: joke
+    prev:
+    - title: Art
+      link: art
+    - title: Hardware
+      link: hardware
+...
+
+_It's all [jokes][]_ 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.
+_All art is an inside joke.
+The symbology involved must be_---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 _**HYMN 386: JOKES**_.
+
+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
+
+(a) he could ask someone and
+(b) that this was something he wondered every time he spoke his thoughts out loud.
+
+He resolved to put the issue to rest by asking someone.
+
+[jokes]: joke.html
@@ -0,0 +1,41 @@
+---
+title: I am
+genre: verse
+
+id: i-am
+toc: "I am"
+
+project:
+    title: Elegies for alternate selves
+    class: elegies
+    order: 13
+    prev:
+    - title: On formal poetry
+      link: onformalpoetry
+    next:
+    - title: How it happened
+      link: howithappened
+...
+
+| I am a great pillar of [white smoke][].
+| I am Lot's nameless wife encased in salt.
+| I am the wound on Christ's back as he moans
+| with the pounding of a hammer on his wrist.
+| I am the nail that holds my house together.
+| It is a strong house, built on a good foundation.
+| In the winter, it is warm and crawling things
+| cannot get in.  This house will never burn down.
+| It is the house that I built, with my body
+| and with my strength.  I am the only one who lives
+| here.  I am both father and mother to a race
+| of [dust motes that worship me as a god][].  I have
+| monuments built daily in my honor in dark
+| corners around the house.  I destroy all of them
+| before I go to bed, but in the morning
+| there are still more.  I don't think I know
+| where all of them are.  I [don't think][not think] I can get
+| to all of them anymore.  There are too many.
+
+[white smoke]: deathstrumpet.html
+[not think]: howithappened.html
+[dust motes that worship me as a god]: plant.html
@@ -0,0 +1,46 @@
+---
+title: I think it's you
+subtitle: "but it's not"
+genre: verse
+
+id: i-think-its-you
+toc: "I think it's you (but it's not)"
+
+epigraph:
+    content: When you fall in love everyone looks the same.
+    link: i-think-its-you.html
+
+project:
+    title: Stark Raving
+    class: stark
+    order: 15
+    next:
+    - title: Initial conditions
+      link: initial-conditions
+    - title: Riptide of memory
+      link: riptide_memory
+    prev:
+    - title: Boy on the bus
+      link: boy_bus
+    - title: L'appel du vide
+      link: lappel-du-vide
+...
+
+| I thought I saw you walking
+| to the bus stop but it was only
+| a [raven][].  His croaks sounded nothing
+| like your footsteps (as they pound
+| down the hallway toward my bedroom)
+| his [wings][] looked nothing like your
+| legs (running on the wrong side
+| of the road away from my house)
+| I think the one resemblance was the eyes
+
+| But that's too easy
+| It's just that I was thinking
+| of you and a raven flew by
+| (maybe it was a [crow][])
+
+[raven]: feedingtheraven.html
+[crow]: stump.html
+[wings]: nothing-is-ever-over.html
@@ -0,0 +1,57 @@
+---
+title: I want to say
+genre: verse
+
+id: i-want-to-say
+toc: "I want to say"
+
+project:
+    title: Autocento of the breakfast table
+    class: autocento
+...
+
+| I want to say I take it all back
+| I want
+| I want to take it back I want it none of it
+| to be ever have happened not
+| when I saw you step over the rope
+| when we went to New York for a week
+| but stayed upstate when you punched me
+| hard in the solar plexus in Prague
+| when I looked in your face and [saw myself][]
+| looking back smiling when we went on another trip
+| and another all the trips I want to have
+| stayed home I want to have seen the clouds
+| drifting past [my car window][] to have listened
+| to that sound the bridge makes driving over it
+| without thinking of you always it was you
+
+| I want
+
+| I [want to be fresh][] I want to roll out of bed
+| as though it were my [first morning in a new state][]
+| I want nothing more than absolution of sins
+| [a negation but there is no way to subtract here][]
+| I cannot remove this growth that appeared
+| seemingly overnight I cannot [cut you away from myself][]
+| I cannot forget what has already and will always have been
+| I cannot get out of a [new bed][] ever
+| New York will always be as it was when I saw it first
+| with you my breathing will always be labored outside
+| of the cafe I will always see you when [I look in a mirror][]
+| of someone's face the reflection of missed thoughts missed
+| [words will cease to give meaning][] the center will come out
+| of me I will make a new center yes I will drag what is
+| your center around with me and [repeat and repeat][] again
+| I cannot want cannot want want not
+
+[new bed]: in-bed.html
+[saw myself]: deathstrumpet.html
+[my car window]: boy_bus.html
+[want to be fresh]: plant.html
+[first morning in a new state]: collage-instrument.html
+[a negation but there is no way to subtract here]: no-nothing.html
+[cut you away from myself]: elegyforanalternateself.html
+[I look in a mirror]: lovesong.html
+[words will cease to give meaning]: words-meaning.html
+[repeat and repeat]: question.html
@@ -0,0 +1,66 @@
+---
+title: I wanted to tell you something
+genre: verse
+
+id: i-wanted-to-tell-you-something
+toc: "I wanted to tell you something"
+
+project:
+    title: Autocento of the breakfast table
+    class: autocento
+...
+
+| I wanted to tell you something in order [to][]
+| explain the way I feel about the [Universe][],
+| its workings, etc.  But I couldn't [yesterday][]
+| ---I'm sorry---I wanted only to [ball][]
+| myself up and cry all day.  It was the [sixteenth][]
+| day in a row this happened to me, and to [be][]
+
+| more than two weeks waiting to cry is,
+| especially when, the whole time, I wasn't able to,
+| absolutely horrible.  It was no sweet sixteen,
+| I'll tell you that much.  Unless at yours, the Universe
+| kept telling you to quit having such a ball
+| and that you should have died, like, yesterday.
+
+| At first, it feels like you're winning---that yesterday
+| you really were meant to die, but since you still _are_,
+| you beat the system somehow.  But the Universe bawls,
+| "No, I meant you should've crawled into
+| a hole and fucking _died_!"  And then the Universe
+| punches you right in the gut, something like sixteen
+
+| times, and all you can think is, "Some sixteenth
+| birthday!  Maybe I will go die in a hole."  Yesterday,
+| at times like this, is a luxury the cruel Universe
+| refuses to give you.  This is when it's a pain just to _be_,
+| when that Marvell line about "[rolling our stuff into one ball][Marvell]"
+| just seems glib, when you don't want one body, let alone two.
+
+| Something else that may come as a surprise to
+| you: over the past more-than-a-fortnight, these sixteen
+| days, I've had nothing to eat but crackers and a cheese ball.
+| (That's not entirely true---yesterday
+| I had some candy, peppermints and Jujubes.)
+| Maybe this is why I'm so mad at the Universe---
+
+| because all it has ever wanted, this Universe
+| that gave me life, fed me from its breast til I was two,
+| and even before that, made a place in which I could be---
+| all it's wanted was for me to take the sixteen
+| steps to sobriety, fold the Eight-Fold Path over yesterday
+| and step around it lightly, as I would an exercise ball,
+
+| but the problem is, dear Universe, there's no way I could be
+| something as hard as all that, to wake up yesterday
+| morning, stretch over my sixteen selves, bound out like a ball.
+
+[to]: poetry-time.html
+[Universe]: initial-conditions.html
+[yesterday]: exasperated.html
+[ball]: ouroboros_memory.html
+[sixteenth]: sixteenth-chapel.html
+[be]: love-as-god.html
+
+[Marvell]: http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/marvell/coy.htm
@@ -0,0 +1,151 @@
+---
+title: In bed
+genre: verse
+
+id: in-bed
+toc: "In bed"
+
+project:
+    title: Autocento of the breakfast table
+    class: autocento
+...
+
+## I
+
+| I hear [the rats][] run
+| in the walls like water
+| through a tree.  My blood
+
+| thickens.  As I dream
+| the masturbation dream
+| the shelf above my bed
+
+| falls covering me in
+| dirt and decaying beetles.
+| [I see my reflection is headless][].
+
+## II
+
+| When the waves stop
+| [and the moon grins down][]
+| to overtake me: the car
+
+| ran up the street that night
+| when you were nearly
+| molested in your neighbor's house:
+
+| is this why we don't have
+| neighbors?  For this the trees
+| [rot only for us][]?
+
+## III
+
+| I woke screaming and you
+| came to sit next to me.  I felt
+| my eyes were open too wide
+
+| that I could not shut them
+| from the horror movie sitting
+| on your lap in the easy chair
+
+| in the dream the other dream
+| in the living room under
+| the tree.  Why do I feel guilty?
+
+
+## IV
+
+| I wake up in a pool of water
+| [closed over me like an eyelid][].
+| There is no longer comfort
+
+| in staring at the ceiling.
+| Its pitch blackness beckons
+| into a future of blankness.
+
+| My body lay still quaking.
+| My mind is chained fast
+| to the beating of my heart.
+
+## V
+
+| I sit up slowly creaking.
+| I find myself alone buried
+| [in an ocean][].  Far off
+
+| [there is an eagle][] flying
+| toward me.  She lands on
+| my knee and lays an egg.
+
+| I think *not this again*
+| something I've never
+| thought in my life.
+
+## VI
+
+| I think *not this again*
+| something I've never
+| thought in my life.  Not
+
+| after losing my car keys
+| in the easy chair.  Not after
+| scratching myself on a branch.
+
+| Not after finding the thing
+| in your dresser drawer that
+| night.  [I remember you suddenly.][]
+
+
+## VII
+
+| [You run through me
+| like rats][rats] down an alley.
+| You are in my [blood][].
+
+| You scared me once
+| remember?  Jumped out
+| of the bathroom door.
+
+| I fell screaming onto
+| the linoleum.  Did you
+| apologize?  Did you need to?
+
+## VIII
+
+| The ocean that surrounds me
+| creaks like a rocking
+| cradle.  Your face bright
+
+| as the moon at eclipse
+| and as [red][].  Low song
+| my tide stretching
+
+| to the horizon.  Ripples
+| on the surface belie
+| something bigger beneath.
+
+## IX
+
+| In bed I am alone for
+| the only time.  In bed
+| I am a grown man.
+
+| Below the blankets I
+| know you for who you are.
+| In bed I see your face
+
+| pressed against the window.
+| I look out and see you
+| and I am not afraid.
+
+[the rats]: last-bastion.html
+[I see my reflection is headless]: deathstrumpet.html
+[and the moon grins down]: moon-drowning.html
+[rot only for us]: options.html
+[closed over me like an eyelid]: theoceanoverflowswithcamels.html
+[in an ocean]: the-sea_the-beach.html
+[there is an eagle]: mountain.html
+[I remember you suddenly.]: ouroboros_memory.html
+[rats]: #I
+[blood]: plant.html
+[red]: window.html
@@ -0,0 +1,80 @@
+---
+title: Initial conditions
+genre: verse
+
+id: initial-conditions
+toc: "Initial conditions"
+
+project:
+    title: Stark Raving
+    class: stark
+    order: 11
+    next:
+    - title: Love as God
+      link: love-as-god
+    - title: Ouroboros of memory
+      link: ouroboros_memory
+    prev:
+    - title: I think it's you (but it's not)
+      link: i-think-its-you
+    - title: Last Bastion
+      link: last-bastion
+...
+
+| There is a theory which states the Universe
+| if it began with the same initial conditions
+| ( [same gravity][] same strong weak nuclear force same
+| size and shape ) would unfold in exactly
+| the way it has : with the same planets [orbiting suns][]
+| same people making same mistakes : like this morning
+
+| ( It's actually past two but I will call it [morning][] )
+| while turning on the shower : I as the Universe
+| intended ( although I was expecting the heat of suns )
+| [had the ice of inner space][] : those pre existing conditions
+| before the Big Bang : the shower was almost exactly
+| freezing for a split second : every day it's the same :
+
+| [I turn on the tap][] hop in pull the knob have the same
+| moment of utter panic then pain then a relaxing morning
+| shower where I spend between five to ten ( I'm not sure exactly )
+| minutes : I have good thoughts : [this poem about the Universe][]
+| for example : I had the idea while I was conditioning
+| my hair : it came to me like accidentally looking at the sun :
+
+| the pain and the wonder that something as large as suns
+| could appear so small and yet so hot all at the same
+| time : so hot in the summer we require air conditioning
+| ( although now in the winter it's cold in the morning )
+| and I can't wait to hop in the shower that tiny universe
+| of water and steam and soap and [body][] : that and only that exactly
+
+| or rather exclusively ( it's hard to get the words exactly
+| right : the meanings bleed into each other like the sun's
+| shadows on pavement ) ready for me to [dream][] another universe
+| into it on top of it again and again until they all look the same :
+| I can't tell whether it's my morning or the shower's morning
+| or where I put the conditioner or what the initial conditions
+
+| could have been that decided I would misplace my conditioner
+| today : and why and how much planning was involved exactly
+| that would cause so far down the production line of this morning
+| \: me to [wake up so long after the rising][] of the sun
+| \: me to stay inside all day even after showering to look at the same
+| [computer screen][] : to give up the actual universe to the universe
+
+| in there with its conditions : where [the screen serves][] as sickly sun :
+| where there is apparently exactly what I need : no more : the same
+| three sites I visited this morning comprising my entire Universe
+
+[same gravity]: the-sea_the-beach.html
+[orbiting suns]: big-dipper.html
+[morning]: plant.html
+[had the ice of inner space]: one-hundred-lines.html
+[I turn on the tap]: hard-game.html
+[this poem about the Universe]: howtoread.html
+[body]: ouroboros_memory.html
+[dream]: dream.html
+[wake up so long after the rising]: stump.html
+[computer screen]: telemarketer.html
+[the screen serves]: reports.html
@@ -0,0 +1,63 @@
+---
+title: January
+genre: verse
+
+id: january
+toc: "January"
+
+project:
+    title: Autocento of the breakfast table
+    class: autocento
+...
+
+| January.
+| It's cold, and I don't like it.
+| I prefer warm weather,
+| although I like sweaters.  They are the one
+| warm spot in an otherwise [shitty][] season.
+| But fall is better sweater weather.  So be patient,
+
+| _patient_,
+| while waiting for the end of January.
+| A change of season
+| brings a change of mood along with it,
+| although I never thought I'd be one
+| to believe that [SAD][] junk about effects of weather---
+
+| weather!---
+| on a person.  Who becomes a patient
+| just because of one
+| [month of snow][]?  I did say of January:
+| "It's cold, and I don't like it,"
+| but I hardly think it's fair, knocking whole seasons,
+
+| seasoning
+| your conversation with demands for better weather.
+| (While I find it
+| nearly impossible, it's my mission to be patient
+| while waiting for the end of January.)
+| Oh, but how the long nights do so [tax][] one!
+
+| One
+| [warm spot][] in an otherwise shitty season---
+| all I ask, January,
+| is one warm day.  Do you care whether
+| I'm a person who becomes a patient
+| in some psych ward?  This just about does it.
+
+| I.T.,
+| although I never thought I'd call one,
+| is fair and patient
+| when I call.  They talk with me, season
+| my conversation of demands for better weather
+| with an argument for the white beauty of January.
+
+| They know it's hard; they say each season
+| has its detractors.  _One day_, they say, _the weather
+| will be controlled---until then, patience in January_.
+
+[shitty]: tapestry.html
+[SAD]: seasonal-affective-disorder.html
+[month of snow]: snow.html
+[tax]: http://www.irs.gov/
+[warm spot]: real-writer.html
@@ -0,0 +1,60 @@
+---
+title: Joke
+genre: prose
+
+id: joke
+toc: "Joke"
+
+project:
+    title: "Buildings out of air: Paul in the Woods"
+    class: paul
+    order: 33
+    next:
+    - title: Stump
+      link: stump
+    - title: Leaf
+      link: leaf
+    prev:
+    - title: Punch
+      link: punch
+    - title: Hymnal
+      link: hymnal
+...
+
+He wrote _**JOKES**_ 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.
+
+_"[Tell us a joke][]" 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._
+
+_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._
+
+_The moon [rises][] on the clearing.
+The only people left are the clown and a listener, the [last listener][].
+She has been waiting for the joke a long time.
+The clown opens his mouth and she leans in closer to hear.
+He closes it as a tear falls onto his coat, then another.
+He opens his mouth again in a sob.
+The listener walks over to him and puts a hand on his shoulder._
+
+_"I'm sorry" says the clown.
+"Sorry for what" she asks.
+"I don't know.
+I don't know any jokes."
+He disappears.
+The last listener sits on the log and looks at the sky.
+There are no [stars][]._
+
+[Tell us a joke]: window.html
+[rises]: the-sea_the-beach.html
+[last listener]: listen.html
+[stars]: big-dipper.html
@@ -0,0 +1,67 @@
+---
+title: L'appel du vide
+genre: prose
+
+id: lappel-du-vide
+toc: "L'appel du vide"
+
+epigraph:
+    content: Don't you know you can't go home again?
+    attrib: Ella Winter
+    link: 'http://books.google.com/books?id=yybDMC0TRIwC&pg=PR12&lpg=PR12#v=onepage&q&f=false'
+
+project:
+    title: Stark Raving
+    class: stark
+    order: 14
+    next:
+    - title: Boy on the bus
+      link: boy_bus
+    - title: I think it's you (but it's not)
+      link: i-think-its-you
+    prev:
+    - title: Ouroboros of memory
+      link: ouroboros_memory
+    - title: Love as God
+      link: love-as-god
+...
+
+## I. Walter
+
+Walter [rides the bus][] 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.
+
+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.
+
+His speculations lead him to picture his grandmother, small and frail and forgetful.
+He always assumed she'd be next, since last year when the other one died and Gina said,
+"I wonder who'll be next."
+She said what they'd both been thinking.
+
+Soon after that he'd come up to land, to the mountains of all places, the most land-like land, and started a job with an [accounting firm][].
+While it was challenging to adjust to the change in pressure and movement, to people staring at him on the bus, in the supermarket, at the job, him with his scales and fins and breathing machine, he'd always made a point to make the best out of a situation.
+The problem was that the best wasn't good enough.
+
+[accounting firm]: telemarketer.html
+
+## II. L'appel du vide {.verse}
+
+And I'll get in my car and drive \
+and I'll want to keep driving \
+straight into the next state \
+or even the next country \
+or even even the ocean
+
+and go down deeper \
+keep exploring forever \
+find out what's down there \
+go to the Marianas trench \
+miss the air world and \
+come back up \
+itself a kind of unknown \
+the homecoming after
+
+What happened to the home I was?
+
+[rides the bus]: sense-of-it.html
@@ -0,0 +1,41 @@
+---
+title: The largest asteroid in the asteroid belt
+genre: verse
+
+id: largest-asteroid
+toc: "The largest asteroid in the asteroid belt"
+
+project:
+    title: Autocento of the breakfast table
+    class: autocento
+...
+
+| What secrets does it hold?
+| Can it tell us who kissed Sara
+| that night on the veranda, or
+| who Joey is really in love with?
+| We all know it isn't Sara, we
+| mean look at them Christmas eve
+| and he's staring whistfully
+| at the stars, or the largest
+| asteroid in the asteroid belt.
+| She's staring at him, sure, but
+| she sees the twinkle in his eye
+| is not aimed in her direction.
+| The reflection of that reflection
+| will beam into space, lightyears
+| of space, dimming slowly each
+| second, until it dies out like
+| all of Sara's hopes for something
+| resembling love in this life, real
+| love that takes hold of her by
+| the throat and refuses to let go,
+| love that makes men travel for her
+| and only for her, love that launches
+| space ships to that asteroid, the
+| largest in the asteroid belt, that
+| jewel of dead rock and ice, harboring
+| something that could've been life
+| [and nothing that actually is][].
+
+[and nothing that actually is]: http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/stevens-snowman.html
@@ -0,0 +1,59 @@
+---
+title: Last bastion
+genre: verse
+
+id: last-bastion
+toc: "Last bastion"
+
+project:
+    title: Stark Raving
+    class: stark
+    order: 10
+    next:
+    - title: AMBER alert
+      link: amber-alert
+    - title: Initial conditions
+      link: initial-conditions
+    prev:
+    - title: The Sixteenth Chapel
+      link: sixteenth-chapel.txt
+    - title: Boy on the bus
+      link: boy_bus
+...
+
+| Dimly remembered celebrity chefs shuffle
+| down the cold and darkened highways of the heart.
+| They are the last personality left.  They are [the meek
+| who inherited the heart][meek], what was left of it.\
+
+| Without food to cook in new or exciting ways
+| nor audience to gasp and cackle, the chefs
+| of the heart quietly waste away while staring
+| doe-eyed into now-empty Safeway windows
+| checking under the dusty produce shelves
+| for something they pray the [rats][] haven't found yet.
+
+| Years ago, the economy of the heart boomed
+| and there was food everywhere.  Produce
+| piled high in pyramids of devotion, meat in
+| gilded glass cases opulent under fluorescence,
+| dairy which ran like the [mythical river][] toward
+| cereals hot and cold.  Under it all, thrumming
+| like great stone wheels on sand under a hot sun
+| near a river where reeds sang in the wind
+| the heart produced and gave reward for hard labor.
+
+| No one knows when it all ended.  No one can say
+| if it was the heart that dried up or the heart's supply.
+| Either way, food of the heart became scarcer and scarcer.
+| People began dying, not of starvation
+| but of a certain facial expression that could only
+| be described as desperation.  Now
+| all that are left are the celebrity chefs, last bastion
+| of a once mighty empire of the [heart
+| are reduced to husks][heart] blown dry by wind.
+
+[meek]: http://biblehub.com/matthew/5-5.htm
+[rats]: in-bed.html
+[mythical river]: music-433.html
+[heart]: sense-of-it.html
@@ -0,0 +1,42 @@
+---
+title: Last passenger
+genre: verse
+
+id: last-passenger
+toc: "Last passenger"
+
+project:
+    title: Autocento of the breakfast table
+    class: autocento
+
+TODO: revise based on reading notes
+...
+
+| Memory works strangely, [spooling its thread][]
+| over the [nails of events][] barely related,
+| creating finally some picture, if we're
+| lucky, of a life---but more likely, it knots
+| itself, catches on a nail or in our throats
+| that gasp, as it binds our necks, for air.
+
+| An example: today marks one hundred years
+| since your namesake, the last living passenger
+| pigeon, died in Cincinnati.  It also marks
+| a year since we last spoke.  Although around
+| the world, zoos mourn her loss, I'm done
+| with you.  I mourn no more your voice, the first
+| sound I heard outside my body that reached
+| [into my throat and set me ringing][].  But that string---
+
+| memory that feels sometimes more like a tide
+| has yoked together, bound your voice to that bird,
+| the frozen, stuffed, forgotten pigeon---my heart
+| is too easy, but it must do---to blink, to flex
+| its unused toes, slowly thaw to the wetness
+| of [beating wings][], fly to me again, and alight,
+| singing full-throated, on my broken shoulder.
+
+[spooling its thread]: roughgloves.html
+[nails of events]: when-im-sorry-i.html
+[into my throat and set me ringing]: weplayedthosegamestoo.html
+[beating wings]: cold-wind.html
@@ -0,0 +1,42 @@
+---
+title: Leaf
+genre: prose
+
+id: leaf
+toc: "Leaf"
+
+project:
+    title: "Buildings out of air: Paul in the Woods"
+    class: paul
+    order: 3
+    next:
+    - title: Writing
+      link: writing
+    - title: Leg
+      link: leg
+    prev:
+    - title: Axe
+      link: axe
+    - title: Joke
+      link: joke
+...
+
+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.
+[No bird did][].
+He inhaled.
+He exhaled again in a way that could [only be classified][] 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.
+
+"*Each piece of paper---each leaf---*" at this he smiled---"*is like a tree in the forest.*"
+He was writing as he thought aloud.
+"*I, as the artist, as the **writer**, must select which to use, chop down those trees, bring them back to my shed and*---and---" he frowned as he realized the only end to this [metaphor was fire][].
+He ran his fingers through his hair in a self-soothing gesture.
+
+"I need to build some furniture" he thought.
+
+[No bird did]: last-passenger.html
+[only be classified]: last-bastion.html
+[metaphor was fire]: the-night-we-met.html
@@ -0,0 +1,48 @@
+---
+title: Leg
+genre: prose
+
+id: leg
+toc: "Leg"
+
+project:
+    title: "Buildings out of air: Paul in the Woods"
+    class: paul
+    order: 12
+    next:
+    - title: Planks
+      link: planks
+    - title: Man
+      link: man
+    prev:
+    - title: Toilet
+      link: toilet
+    - title: Leaf
+      link: leaf
+...
+
+His first chair was a stool.
+It was an [uneven wobbly stool][] 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 [one leg][], 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.
+
+> MAKING CHAIR LEGS
+>
+> 1. get longish piece of wood
+> 2. cut it to length ([4 feet][] I'd
+>    recommend)
+> 3. whittle off bark
+> 4. sand smooth the leg
+
+After he tried remembered tried standing the leg up, failing, and after much thought realizing that the ends needed to be flat, he typed one more line on his notecard:
+
+> 5. make ends flat
+
+He had no tools with which to flatten the ends of his leg.
+
+[uneven wobbly stool]: stump.html
+[one leg]: i-think-its-you.html
+[4 feet]: boar.html
@@ -0,0 +1,41 @@
+---
+title: Liking Things
+genre: prose
+
+id: likingthings
+toc: "Liking things"
+
+project:
+    title: Book of Hezekiah
+    class: hezekiah
+    order: 7
+    prev:
+    - title: Problems
+      link: problems
+...
+
+The definition of happiness is *doing stuff that you really like*.
+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: *that feeling you get when you forget how miserable you are for just a little bit*.
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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 [shirt][]---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.
+
+[shirt]: theoceanoverflowswithcamels.html
@@ -0,0 +1,23 @@
+---
+title: Listen
+genre: verse
+
+id: listen
+toc: "Listen"
+
+project:
+    title: Autocento of the breakfast table
+    class: autocento
+...
+
+| If you swallow hard enough
+| you'll [feel the stone][]
+| the one we all have waiting
+
+| Once I [found the stone][] in
+| the sea it kissed me as
+| [the sea pawed at my back][]
+
+[the sea pawed at my back]: the-sea_the-beach.html
+[feel the stone]: serengeti.html
+[found the stone]: plant.html
@@ -0,0 +1,77 @@
+---
+title: Love as God
+genre: verse
+
+id: love-as-god
+toc: "Love as god"
+
+project:
+    title: Stark Raving
+    class: stark
+    order: 13
+    next:
+    - title: Worse looking over
+      link: worse-looking-over
+    - title: L'appel du vide
+      link: lappel-du-vide
+    prev:
+    - title: Initial conditions
+      link: initial-conditions
+    - title: Ouroboros of memory
+      link: ouroboros_memory
+...
+
+| [God is love][], they say, but there [is][]
+| no god.  Therefore, how can there be love?
+| And if there is no love, how can there be God?
+| There are things in life, I suppose,
+| that are simply unanswerable mysteries
+| of existence.  Maybe this God and love are one.
+
+| Maybe there are many loves, instead of one.
+| The difference between [what isn't][] and what is
+| could merely be one of scope.  The mystery
+| is how we speak only of one love---
+| to act as though we know we are supposed
+| to love only one other, or that one other and God.
+
+| But supposing that one other is God?
+| What then?  Is the God-lover to walk alone,
+| supported by God only when He feels He is supposed
+| to support her?  What kind of love is
+| this?  I would argue in fact this isn't love,
+| this [one-set-of-footprints-in-the-sand][] mystery.
+
+| How to define two loves as one is the mystery.
+| It's obvious to many there is a thing called God,
+| and just as obvious that there is one called love.
+| Maybe we fool ourselves, we who can't be alone;
+| maybe we don't know what either God or love is.
+| Maybe, and perhaps; but I for one propose
+
+| that we as only humans are not supposed
+| to know or understand capital-L Life, that mystery.
+| Isn't it enough to know that God is
+| love, and love is God,
+| no matter which one
+| does or does not exist?  What is life, if no love,
+
+| if no God?  [Maybe][Maybe1] this saying, "God is love,"
+| is less a definition of God what what love is supposed
+| to be.  Of these two terms, [maybe2][] the one
+| we should capitalize is Love, that great mystery
+| of chemistry and longing.  Maybe "Love is god"
+| is a more fitting [epigraph][] for what life is
+
+| [made of:][made of] Love, that most delicate, most misty
+| of all emotions, is supposed to be their god,
+| as the one that binds us, that was, that will be, that is.
+
+[is]: i-wanted-to-tell-you-something.html
+[God is love]: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+John+4%3A8&version=NIV
+[what isn't]: largest-asteroid.html
+[one-set-of-footprints-in-the-sand]: http://www.footprints-inthe-sand.com/index.php?page=Poem/Poem.php
+[Maybe1]: cereal.html
+[maybe2]: death-zone.html
+[epigraph]: epigraph.html
+[made of]: tapestry.html
@@ -0,0 +1,55 @@
+---
+title: Love Song
+genre: prose
+
+id: lovesong
+toc: "Love song"
+
+project:
+    title: Elegies for alternate selves
+    class: elegies
+    order: 15
+    prev:
+    - title: How it happened
+      link: howithappened
+    next:
+    - title: Rough gloves
+      link: roughgloves
+...
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+Can you see?
+Can you see into me and reach in your hand and pull me inside out, like an [old shirt][]?
+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?
+
+I want you to know that I want you to know.
+Do you want me?
+To know is to know.
+[I, you want we.][]
+We want.
+That is why we're here.
+To want is to be is to want and I want you.
+Do you also?
+Check yes or no.
+
+There is a way to end every story, [every song][].
+Every criminal must be caught.
+Even those who cry dry their tears.
+I cannot tell you all I want because I want to tell you everything.
+[There is no art because there is no mirror big enough.][]
+We wake up every day.
+Sometimes we sleep.
+
+[old shirt]: ronaldmcdonald.html
+[every song]: swansong.html
+[something so beautiful]: window.html
+[cola you spill]: ex-machina.html
+[I, you want we.]: poetry-time.html
+[There is no art because there is no mirror big enough.]: hands.html
@@ -0,0 +1,54 @@
+---
+title: Man
+genre: prose
+
+id: man
+toc: "Man"
+
+ekphrastic:
+    image: tbedemugshot.jpg
+    title: This man refused to open his eyes
+    link: 'http://collection.hht.net.au/firsthhtpictures/fullRecordPicture.jsp?recnoListAttr=recnoList&recno=31230'
+
+project:
+    title: "Buildings out of air: Paul in the Woods"
+    class: paul
+    order: 22
+    next:
+    - title: Snow
+      link: snow
+    - title: Notes
+      link: notes
+    prev:
+    - title: Cereal
+      link: cereal
+    - title: Leg
+      link: leg
+...
+
+_THIS MAN REFUSED TO OPEN HIS EYES_
+
+Paul read this on an old mugshot in the library.
+He had taken the [bus][] into town to check out a few books on woodworking and got distracted by the True Crime section.
+He found this mugshot in a book titled _Crooks like Us_ that was published in Sydney.
+He liked how cities were named after women, or how women were named after cities, whichever was true.
+
+The man in the picture's eyes were tightly shut, as though he'd just come into the brightness of day after being dark inside for a long time.
+His head was tilted up and slightly to the right.
+He was wearing a short light tie with hash marks, and a pinstripe suit.
+Paul wished the [photograph][] was in color.
+He was standing in front of a plain brown wall covered in fabric.
+
+The man's eyes were not so tightly shut as Paul first thought.
+His eyebrows lifted away from the eyes, giving the man a bemused look.
+His mouth was slightly opened in what seemed to Paul like a grin.
+This was accentuated by the man's ears, which were large.
+Paul wasn't sure why the ears made the man look happier.
+He wondered what crime he had committed.
+
+Above the man's head was written [_T. BEDE.22.11.28 / 203 A_.][emilia]
+_THIS MAN REFUSED TO OPEN HIS EYES_ was written over his suit, directly below his ribcage.
+
+[emilia]: http://emiliaphillips.com/books/signaletics/
+[bus]: boy_bus.html
+[photograph]: about-the-author.html
@@ -0,0 +1,47 @@
+---
+title: Manifesto of poetics
+genre: prose
+
+id: manifesto_poetics
+toc: "A manifesto of poetics"
+
+project:
+    title: Stark raving
+    class: stark
+...
+
+What is a poem?
+I think it was Yeats that called a poem "the best words in the best order," and that isn't an inaccurate description, but I don't think it captures all of what a poem is.
+[Let me start][] with communication.
+
+Communication is a transaction, an exchange between two people or entities, in which one (the Speaker/Writer/Communicator) gives the other (the Reader/Listener/Consumer) a \
+set of ideas / \
+a wireframe organization of a concept / \
+a set of reasons/instructions for action.
+In many kinds of communication, for example speeches, reports, or advertisements, the kind of ideas transacted are generally factual/logical/brain-based in nature.
+In art, these ideas are emotional/heart-based.
+In short, Art is to Emotion as an [Article][] is to Information.
+I think art should strive to transmit the emotion the author feels as efficiently as possible to the reader of that art.
+
+In order to do this, multiple notation systems have been devised.
+Music is the most notable example that comes to mind, as it has the most rigid style, but grammar, as used self-consciously in writing, would be another example.
+Poetry has only a very loose set of rules and assumptions that allow it a sort of notational language, and this is complicated by the fact that when writing poetry, the author writes for a different medium: poetry is meant to be performed aloud.
+This makes the notation system even more important, but again, it's hard to come up with a system that will be read mostly the same by most people.
+
+What I've been trying to do since I began writing is develop a personal notation system, or what I think most would refer to as my "voice" as a poet/writer (I personally don't like the word "poet," as it sounds pretentious to me; I'm aware I should get over this).
+
+However, there were some places that still needed improving from my draft manuscript: most notably, my prose in "Rip Tide of Memory" (now only "Rip Tide") and "AMBER Alert."
+I rewrote each to tighten their syntactic and idea rhythm, to make them move more lightly and gracefully.
+
+The most notable difference in my series is the reordering of poems within it.
+I think that in my first draft, I spent so much time on getting my individual poems tight and polished that I threw them together somewhat haphazardly, using a loose thematic correspondence with the fake "Table of contents."
+With the new order, I hope this has been fixed: the piece consists of six sections, each with three poems (A new one, "Everything stays the same," makes the totals correct).
+Each section has a thematic/emotional/personal element that ties the sections together.
+They are ordered by the order in which I wrote the sestinas at the beginning of each section, which works out to make the series move from identity to memory to a feeling of universal justice, and from there to a discussion of death and (something like) love that culminates in an exploration of the nature of time and cosmology.
+The piece is bookended by the fake "Table of contents" (provided at the end as an ironic commentary on the rest of the text) and an "About the author" section.
+I think it works better this way, and I think the "About the author" at the beginning serves as a fair prelude poem to the piece.
+
+I'm excited to be a writer like I haven't been before.
+
+[Let me start]: prelude.html
+[Article]: README.html#fn1
@@ -0,0 +1,44 @@
+---
+title: The Moon is drowning
+genre: verse
+
+id: moon-drowning
+toc: "The moon is drowning"
+
+project:
+    title: Stark Raving
+    class: stark
+    order: 3
+    next:
+    - title: Something about all music being performances of _4&prime;33&Prime;_ in places where other bands happen to be playing
+      link: music-433
+    - title: Worse looking over
+      link: worse-looking-over
+    prev:
+    - title: Something about the nature of poetry and time
+      link: poetry-time
+    - title: The Big Dipper
+      link: big-dipper
+...
+
+| [The moon is drowning][] the stars it pushes them
+| under into the darkness they cannot breathe
+| they are flailing the moon boasts to my shadow
+| how powerful is the moon how great its light
+
+| My shadow nods and calls the moon father though
+| it acknowledges also the existence of others
+| headlights are like little moons father my shadow says
+| they pass like waves in a dark ocean
+
+| Father moon becomes angry and threatens
+| I can maroon you shadow I can trap you in darkness
+| your strength comes from my own the little moons
+| are fleeting like foam on a darkened sea
+
+| My shadow fears the night as it fears death
+| but it remembers the moon's strength is from another
+| my shadow wants the headlights like an ocean
+| might want the moon as a seducer as a lover
+
+[The moon is drowning]: moongone.html
@@ -0,0 +1,35 @@
+---
+title: The moon is gone and in its place a mirror
+genre: prose
+
+id: moongone
+toc: "The moon is gone and in its place a mirror"
+
+ekphrastic:
+    image: moongone.jpg
+    title: The moon is gone
+    link: 'http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap120102.html'
+
+project:
+    title: Elegies for alternate selves
+    class: elegies
+    order: 18
+    prev:
+    - title: Ronald McDonald
+      link: ronaldmcdonald
+    next:
+    - title: The mountain
+      link: mountain
+...
+
+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 [alone][], 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 [Earth][].
+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.
+
+[alone]: apollo11.html
+[Earth]: serengeti.html
@@ -0,0 +1,43 @@
+---
+title: The mountain
+genre: verse
+
+id: mountain
+toc: "The mountain"
+
+project:
+    title: Elegies for alternate selves
+    class: elegies
+    order: 19
+    prev:
+    - title: The moon is gone and in its place a mirror
+      link: moonegone
+    next:
+    - title: Serengeti
+      link: serengeti
+...
+
+| The other side of this mountain
+| is not the mountain.  This side
+| is honey-golden, sticky-sweet,
+| full of phone conversations with mother.
+| The other side is a bell,
+| ringing in the church-steeple
+| the day mother died.
+
+| The other side of the mountain
+| [is not a mountain.  It is a dark][apollo]
+| valley crossed by a river.
+| There is a ferry at the bottom.
+
+| This mountain is not a mountain.
+| I walked to the top, but it turned
+| and was only a shelf halfway up.
+| I felt like an unused Bible
+| sitting on a [dusty pew][].
+
+| A hawk soars over the mountain.
+| She is looking for home.
+
+[apollo]: apollo11.html
+[dusty pew]: and.html
@@ -0,0 +1,56 @@
+---
+title: Moving Sideways
+genre: prose
+
+id: movingsideways
+toc: "Moving sideways"
+
+project:
+    title: Book of Hezekiah
+    class: hezekiah
+    order: 5
+    next:
+    - title: Problems
+      link: problems
+    prev:
+    - title: Proverbs
+      link: proverbs
+...
+
+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.
+
+Shit wait.
+The problem is not that by observing you are observed (although quantum mechanics may disagree[^1]), 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 *the actual act of observing that distorts the world into what we want it to be*.
+
+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?[^2]
+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.
+
+Of course, reality doesn't judge us back.
+But that doesn't mean that it doesn't!
+If you think it's judging you, then *observe in your surroundings your own insecurities*.
+It is obvious that this way of doing things is far from vogue; usually projecting [inner pain][] onto the outer world is classified as pathology.
+However, this is because it is assumed that the outer world is *on its own terms*, which it obviously isn't, as far as we know.
+It follows that as [there is no backdrop][backdrop] against which to judge our quirks, the quirks must not exist.
+Thus all is right with the world.
+
+[inner pain]: telemarketer.html
+[backdrop]: philosophy.html
+
+[^1]: Quantum mechanics, as is well known, are the most hornery and
+    least agreeable of all mechanics.  The cost to get one quantum
+    serviced is usually at least eight times more expensive than the
+    cost of an average automobile tune-up, for reasons not clearly
+    known.  The quantum mechanics themselves claim it's the smallness of
+    their work that justifies the price, but it doesn't really look like
+    they're doing anything, and besides, my quantum always seems to
+    break again within six months---maybe I'm just driving it too hard.
+
+[^2]: I attempted to strike this terrible pun from the account, but
+    Hezekiah demanded I keep it if he were to continue the relation of
+    his prophecy-slash-advice column.
@@ -0,0 +1,57 @@
+---
+title: Something
+subtitle: 'about all music being performances of _4&prime;33&Prime;_ in places where other bands happen to be playing'
+genre: verse
+
+id: music-433
+toc: "Something about all music being performances of _4&prime;33&Prime;_ in places where other bands happen to be playing"
+
+dedication: '[Randall](https://xkcd.com/1199/)'
+
+project:
+    title: Stark Raving
+    class: stark
+    order: 18
+    next:
+    - title: Riptide of memory
+      link: riptide_memory
+    - title: About the author
+      link: about-the-author
+    prev:
+    - title: The Moon is drowning
+      link: moon-drowning
+    - title: The Sixteenth Chapel
+      link: sixteenth-chapel
+...
+
+| Silence lies underneath us all in the same way
+| [the Nile has a river underneath ten times as large][nile]
+| (although this is an urban legend, apparently).
+
+| So underneath [truth][] or legend, flowing by
+| the feel of their own [silence][], move the stars:
+| silence lies underneath us all in the same way.
+
+| [John Cage][433], I think, understood this: the way
+| that, in a silent room, one still hears the nerves
+| (although this is an urban legend, apparently),
+
+| or the heart, which I find more easily
+| believable: there simply is no way that, by and large,
+| silence lies underneath us all in the same way.
+
+| There must be different silences, because we
+| have different [songs][] to drown them out, different gods
+| (although these are urban legends, apparently).
+
+| But is not all [sound one sound][]?  You and I
+| are two faces to the same head, the same body.
+| Silence lies underneath us all in the same way---
+| although this is an urban legend, apparently.
+
+[433]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=zY7UK-6aaNA#t=39
+[truth]: phone.html
+[silence]: nothing-is-ever-over.html
+[songs]: swansong.html
+[sound one sound]: swansong-alt.html
+[nile]: http://members.authorsguild.net/svobodni/resonance_80307.htm "Personals"
@@ -0,0 +1,74 @@
+---
+title: No nothing
+genre: verse
+
+id: no-nothing
+toc: "No nothing"
+
+project:
+    title: Autocento of the breakfast table
+    class: autocento
+...
+
+| While [swimming in the river][]
+| I saw [underneath it a river][]
+| of stars.  Only there was no
+| river: it was noon.  You can
+| say the sun is a river; you
+| can argue the stars back it
+| like [shirts behind a closet][]
+| door; you can say [the earth][]
+| holds us up with its weight
+| or that it means well or it
+| means anything.
+|                 There is no
+| closet, [nor door][]; there are
+| no shirts hanging anywhere.
+| There is no false wall that
+| leads deep into the earth's
+| bowels, [growing warmer][] with
+| each step.  Warmth as a con-
+| cept has ceased to make any
+| sense.  In contraposition to
+| cold, it might, but cold as
+| well [stepped out][] last night
+| and hasn't returned.
+|                      Last I
+| heard, it went out swimming
+| and [might've drowned][].  Trees
+| were the pallbearers at the
+| funeral, the train was long
+| and wailful, there was much
+| [wailing and gnashing][] of all
+| teeth--though there were no
+| teeth, no train, no funeral
+| or prayer or trees at all--
+| nor a [river underneath][] any-
+| thing.  There was nothing to
+| be underneath anymore.
+|                        Look
+| around, and tell me you see
+| something.  Look around, and
+| tell me something that I do
+| not know.  I know, more than
+| anything, that the world is
+| always ending.  Behind that,
+| there is nothing, save that
+| there is no nothing either.
+|
+| Nothing somehow still turns
+| and flows past us, past all
+| time and beyond it, a river
+| returning, to its forgotten
+| origins deep within itself.
+
+[swimming in the river]: father.html
+[shirts behind a closet]: lovessong.html
+[the earth]: big-dipper.html
+[nor door]: amber-alert.html
+[growing warmer]: real-writer.html
+[stepped out]: i-think-its-you.html
+[might've drowned]: in-bed.html
+[wailing and gnashing]: http://biblehub.com/luke/13-28.htm
+[river underneath]: howtoread.html
+[underneath it a river]: music-433.html
@@ -0,0 +1,51 @@
+---
+title: Notes
+genre: prose
+
+id: notes
+toc: "Notes"
+
+project:
+    title: "Buildings out of air: Paul in the Woods"
+    class: paul
+    order: 8
+    next:
+    - title: Shed
+      link: shed
+    - title: Options
+      link: options
+    prev:
+    - title: Writing
+      link: writing
+    - title: Man
+      link: man
+...
+
+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, [even reports for work][] (which is what got him in trouble).
+
+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 [cold winter morning][], he wrote
+
+> Woke up from a [dream][] I was famous.
+> One of the more famous people in
+> fact.  I had written something
+> everyone could relate to and at
+> the same time proved my parents
+> wrong.  Because I made a lot of
+> money.  Or not a lot, but enough
+> and more than they thought I
+> would.  It was a good day.
+> Woke up this morning and I was
+> still cold.  [Still Paul.][]  Still not
+> good at furniture.
+
+[even reports for work]: telemarketer.html
+[cold winter morning]: seasonal-affective-disorder.html
+[dream]: in-bed.html
+[Still Paul.]: something-simple.html
@@ -0,0 +1,32 @@
+---
+title: Nothing is ever over
+genre: verse
+
+id: nothing-is-ever-over
+toc: "Nothing is ever over"
+
+project:
+    title: Autocento of the breakfast table
+    class: autocento
+...
+
+| [Nothing is ever over][]; nothing
+| is ever even begun.  The foundation
+| hasn't been laid; how can we hope
+| to put in the plumbing?  The bed
+| is unmade, not even made; the wood
+| [hasn't been cleft from the tree][];
+| the seed hasn't been cast
+| out of water and growth and sun,
+| which itself hasn't started shining.
+| The cock has never stopped crowing
+| because he never started.  Peter
+| [betrays us again][] and again with
+| silence.  Christ wakes up at night,
+| [choking from a bad dream][], wrists
+| aching from a dreamt, torturous pain.
+
+[choking from a bad dream]: in-bed.html
+[Nothing is ever over]: no-nothing.html
+[hasn't been cleft from the tree]: axe.html
+[betrays us again]: spittle.html
@@ -0,0 +1,93 @@
+---
+title: On genre and the dimensionality of poetry
+genre: prose
+
+id: on-genre-dimension
+toc: "On genre and the dimensionality of poetry"
+
+project:
+    title: Autocento of the breakfast table
+    class: autocento
+...
+
+How does one describe a poem?
+
+A genre is a set of creative outputs that fit a given set of criteria.
+Genres are useful as a sort of shorthand when describing a thing of art: instead of noting, for example, all of the objects depicted in a still-life that aren't people or land-features, we call it a still-life and get on to describing how the objects interrelate to each other on the canvas.
+If you ask me what kind of painting I'm working on, and I say, "a still-life," you have an expectation of certain elements the painting will contain.
+If you happen to be an agent and try to sell the painting later, you'll say to your prospective buyers, "It's a still-life," and whether the buyer is over the phone or standing in the gallery, they'll know whether they'll like it or not based on whether they like still-lifes.
+In the same way, they can call you up and ask if you have any still-lifes for sale right now, and get a simple yes-or-no answer for it.
+This is the first kind of genre, and it applies well within separate types of fundamentally-different media, such as painting, sculpture, film, or the written word.
+
+A poem, obviously, is in this last category, and for some reason its designation is hairier than others'.
+People refer to all sorts of art, or even dispassionate events, as poetry; dancing is called "poetry in motion," for example.
+I think the confusion is caused in part by the nature of writing as a medium, namely in that it captures thoughts more clearly and communicably than other art forms.
+While a picture can be "worth a thousand words," as the old cliché goes, when those words are actually written out they can contain shades of meaning impossible to capture in the picture itself, at least as quickly as they can be absorbed in writing.
+It seems as though writing is akin to the fundamental nature of thought, or at least of spoken language, which our thought is steeped in.
+
+So we know what _writing_ is.
+What is a _poem_?
+Especially in a world with such forms as prose poetry, flash fiction, short-shorts, lyrical essays, [lyrical _ballads_][], et cetera, what makes a poem a poem?
+
+I read an essay once that lamented the unidimensionality of writing.
+It posited that prose is really just a long, wrapped line of text that's bound by time---when you read a novel, for example, you really must start at the beginning and read through to the end, in order.
+Some newer forms of fiction are changing this, such as the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure genre in the 1970s and 80s, or hyperfiction found online, which raises the question for me if these newer forms could be considered on some level to be poetry.
+
+This is because poetry has more than one dimension, due to its linear nature---those line breaks are intentional, and the poem can't just fit into any-sized book or web page.
+If prose is a liquid, filling any container it's placed in with a constant volume, poetry is more like a crystallized form of prose, or to put it another way, poetry has between [one and two dimensions][].
+I wouldn't say that poetry has fully two dimensions, except for some of the more conceptually visual stuff that I'd call a word-picture anyway, because from line to line that unidimensionality of prose remains.
+Poetry has a higher dimensionality than prose, though, because it's crystallized there on the page; this fractal-dimensionality of poetry has interesting side effects on the genre itself.
+
+For one thing, poetry isn't as bound by time as prose is.
+It can, as Marianne Boruch writes, resist "narrative sequence," or "the forward press of _time_ itself," due to its repetitions and diversions, which are in turn made possible or more apparent by its line breaks.
+It's able to meditate on a subject, or expand on it lyrically, exploring the emotions connected with the images in the poem, or the connections between images.
+Through repitition of sounds, the poem builds meaning through resonance and rhyming, something that's harder to do in prose.
+Take, for example, the first lines of "[The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock][]:"
+
+> Let us go then, you and I, \
+> When the evening is spread out against the sky \
+> Like a patient etherized upon a table; \
+> Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets, \
+> The muttering retreats \
+> Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels \
+> And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells: \
+> Streets that follow like a tedious argument \
+> Of insidious intent \
+> To lead you to an overwhelming question.... \
+> Oh, do not ask, "What is it?" \
+> Let us go and make our visit.
+
+And here it is again, without line breaks:
+
+> Let us go then, you and I,
+> when the evening is spread out against the sky
+> like a patient etherized upon a table;
+> let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
+> the muttering retreats
+> of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
+> and sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
+> streets that follow like a tedious argument
+> of insidious intent
+> to lead you to an overwhelming question....
+> Oh, do not ask, "What is it?"
+> Let us go and make our visit.
+
+The end-rhymes that do so much for the sound of the poem are gone, and so part of the meaning of the poem---its obsessive self-consciousness, its paranoia---are gone as well.
+Additionally, line breaks act as punctuation in the entirety of this [fragment][]; without them, the meaning becomes obscured in the long first sentence of the poem.
+
+Perhaps due to this dwelling on scene, or on all aspects of a single scene at one time, poetry tends to be heavy on images, or lyrical.
+I think this is what's generally meant when someone describes a dance as "poetic," or a story or anything else: I think they really mean "lyrical," or maybe "beautiful." The images form sort of a narrative as the reader moves through them, as Cesare Pavese says, that's nevertheless [different than a traditional narrative][]: this "image narrative" jumps from image to image not by a logical progression but by the resonances between the images that run underneath them, on almost a subliminal plane.
+Almost without noticing, the reader of a poem is taken on an emotional journey that's not necessarily connected to the images of the poem, themselves.
+
+Poetry is a manipulation of emotion, or a communication of it.
+Prose has the space, the time to describe what's going on, even if the author stands by the old adage of "show, don't tell."
+_Showing_ in prose inherently involves more telling than poetry does, as poetry communicates a feeling itself.
+This definition may be broad enough to include certain dance performances or paintings, but that's okay.
+I'm of the opinion that the more useful genre distinctions are those which describe the thing technically: _verse_, for example, or _lyrical_.
+_Poetry_ is almost a value judgement, and that makes me a little uncomfortable.
+
+[lyrical _ballads_]: http://www.bartleby.com/39/36.html
+[one and two dimensions]: http://www.vanderbilt.edu/AnS/psychology/cogsci/chaos/workshop/Fractals.html
+[The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock]: http://www.bartleby.com/198/1.html
+[fragment]: statements-frag.html
+[different than a traditional narrative]: http://numerocinqmagazine.com/2011/03/07/translation-adaptation-and-transformation-the-poet-as-translator-an-essay-by-richard-jackson/
@@ -0,0 +1,128 @@
+---
+title: One hundred lines
+genre: verse
+
+id: one-hundred-lines
+toc: "100 lines"
+
+project:
+    title: Autocento of the breakfast table
+    class: autocento
+...
+
+| Whenever you call me friend
+| I fall down on my knees and cry
+| because I know it's the only thing
+| never to happen before in this
+| life is something you can't see
+| it's a pillow under a [hook shot][]
+| [I want to tell you something anything][tell-you]
+| but you are there and I am here
+| we are [trapped inside ourselves][trapped]
+| and the distance is too far
+| you are something that I would tell
+| [would be nothing][] before too long
+| you are not the finisher of dreams
+| you are the beginning of [nightmares][]
+| or waking but I'm not sure which
+| this [letter is for you][] in the future
+| it will lead you on the path
+| of goodness or of rightness or of
+| wrong people and right meanings
+| or the meaning will be hidden
+| or wrestling the demon I will have become
+| restless under the starlight
+| it's too bright here to think
+| the negatives would be pitch black
+| darkness of a silver mine
+| there are [no trees][] here
+| where have you been where are you now
+| I am no longer here or there
+| you are anywhere or are you
+| up in the clouds is a ghost
+| he is white and blue like a cloud
+| he paints with his teeth
+| he paints the rainbow before midnight
+| that you can see from your window
+| staring out under the sunlight
+| through the gauze curtains
+| [over the high mountain][mountain] far away
+| that is covered over with snow
+| past the rivers and forests
+| that lie awake under Orion
+| hunting the bull that runs forever
+| just out of his reach
+| pointing the way for the two of us
+| to join together in song or dance
+| or that other thing and sing
+| the Grinch down off Mount Crumpet
+| [his heart breaking his chest][heart]
+| thumping with the beat
+| his [little dog too][] running running
+| with the bull full of laughter and blood
+| he can't see it anymore because it's become him
+| we are trapped he says we are
+| trapped in ourselves it turns out
+| that all along it wasn't you or me
+| but he and her or her and him or
+| he and he or she and she or they
+| even they tell us that nothing has happened
+| even they know that it's a big joke
+| one more thing to know before the death
+| we are crying like crocodiles
+| before their loved ones' coffins
+| we are bellowing with grief like buffalo
+| on a berth of wild oxen
+| we are wailing our clothes are in rags
+| [we want][want1] [we want][want2] [we want][want3]
+| but never can we get
+| what is it
+| we don't know what it is
+| but it's something it's anything
+| it's too many people or not enough
+| it's too few trees we need more
+| beavers to build riverdams we need
+| grapes too or [plums][] from the ice box
+| or an ice box even would be nice
+| all I have is this cube isn't that right
+| or is a sphere a cube a donut a coffee
+| cup your hands in mine yes that's right
+| now bring the water to your face
+| clear and cool and
+| full of something
+| what is it wanting
+| or yearning
+| I can see in your eyes they're clear now
+| they are as clear as a running stream
+| or the sky that's clear right
+| or the water that is in the Bahamas
+| because I hear that's clear
+| you're as clear as the sound of a bell
+| you're as clear as the [braying of horses][]
+| you're as clear as the glass in God's eye
+| and I
+| I'm as dull as an ox plowing
+| [through fields in his yoke][yoke]
+| I'm as dull as clouded amber
+| I'm dull as you find me
+| tonight after dinner
+| I'm reading the crossword
+| you're sitting beside me
+| you're watching TV.
+
+[hook shot]: theoceanoverflowswithcamels.html
+[tell-you]: lovesong.html
+[trapped]: howtoread.html
+[would be nothing]: no-nothing.html
+[nightmares]: in-bed.html
+[letter is for you]: poetry-time.html
+[no trees]: plant.html
+[mountain]: mountain.html
+[heart]: moon-drowning.html
+[little dog too]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUpxmlZ2hyM
+[want1]: i-wanted-to-tell-you-something.html
+[want2]: fire.html
+[want3]: lovesong.html
+[plums]: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/245576
+[braying of horses]: table_contents.html
+[yoke]: last-passenger.html
@@ -0,0 +1,39 @@
+---
+title: On formal poetry
+genre: verse
+
+id: onformalpoetry
+toc: "On formal poetry"
+
+project:
+    title: Elegies for alternate selves
+    class: elegies
+    order: 12
+    prev:
+    - title: Feeding the raven
+      link: feedingtheraven
+    next:
+    - title: I am
+      link: i-am
+...
+
+| I think that I could write formal poems
+| exclusively, or at least inclusive
+| with all the other stuff I write
+| I guess.  Of course, I've already written
+| a few, this one included, though "formal"
+| is maybe a stretch.  Is blank verse a form?
+| What is form anyway?  I picture old
+| women counting [stitches on their knitting][knitting],
+| keeping iambs next to iambs in lines
+| as straight and sure as arrows.  But my sock
+| is lumpy, poorly made: it's beginning
+| to unravel.  Stresses don't line up.  Syl-
+| lables forced to fit like [McNugget][] molds.
+| That cliché on the arrow?  I'm aware.
+| My prepositions too---God, where's it stop?
+| The answer: never.  I will never stop
+| writing poems, or hating what I write.
+
+[knitting]: roughgloves.html
+[McNugget]: ronaldmcdonald.html
@@ -0,0 +1,49 @@
+---
+title: Options
+genre: prose
+
+id: options
+toc: "Options"
+
+project:
+    title: "Buildings out of air: Paul in the Woods"
+    class: paul
+    order: 26
+    next:
+    - title: Stagnant
+      link: stagnant
+    - title: Paul
+      link: paul
+    prev:
+    - title: Swear
+      link: swear
+    - title: Notes
+      link: notes
+...
+
+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 [dismember them][]?
+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?
+
+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?
+[What did he do with the desk?][]
+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?
+
+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?
+
+[dismember them]: weplayedthosegamestoo.html
+[What did he do with the desk?]: finding-the-lion.html
@@ -0,0 +1,78 @@
+---
+title: Ouroboros of Memory
+genre: prose
+
+id: ouroboros_memory
+toc: "Ouroboros of memory"
+
+epigraph:
+    content: |
+        He used his body to remember
+        his body, but in the end could only
+        remember the string.
+    attrib: Jonathan Safran Foer
+    link: 'http://www.bet-tal.com/index.aspx?id=2315'
+
+project:
+    title: Stark Raving
+    class: stark
+    order: 12
+    next:
+    - title: L'appel du vide
+      link: lappel-du-vide
+    - title: Love as God
+      link: love-as-god
+    prev:
+    - title: Table of contents
+      link: table_contents
+    - title: Initial Conditions
+      link: initial-conditions
+...
+
+[He said][] 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.
+
+"But what does it mean, _To remember the body with the body?_
+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 have forgotten that, as babies, they were able to make themselves into loops.
+
+"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.
+
+"I disagree with this theory of memory.
+I think there is, at bottom, only one type of anything, with subtypes grouped together along the edge of a loop.
+Color becomes a good metaphor: look how many of them!
+yet they are all consumed by the same part of the body.
+Maybe two different materials are still made of material, and maybe they can be rolled into a ball.
+Maybe there actually never was a problem.
+
+"Or maybe, and this is more likely, I need to restate the problem.
+I think it all boils down to the fact that I have a truly lousy memory.
+I've tried different mnemonic devices, like imagining each thing I need to remember being visited by a bouncing ball.
+I've tried trying string into finger-loops.
+I've even tried writing the things I need to remember on my body.
+If you asked me, 'Do any of these work,' I would have to answer, 'None of them.'
+
+"Sometimes in the morning I realize dumbly I've forgotten my words, all of them.
+They generally come back by around ten o'clock, but the frequency with which this is occurring is becoming a problem.
+I feel that my brain is being separated from my body.
+Is there a place in the universe for a misplaced memory?
+Does it eat its own tail and roll around the universe as it loops?
+Does it shrink down and become lost as a tiny ball?
+
+No matter what happens, eventually _I_ will become _them_ as I lose the last of my memory.
+I won't be able to solve the problem of my being, and my being will become my problem, in an eternal loop.
+I will roll my body into a prenatal ball.
+
+[He said]: joke.html
@@ -0,0 +1,54 @@
+---
+title: Paul
+genre: prose
+
+id: paul
+toc: "Paul"
+
+project:
+    title: "Buildings out of air: Paul in the Woods"
+    class: paul
+    order: 38
+    next:
+    - title: Fire
+      link: fire
+    - title: Phone
+      link: phone
+    prev:
+    - title: Father
+      link: father
+    - title: Options
+      link: options
+...
+
+> CONTENTS OF THE SHED
+>
+> - typewriter
+> - writing desk
+> - notecards (top drawer of desk)
+> - [pen][] (fountain)
+> - inkpot (empty)
+> - wood (a lot, more out back)
+> - bare lightbulb
+> - candle
+> - wooden shelf with tools:
+>     - claw hammer
+>     - screwdriver
+>     - prybar
+>     - 2x wrench (different kinds)
+> - tiller machine
+> - push lawnmower
+> - hatchet
+> - axe
+
+He typed the list in the typewriter and looked around some more.
+He wanted to make sure he didn't miss anything.
+Finally it hit him and he smiled.
+He typed one more line, stood up, and went out of the shed.
+
+> - Paul Bunyon
+
+He got some kerosene from under the house, poured it around the base of the shed, lit a cigarette.
+He smoked half of it and threw it down to start the fire.
+
+[pen]: howithappened.html
@@ -0,0 +1,87 @@
+---
+title: Peaches
+genre: prose
+
+id: peaches
+toc: "Peaches"
+
+project:
+    title: Autocento of the breakfast table
+    class: autocento
+...
+
+"My anger is like a peach," he said.
+He was trying to show how metaphors could be anything.
+I thought it worked.
+I wrote it down in my red notebook.
+
+In my other class, there was a long discussion about the difference between metaphor and simile as they relate to [Prufrock][].
+I could only think about his peaches.
+I wonder if he dared.
+
+A few years ago my friend dressed up as J. Alfred Prufrock for Halloween.
+Her costume consisted of rolled khaki trousers and a peach.
+(I wonder where she found that in [October][].)
+She was annoyed that she had to tell everyone who she was---"At a writers' party!"
+I don't remember if she ate that peach.
+I do remember the main meal was spaghetti.
+
+That party was held in a house in Chattanooga, in the basement.
+There was a big back yard where people drank and talked and sat in the darkness.
+Somewhere someone was smoking weed with a visiting writer.
+
+Earlier that day, [the writer had read a poem about his car accident][sebastian] a year ago, in Georgia, on the interstate.
+It had broken him pretty badly, and his wife, but somehow their child was unharmed.
+He said something about the peach pit being the one place Georgia held sacred.
+He said it was the place where all new things grow.
+
+I can see how anger could be like a peach: its juice runs out of the mouth and down the chin, dropping onto the pants and staining them.
+In the same way, I can see how [anger is like sex][]: they are both heightened states of emotional observation.
+
+In Atlanta, there are something like five or ten [Peachtree Streets][].
+I'm not sure if they all connect at some point, but from what I could see, they would have to do some contorting to get to the same point.
+I like to think a giant peach tree grows there, like the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.
+
+I was walking down one of Atlanta's Peachtrees with my girlfriend when a man in tight pants, a runner, jogged past us.
+We both agreed he had a marvelous ass.
+I was annoyed, however, when she confessed that she wished I had one like his.
+Later, we ate at a taqueria with peach-habanero salsa.
+
+[My mother][] would read to us as children.
+The first real books I remember, the first novels, are Island of the Blue Dolphins and James and the Giant Peach.
+I don't remember Island of the Blue Dolphins as well, probably because no movie was made of it.
+
+There's an independent video rental store where I grew up called [Popcorn Video][], one of the only stores I went to in my hometown that wasn't a chain.
+Every time we went, my sister would rent two movies: _James and the Giant Peach_ and _Home Alone 3_.
+
+I wasn't allowed to stay home alone, or I don't remember it, until I was fifteen.
+I built a potato cannon out of PVC pipe and a barbecue lighter.
+I would load a potato, spray hairspray into the barrel, and light it.
+Once, the cannon wouldn't light.
+I looked down the barrel and pushed the trigger button to see if I could see a light.
+I forgot that I had already primed the barrel with hairspray.
+I singed my eyebrows and bangs.
+
+In peach season, my father would bring home a bag of the freestones every week or so.
+He always got the cheap ones, so they were usually dry and pithy, with a stone that fell apart and nearly broke my tooth.
+I don't eat them anymore when I go home.
+
+My mother would always eat canned peaches with cottage cheese.
+For some reason I didn't think this was common knowledge.
+I showed people how good it was when we went to a buffet: they said "I know."
+
+To be honest, I'm not even sure what a peach tree looks like.
+I do know what an orange tree looks like, from a backyard in Phoenix, and a fig tree, from a back yard in Chattanooga.
+I also know what a cherry tree looks like, or at least a type of them, from my own backyard at home, as well as mulberry and apple.
+If, for some reason, I find myself lost in a sinister Garden of Eden, I'll at least know a few of the trees I can eat from.
+
+I always heard growing up that the Fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was an apple.
+Maybe I'll luck out: maybe it'll be a peach.
+
+[Prufrock]: http://www.bartleby.com/198/1.html
+[October]: axe.html
+[sebastian]: http://www.32poems.com/blog/5158/weekly-prose-feature-an-interview-with-sebastian-matthews-by-justin-bigos
+[anger is like sex]: statements-frag.html
+[Peachtree Streets]: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Peachtree+Rd+NE,+Atlanta,+GA/@33.7779425,-84.3843615
+[My mother]: riptide_memory.html
+[Popcorn Video]: http://popcornvideo.net/
@@ -0,0 +1,34 @@
+---
+title: Philosophy
+genre: prose
+
+id: philosophy
+toc: "Philosophy"
+
+project:
+    title: Book of Hezekiah
+    class: hezekiah
+    order: 3
+    next:
+    - title: Proverbs
+      link: proverbs
+    prev:
+    - title: The purpose of dogs
+      link: purpose-dogs
+...
+
+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: *so is the fallibility of the human intellect a mere product of the fallible human intellect.*
+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 *on its own terms*," that is, without any [modification][] 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.
+
+By this it is possible to see that nothing is knowable without the mediating factor of our mind fucking up the "[raw][]," 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.
+
+[modification]: i-am.html
+[raw]: spittle.html
@@ -0,0 +1,54 @@
+---
+title: Phone
+genre: prose
+
+id: phone
+toc: "Phone"
+
+project:
+    title: "Buildings out of air: Paul in the Woods"
+    class: paul
+    order: 16
+    next:
+    - title: Tapestry
+      link: tapestry
+    - title: Planks
+      link: planks
+    prev:
+    - title: Treatise
+      link: treatise
+    - title: Paul
+      link: paul
+...
+
+"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."
+
+"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" [said the woman's voice][] tinny in the phone
+"Listen I ran into your mother at the [Supermarket][] 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."
+
+"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.
+
+"Who was that" asked his mother.
+"Jill Noe" he said.
+"Oh her was she calling about a job for you?"
+"Yes starts Monday" he said.
+She smiled behind her glasses reflecting dominoes.
+
+[said the woman's voice]: telemarketer.html
+[Supermarket]: last-bastion.html
@@ -0,0 +1,48 @@
+---
+title: Planks
+genre: prose
+
+id: planks
+toc: "Planks"
+
+project:
+    title: "Buildings out of air: Paul in the Woods"
+    class: paul
+    order: 13
+    next:
+    - title: Hardware
+      link: hardware
+    - title: Punch
+      link: punch
+    prev:
+    - title: Leg
+      link: leg
+    - title: Phone
+      link: phone
+...
+
+> [EVERYTHING CHANGES OR EVERYTHING][]
+> [STAYS THE SAME][]
+
+This sat alone on a blank notecard in Paul's typewriter.
+He stared at it, sipping at his too-hot coffee.
+This made sense to him.
+
+He looked at the spot on the wall where he wanted a window to be, at the rough planks above his desk as they were lit by the bare hanging lightbulb.
+He sipped his coffee again.
+It was still too hot.
+His Woodworking Shack was becoming full of wood that was not furniture.
+He feared it would never become so.
+
+He threw open the door to the snow and the ground below it.
+He reached for his axe on the wall.
+He reconsidered.
+He took a few tentative steps onto the [blankness][] on his own.
+He wasn't cold, not yet.
+He walked into the forest.
+The snow crunched under his feet and [did not echo][].
+
+[EVERYTHING CHANGES OR EVERYTHING]: swear.html
+[STAYS THE SAME]: howtoread.html
+[blankness]: in-bed.html
+[did not echo]: last-passenger.html
@@ -0,0 +1,136 @@
+---
+title: Litany
+genre: verse
+
+dedication: a plant
+
+id: plant
+toc: "Litany for a plant"
+
+project:
+    title: Autocento of the breakfast table
+    class: autocento
+...
+
+| I need a plant.  I need a thing
+| to take care of.  I need
+| a little green brownspotted
+| [blackdirt][] growing
+| quietness.  I need a sunlit
+| dawn knowing my name filtered
+| through a [thin green window][].
+| I need chlorophyll
+| working its [magic][] on beams of
+| grassmade early morning dewdrop
+| sweetmaking green.  I need
+| the dark earth sucking water
+| from a black crevice
+| its black magic churning
+| wormilled rockturned starblind
+| darkness and cold into
+| [the opposite of dust][].  I need the heat
+| to blind me.  I need the dumb making
+| to charge my coldened blood.  I need
+| the dropturned leaves to turn again
+| their [faces to the windblown sun][].
+| I need millions of tiny years
+| summed up and burning out some unknown
+| new growth into the air.  I need four
+| hundred feet of dark red gnarled wood
+| and needles glistening wetly on goldheaded
+| branches hoisting themselves
+| to the sky.  I need ten strong men
+| to fail to bring you down.  Old one
+| I need the peace that comes with knowing
+| something sacred holds still
+| in the world.  I need your green tongues
+| [of flame to lick at old wounds][]
+| stitching us together away from ourselves.
+| I need your brownbranching grasp
+| to keep me from drifting off
+| into [unknowing terrible sleep][].  I need
+| [to know the snake][] hanging
+| from your branches.  I need to watch
+| the dropping of flesh massful
+| onto the ground from a height.  I need
+| the gnawer at your root to strike
+| a vein to quicken old brown stone
+| to movement.  I need jeweleyed venom
+| barking new greennesses into the bark.
+| I need a knocker of dark secrets hidden
+| in the dark bark hiding a smallstone
+| smoldering pearl in the knot.  I need
+| that [pearl held out in a hand][] like an offering.
+| I need the hand to be a plant's hand.
+
+| I need a plant.  I need a growing
+| growler [groaning][] toward heat and air.
+| I need a green thin stem surprisingly strong
+| holding up the weight of a plain
+| of fallow [greennesses of creases and caresses][]
+| of tiny worldmaking hardworking grandeur.
+| I need a singer of life crying
+| forward into old roads covered over
+| by dead trees.  I need the rasping of root
+| in dirt.  I need the unfurling of fiddleheads
+| to sing forth a new symphony.  I need
+| fruits swelling large for the harvest.
+| I need yellow light shining through white bark.
+| I need juicecrush flowing waterlike
+| through valleys percolating up
+| through the ground.  I need springs bubbling sap
+| into cabins of wood fought for by labor.
+| I need snow on the ground with shoots
+| dotting the melting patches.  I need two
+| leaves on a thin stalk shivering
+| in [moonlight][].  I need robinsong warbling
+| over the heads of small seeds sprouting
+| to enliven their growth.  I need rings
+| of woody material widening to push
+| the ground out of their way.  I need
+| new greennesses pushing out from
+| the brown dark bark gnarled.  I
+| need the robin to build its songfilled
+| nest in a [branchcrotch][].  I need
+| the fecundity of fungi on the branches.
+| I need quiet of the sunlight shooting
+| through thousands of branched leaves
+| quivering.  [I need whisper at dawn.][]
+| I need burrows underground foxholes.
+| I need duff layers eaten through
+| by worms.  I need brooks murmuring
+| through crooks of roots.  I need small
+| [fish swimming][] in their schools at
+| midnight.  I need oldnesses giving way
+| [to youngnesses giving way to oldnesses][].
+| I need dapplegray yellowshot ashbark.
+| I need the crunch of dead leaves underfoot.
+| I need [snowquiet deadbranch][] mourning.
+| I need those [purple mountains majesty][].
+| I need a walk between trees in the dark.
+| I need that moment when stopping to rest
+| it suddenly seems that all the weary
+| [forestroads][] in all their meandering come
+| [to rest their heads][] at my astonished
+| feet, none of them needing more than me.
+
+[blackdirt]: building.html
+[thin green window]: window.html
+[magic]: cereal.html
+[to rest their heads]: riptide_memory.html
+[forestroads]: http://www.bartleby.com/119/1.html
+[purple mountains majesty]: http://www.wrensworld.com/purpmount.htm
+[snowquiet deadbranch]: one-hundred-lines.html
+[to youngnesses giving way to oldnesses]: about-the-author.html
+[fish swimming]: proverbs.html
+[I need whisper at dawn.]: apollo11.html
+[branchcrotch]: epigraph.html
+[moonlight]: finding-the-lion.html
+[greennesses of creases and caresses]: the-sea_the-beach.html
+[groaning]: feedingtheraven.html
+[pearl held out in a hand]: roughgloves.html
+[to know the snake]: ouroboros_memory.html
+[unknowing terrible sleep]: in-bed.html
+[of flame to lick at old wounds]: fire.html
+[faces to the windblown sun]: no-nothing.html
+[the opposite of dust]: https://samofthetenthousandthings.wordpress.com/2012/09/08/charles-wright-reads-james-wright-the-journey-audio-poem/
@@ -0,0 +1,76 @@
+---
+title: Something
+subtitle: about the nature of poetry and time
+genre: verse
+
+id: poetry-time
+toc: "Something about the nature of poetry and time"
+
+project:
+    title: Stark Raving
+    class: stark
+    order: 5
+    next:
+    - title: The Moon is drowning
+      link: moon-drowning
+    - title: AMBER alert
+      link: amber-alert
+    prev:
+    - title: The Big Dipper
+      link: big-dipper
+    - title: Worse looking over
+      link: worse-looking-over
+...
+
+| I'm writing this now because I have to.
+| Not in some "my soul yearns for this and
+| I can't help it" way, but in the way that this
+| moment is structured as such, that it is
+| crystallized this way, me writing this, and later
+| you reading it, now for you, later for me,
+
+| and this tenuous connection mates me
+| and you forever, combined with each other, two
+| [electrons momentarily entwined][].  Later,
+| when I'm dead or far too famous for you, and
+| you're in school, reading my words because it is
+| required reading, I want you to remember this
+
+| connection we've always had, this
+| [spider's thread][] hanging between you and me.
+| Which of us is the spider and which is
+| the fly still remains to be seen.  To
+| eat, perchance to fly: all of that and
+| more.  We can settle all of this later.
+
+| Yes, it is you I'm thinking of in your later
+| time: you specifically, not another.  This
+| is true for all $x$ such that $x > 0$ and
+| $x$ is a real person, though it doesn't bother me
+| to write to a fictional figure or to
+| [a figment][], maybe, of my imagination.  This is
+
+| what you are right now, anyway, [dear Reader][], is
+| it not?  I'm talking about my now, of course, not later,
+| which is your now.  Later will be my now too,
+| and maybe I'm ultimately writing to a future part of this
+| self: you could very well be me.
+| In fact, you probably are me, [some other version][], and
+
+| I am you in the past, or what you could've been, and
+| at the same time, this isn't true.  Everything is,
+| and nothing isn't.  The difference between "you" and "me"
+| is in name only.  Maybe you'll get this later,
+| [when you're older][], when I'm older, when all of this
+| is something we'll look fondly back to,
+
+| because I do hope to meet you, although much later,
+| and I hope your feeling is the same.  All this
+| talk on me and you and you and me we'll keep between us two.
+
+[electrons momentarily entwined]: treatise.html
+[spider's thread]: last-passenger.html
+[a figment]: epigraph.html
+[some other version]: elegyforanalternateself.html
+[when you're older]: found-typewriter-poem.html
+[dear Reader]: real-writer.html
@@ -0,0 +1,28 @@
+---
+title: Prelude
+genre: prose
+
+id: prelude
+toc: "Prelude"
+
+project:
+    title: Book of Hezekiah
+    class: hezekiah
+    order: 1
+    next:
+    - title: The purpose of dogs
+      link: purpose-dogs
+...
+
+Of course, [there is a God][].
+Of course, [there is no God][].
+Of course, what's really [important][] 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.
+[Shit.][]
+Never mind; let's start over.
+
+[there is a God]: boar.html
+[there is no God]: TODO_BONNIE_PRINCE_BILLIE_YOUTUBE
+[Shit.]: january.html
+[important]: building.html
@@ -0,0 +1,61 @@
+---
+title: Problems
+genre: prose
+
+id: problems
+toc: "Problems"
+
+project:
+    title: Book of Hezekiah
+    class: hezekiah
+    order: 6
+    next:
+    - title: Liking things
+      link: likingthings
+    prev:
+    - title: Moving sideways
+      link: movingsideways
+...
+
+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.
+
+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.[^1]
+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[^2]) that there is no background to put themselves against, no "[big picture][]" to get painted into.
+This makes sense, because on one level, the level of everyday life, the level of *observation*, 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.[^3]
+
+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.[^4]
+
+In any case, people have for some reason or another, and to some end or another, always been unhappy.
+And people have always tried to figure out ways to be less unhappy---one of the most important things to people everywhere is called "the pursuit of happiness."
+I think that calling it a pursuit makes people feel more like dogs, who are the most happy beings most people can think of.
+By pursuing happiness, they're like a dog pursuing a possum or a bone on a fishing rod: two activities that sound like a lot of fun to most people.
+I think most people wish they were dogs.
+
+[big picture]: ronaldmcdonald.html
+[sitting in a buiding]: feedingtheraven.html
+
+
+[^1]: This seems to be an attempt on Hezzy's part to set an example for
+    mankind.  It should be noted that he is an alcoholic, and not in any
+    shape to be an example to anyone.
+
+[^2]: It is thought that only the leg coverings of the female sex are
+    here referenced
+
+[^3]: You have hereby found the super special secret cheat code room.
+    Yes, this is just like Super Mario Brothers---you can skip right to
+    the end.  Go and face the final boss already!
+
+[^4]: See footnote, above
@@ -0,0 +1,70 @@
+---
+title: Autocento of the breakfast table
+subtitle: process narrative
+genre: prose
+
+id: process
+toc: "Process narrative"
+
+project:
+    title: Front matter
+    class: front-matter
+...
+
+## Hi.  My name is Case Duckworth.  This is my thesis.
+
+_Autocento of the breakfast table_ is an inter/hypertextual exploration of the workings of inspiration, revision, and obsession.
+I've compiled this work over multiple years, and recently linked it all together to form a (hopefully) more cohesive whole.
+To make this easier than collating everything by hand, I've relied on a process that leverages open-source technologies to publish my work onto a web platform.
+
+## Process steps
+
+1. Write poems.
+2. Convert to Markdown.
+    - Markdown, originally by [John Gruber][], is a lightweight markup language that allows me to focus on the _content_ of my writing, knowing that I can work on the _presentation_ later.
+    - The original `markdown.pl` program is buggy and inconsistent with how it applies styles to markup.  It also only works to convert text to HTML.
+    - Because of these limitations, I've used John MacFarlane's [extended Markdown syntax][], which lets me write richer documents and programmatically compile my work into multiple formats.
+3. Compile to HTML with Pandoc.
+    - At first, I used this code in the shell to generate my HTML:
+    ```bash
+    for file in *.txt; do
+        pandoc "$file" -f markdown -t html5 \
+        --template=template.html -o "${file%txt}html"
+    done
+    ```
+        but this proved tedious with time.
+    - After a lot of experimenting with different scripting languages, I finally realized that [`GNU make`][] would fit this task perfectly.
+    - You can see my makefile [here][makefile]---it's kind of a mess, but it does the job.  See below for a more detailed explanation of the makefile.
+4. Style the pages with CSS.
+    - I use a pretty basic style for _Autocento_.  You can see my stylesheet [here][stylesheet].
+4. Use [Github][] to put them online.
+    - Github uses `git` under the hood---a Version Control System developed for keeping track of large code projects.
+    - My workflow with `git` looks like this:
+        - Change files in the project directory---revise a poem, change the makefile, add a style, etc.
+        - (If necessary, re-compile with `make`.)
+        - `git status` tells me which files have changed, which have been added, and if any have been deleted.
+        - `git add -A` adds all the changes to the _staging area_, or I can add individual files, depending on what I want to commit.
+        - `git commit -m "[message]"` commits the changes to git.  This means they're "saved"---if I do something I want to revert, I can `git revert` back to a commit and start again.
+        - `git push` pushes the changes to the _remote repository_---in this case, the Github repo that serves <http://autocento.me>.
+        - Lather, rinse, repeat.
+5. Write Makefile to extend build capabilities.
+    - As of now, I've completed a _[Hapax legomenon][]_ compiler, a [back-link][] compiler, and an updater for the [random link functionality][] that's on this site.
+    - I'd like to build a compiler for the [Index of first lines][] and [Index of common titles][] once I have time.
+
+## The beauty of this system
+
+- I can compile these poems into (almost) any format: `pandoc` supports a lot.
+- Once I complete the above process once, I can focus on revising my poems.
+- These poems are online for anyone to see and use for their own work.
+
+[John Gruber]: http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/
+[extended Markdown syntax]: http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/README.html#pandocs-markdown
+[`GNU make`]: https://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/make.html
+[makefile]: https://github.com/duckwork/autocento/blob/gh-pages/makefile
+[stylesheet]: https://github.com/duckwork/autocento/blob/gh-pages/style.css
+[Github]: https://github.com
+[Hapax legomenon]: hapax.html
+[back-link]: makefile
+[random link functionality]: trunk/lozenge.js
+[Index of first lines]: first-lines.html
+[Index of common titles]: common-titles.html
@@ -0,0 +1,50 @@
+---
+title: Proverbs
+genre: prose
+
+id: proverbs
+toc: "Proverbs"
+
+project:
+    title: Book of Hezekiah
+    class: hezekiah
+    order: 4
+    next:
+    - title: Moving sideways
+      link: movingsideways
+    prev:
+    - title: Philosophy
+      link: philosophy
+...
+
+[Nothing matters; everything is sacred.
+Everything matters; nothing is sacred][sacred].[^1]
+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 *complete each other*.
+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.
+[There are no rosebushes, groomed never.  There is no carpet, steamed at any time.][rosebush]
+The dog looks at you wanting you to love it.
+It wants to know that you know that it's there.
+*It wants to be observed*.[^2]
+
+[sacred]: words-meaning.html
+[rosebush]: lovesong.html
+
+[^1]: Thank you [Tom Stoppard][].  Ha ha ho ho and hee hee.
+
+[^2]: Ah ha!  I knew this was going to happen at some point.  Now things
+    are going to get more interesting because the dog wants what we
+    thought was a bad thing, right?  Right?  Didn't we go through that
+    part about how observing made it impossible to really know anything,
+    and I had to start over because it's really hard to figure out what
+    you're talking about when reality slips out of your hands like a
+    fish, but you're not a cat with claws so it just flops right outta
+    your hand back into the lake.  (By the way, Nirvana is thought to be
+    what a drop of water feels upon flopping into a lake---doesn't that
+    seem important?  Doesn't it seem like a fish and a drop of water here
+    are connected?  It helps, of course, that the fish represents Reality
+    here.)
+
+[Tom Stoppard]: http://www.thesatirist.com/books/CowGirlBlues.html
@@ -0,0 +1,49 @@
+---
+title: Punch
+genre: prose
+
+id: punch
+toc: "Punch"
+
+project:
+    title: "Buildings out of air: Paul in the Woods"
+    class: paul
+    order: 32
+    next:
+    - title: Joke
+      link: joke
+    - title: Question
+      link: question
+    prev:
+    - title: Wallpaper
+      link: wallpaper
+    - title: Planks
+      link: planks
+...
+
+When he finally got back to work he was surprised they threw him a party.
+_**WELCOME BACK PAUL!**_  was written on a big banner across the back wall.
+Someone had ordered a confectioner's-sugar cake with [frosting flowers][] 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 [gauze][].
+
+"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."
+
+"Sorry for what" she looked at his eyes.
+He imagined her seeing [fisheye][] 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.
+
+[fisheye]: hands.html
+[frosting flowers]: big-dipper.html
+[gauze]: one-hundred-lines.html
@@ -0,0 +1,40 @@
+---
+title: The purpose of dogs
+genre: prose
+
+id: purpose-dogs
+toc: "The purpose of dogs"
+
+project:
+    title: Book of Hezekiah
+    class: hezekiah
+    order: 2
+    next:
+    - title: Philosophy
+      link: philosophy
+    prev:
+    - title: Prelude
+      link: prelude
+...
+
+Okay, so as we said in [the Prelude][], 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.
+
+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.
+
+Note: *Just because we think it's important doesn't mean it is important.*
+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.
+[Shit][].
+Let me start again.
+
+[the Prelude]: prelude.html
+[Shit]: feedingtheraven.html
@@ -0,0 +1,54 @@
+---
+title: Question
+genre: prose
+
+id: question
+toc: "Question"
+
+project:
+    title: "Buildings out of air: Paul in the Woods"
+    class: paul
+    order: 19
+    next:
+    - title: Sapling
+      link: sapling
+    - title: Reports
+      link: reports
+    prev:
+    - title: Window
+      link: window
+    - title: Punch
+      link: punch
+...
+
+"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.
+[He couldn't quite remember.][remember]
+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.
+
+"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.
+
+"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.
+
+Only all of the time, Paul thought to himself but didn't speak.
+
+[remember]: riptide_memory.html
@@ -0,0 +1,51 @@
+---
+title: A real writer
+genre: verse
+
+id: real-writer
+toc: "A real writer"
+
+project:
+    title: Autocento of the breakfast table
+    class: autocento
+...
+
+| Sometimes I feel as though I am not a real writer.
+| [I don't smoke][].  I don't wake up early but I don't sleep
+| all day either.  I find myself increasingly interested
+| in dumb luck.  Chance: I've found two dimes in as many
+| days.  Does this mean I've found twenty lucky pennies?
+| I want you to participate.  You the reader.  You,
+| the probabilistic god of my dreams.  I've been having
+| [strange dreams][] lately.  I don't remember them but
+| they leave impressions.  A bare foot.  A tunnel
+| of hair from her face to mine.  A boat stranded
+| in a living-room.  Something warm.  Something like the sun
+| through my eyelids.  [A hand, with all its dead symbology][].
+| [My teeth have fallen out][].  No, you pulled them out
+| with your hands, threw them over your left shoulder
+| [like salt][], to wish away bad luck.  I have something
+| to tell you: bad luck follows like a dog.  It lets you
+| get ahead for a few days, a week, a year.  You'll see,
+| it'll bite your sleeping face when you're not looking.
+| I've been dreaming about the future, I know.  In my dream
+| I am not a writer, [I live in a place with rain][].  You
+| are sunning yourself as you read this, on a beach or
+| maybe a desert.  Let me move in with you.  I can cook
+| [or clean][] or take care of your dog while you're out.
+| I'll never have to write again.  [I'll watch television][].
+| Do I want to become a writer?  Tell me.  Should I smoke?
+| I can sleep all day in your attic if you want, become
+| [your god][], lose my own, settle to the bottom of the bed
+| like a boat in a river, dream about nothing but [furniture][].
+
+[I don't smoke]: cereal.html
+[strange dreams]: in-bed.html
+[A hand, with all its dead symbology]: roughgloves.html
+[My teeth have fallen out]: no-nothing.html
+[like salt]: i-am.html
+[I live in a place with rain]: riptide_memory.html
+[or clean]: when-im-sorry-i.html
+[I'll watch television]: about-the-author.html
+[your god]: love-as-god.html
+[furniture]: leaf.html
@@ -0,0 +1,46 @@
+---
+title: Reports
+genre: prose
+
+id: reports
+toc: "Reports"
+
+project:
+    title: "Buildings out of air: Paul in the Woods"
+    class: paul
+    order: 24
+    next:
+    - title: Swear
+      link: swear
+    - title: Sapling
+      link: sapling
+    prev:
+    - title: Snow
+      link: snow
+    - title: Question
+      link: question
+...
+
+"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
+
+1. going to the Office Supply Store to buy notecards and typewriter ribbon (he
+   found it surprisingly easily) after his first payday
+2. replacing the ribbon in his typewriter (this took approximately half an
+   hour, because he had to figure it all out on his own)
+3. opening the package of notecards (this took approximately four seconds,
+   although he still had to figure out how to do it on his own.  It was just
+   easier)
+4. carefully typing the reports he'd handwritten on letter paper onto the
+   notecards (he made many mistakes and threw away many notecards, though
+   later he used them for kindling)
+
+so understandably he was upset.
+He told Jill all the work he'd gone to to type those notecard reports for her, for the company.
+[She shook her head.][]
+"Paul, you don't have to do all that work at home.
+Just type it up on the computers here, that's all you need to do.
+Thanks for the work though."
+He nodded as she threw the notecards into the trashcan and left his cubicle.
+
+[She shook her head.]: seasonal-affective-disorder.html
@@ -0,0 +1,59 @@
+---
+title: Riptide of memory
+genre: verse
+
+id: riptide_memory
+toc: "Riptide of memory"
+
+project:
+    title: Stark Raving
+    class: stark
+    order: 16
+    next:
+    - title: About the author
+      link: about-the-author
+    - title: The Sixteenth Chapel
+      link: sixteenth-chapel
+    prev:
+    - title: Something about all music being performances of _4&prime;33&Prime;_ in places where other bands happen to be playing
+      link: music-433
+    - title: I think it's you (but it's not)
+      link: i-think-its-you
+...
+
+| Inside of my memory, the poem is another memory.
+| The air up here is thin, but the wind blows harder
+| than anywhere else I know.  It threatens to rip
+| my body away, like [an angel of death][], to the stars.
+
+| In Arizona, I thought I would forget the rain,
+| forget its sound on a roof like a hard wind, forget
+| its smell like a far away ocean.  Luckily for me
+| it rains here.  Luckily, because I forget too easily.
+
+| In a dream, [my father is caught by a riptide][] off-shore.
+| He's pulled far out, far enough that the shoreline's
+| a line in his [memory][] on the horizon.  I can see him
+| swimming, hand over hand, pulling his small weight
+
+| back to land.  I see him as [another shipwreck][] victim,
+| coughing sand and seawater, beard woven with seaweed.
+| I see him lying there a long time.  I see all this
+| as he tells me the story, years later, the riptide
+
+| only a [ghost][] in his memory, I only a child falling
+| asleep.  My mother's making mayonnaise rolls
+| in the kitchen, a recipe I'll send for years later,
+| in Arizona, in the monsoon season, when my thirst
+
+| pulls me back home, my memory's lonesome twinkle
+| like [stars above the mountains][].  I'll send for it
+| and try to make them, but in the thin air they'll
+| crumble into dust like desert air, like a memory.
+
+[an angel of death]: angeltoabraham.html
+[my father is caught by a riptide]: father.html
+[memory]: ouroboros_memory.html
+[another shipwreck]: shipwright.html
+[ghost]: one-hundred-lines.html
+[stars above the mountains]: finding-the-lion.html
@@ -0,0 +1,52 @@
+---
+title: Ronald McDonald
+genre: verse
+
+id: ronaldmcdonald
+toc: "Ronald McDonald"
+
+project:
+    title: Elegies for alternate selves
+    class: elegies
+    order: 17
+    prev:
+    - title: Rough gloves
+      link: roughgloves
+    next:
+    - title: The moon is gone and in its place a mirror
+      link: moongone
+...
+
+| When Ronald McDonald takes off his [striped shirt][],
+| his coveralls, his painted face: when he no longer looks
+| like anyone or anything special, sitting next to women
+
+| in bars or standing in the aisle at the grocery,
+| is he no longer Ronald?  Is he no longer happy to kick
+| a soccer ball around with the kids in the park,
+
+| is he suddenly unable to enjoy the french fries
+| he gets for his fifty percent off?  I'd like to think
+| that he takes Ronald off like a shirt, hangs him
+
+| in a closet where he breathes darkly in the musk.
+| I'd like to believe that we are able to slough off selves
+| like old skin and still retain some base self.
+
+| Of course we all know this is not what happens.
+| The Ronald leering at women drunkenly is the same who
+| the next day kicks at a ball the size of a head.
+
+| He is the same that hugs his children at night,
+| who has sex with his wife on the weekends when they're
+| not so tired to make it work, who smiles holding
+
+| a basket of fries in front of a field.  He cannot
+| take off the facepaint or the [yellow gloves][].  They are
+| stuck to him like so many feathers with the tar
+
+| of his everyday associations.  His plight is that
+| of everyone's---we are what we do who we are.
+
+[striped shirt]: theoceanoverflowswithcamels.html
+[yellow gloves]: roughgloves.html
@@ -0,0 +1,38 @@
+---
+title: Rough gloves
+genre: verse
+
+id: roughgloves
+toc: "Rough gloves"
+
+project:
+    title: Elegies for alternate selves
+    class: elegies
+    order: 16
+    prev:
+    - title: Love Song
+      link: lovesong
+    next:
+    - title: Ronald McDonald
+      link: ronaldmcdonald
+...
+
+| I lost my hands & knit replacement ones
+| from [spiders' threads][], stronger than steel but soft
+| as lambs' wool.  Catching as they do on nails
+| & your collarbone, you don't seem to like
+| their rough warm presence on your [cheek or thigh][].
+| I've asked you if you minded, you've said no
+| (your face a table laid with burnt meat, bread
+| so stale it could [break a hand][]).  Remember
+| your senile mother's face above that table?
+| I'd say she got the meaning of that look.
+| You'd rather not be touched by these rough gloves,
+| the only way I have to knit a love
+| against whatever winters we may enter
+| like a silkworm in a spider's blackened [maw][].
+
+[cheek or thigh]: feedingtheraven.html
+[break a hand]: weplayedthosegamestoo.html
+[maw]: serengeti.html
+[spiders' threads]: poetry-time.html
@@ -0,0 +1,49 @@
+---
+title: Sapling
+genre: prose
+
+id: sapling
+toc: "Sapling"
+
+project:
+    title: "Buildings out of air: Paul in the Woods"
+    class: paul
+    order: 20
+    next:
+    - title: Cereal
+      link: cereal
+    - title: Shed
+      link: shed
+    prev:
+    - title: Question
+      link: question
+    - title: Reports
+      link: reports
+...
+
+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.
+
+"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 [the tree that fell in the forest][] 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 [bound to another][] 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.
+
+"Still, a neuron by itself means nothing.
+Put them all together though and connect them.
+You've got a brain."
+
+[the tree that fell in the forest]: options.html
+[bound to another]: last-passenger.html
@@ -0,0 +1,38 @@
+---
+title: Seasonal affective disorder
+genre: verse
+
+id: seasonal-affective-disorder
+toc: "Seasonal affective disorder"
+
+project:
+    title: Autocento of the breakfast table
+    class: autocento
+...
+
+| On your desk I set a tangerine:
+| a relic of a [winter][] quickly passing.
+
+| I'm reminded, fiercely, of a summer:
+| I watched the [cemetery grass][] on my stomach.
+
+| You hate the wind [blowing through buildings][]:
+| the coldness of fire, blister of a mountain stream.
+
+| When you broke down that night: your aunt / you
+| never have been / [you shook that night][] /
+
+| Seasonal affective disorder is real: you
+| [mutter under your breath on the highway][].
+
+| The ant carries an orange peel past a headstone:
+| it carries her nearly as often.
+
+| I set a tangerine on your desk:
+| an engagement ring, winter-returned.
+
+[winter]: january.html
+[cemetery grass]: death-zone.html
+[blowing through buildings]: building.html
+[you shook that night]: the-night-we-met.html
+[mutter under your breath on the highway]: last-bastion.html
@@ -0,0 +1,37 @@
+---
+title: Sense of it
+genre: verse
+
+id: sense-of-it
+toc: "Sense of it"
+
+project:
+    title: Autocento of the breakfast table
+    class: autocento
+...
+
+| I only write poems on [the bus][] anymore.
+| I sit far in the back to be alone.
+| I mark black things on white things in a black thing.
+| I try to make sense of it.
+
+| Every time I see a plastic bag in the wind I think:
+| [This is the most beautiful thing I've ever seen.][]
+| Most of my life I relate to something on the TV:
+| This is how I try to make sense of it.
+
+| The Talking Heads song ["Stop Making Sense"][stop]
+| is about a girlfriend caught cheating and willed oblivion.
+| The song's real title is "Girlfriend is Better"
+| but [lying][] about it is a way I try to make sense of it.
+
+| The day after I lost her I found you again.
+| Your face made a plastic bag of my heart.
+| Your eyes were [the wind][] pushing the bus forward.
+| I couldn't make sense of it.
+
+[stop]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9r7X3f2gFz4
+[This is the most beautiful thing I've ever seen.]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qssvnjj5Moo
+[the wind]: cold-wind.html
+[lying]: the-night-we-met.html
+[the bus]: stagnant.html
@@ -0,0 +1,36 @@
+---
+title: Serengeti
+genre: verse
+
+id: serengeti
+toc: "Serengeti"
+
+project:
+    title: Elegies for alternate selves
+    class: elegies
+    order: 20
+    prev:
+    - title: The mountain
+      link: mountain
+    next:
+    - title: The shipwright
+      link: shipwright
+...
+
+| The self is a serengeti
+| a wide grassland with baobab trees
+| reaching their roots deep into earth
+| like a child into a clay pot
+| A wind blows there or seems to blow
+| if he holds it up to his ear the air shifts
+| like stones in a stream uncovering a crawfish
+| it finds another hiding place watching you
+| Its eyes are blacker than wind
+| on the serengeti they are the [eyes of a predator][formal]
+| they are coming toward you or receding
+| a storm cloud builds on the horizon
+| Are you [running][] toward the rain or away from it
+| Do you stand still and crouch hoping for silence
+
+[formal]: onformalpoetry.html
+[running]: squirrel.html
@@ -0,0 +1,46 @@
+---
+title: Shed
+genre: prose
+
+id: shed
+toc: "Shed"
+
+project:
+    title: "Buildings out of air: Paul in the Woods"
+    class: paul
+    order: 9
+    next:
+    - title: Hands
+      link: hands
+    - title: Snow
+      link: snow
+    prev:
+    - title: Notes
+      link: notes
+    - title: Sapling
+      link: sapling
+...
+
+"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.
+
+"Goddammit Paul" his mother said.
+"You're [wasting your life][] 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.
+
+"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 [this furniture][] of yours?"
+"It'll be a while" he answered.
+
+"Then you'd better get a job until then" she said.
+
+[wasting your life]: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/177229
+[this furniture]: real-writer.html
@@ -0,0 +1,40 @@
+---
+title: The shipwright
+genre: verse
+
+id: shipwright
+toc: "Shipwright"
+
+project:
+    title: Elegies for alternate selves
+    class: elegies
+    order: 21
+    prev:
+    - title: Serengeti
+      link: serengeti
+    next:
+    - title: Spittle
+      link: spittle
+...
+
+| He builds a ship as if it were the last thing
+| holding him together, as if, when he stops,
+| his body will fall onto the plate-glass water
+| and shatter into sand.  To keep his morale up
+| he whistles and sings, but the wind whistles [louder][]
+| and taunts him: Your ship will build itself
+| if you throw yourself into the sea; time
+| has a way of growing your beard for you.
+| Soon, you'll find yourself on a rocking chair
+| on some porch made from your ship's timbers.
+| The window behind you is made from a sail, thick
+| canvas, and no one inside will hear your calling
+| for milk or a chamberpot.  Your children
+| will have all sailed to the New World and left you.
+| But he tries not to listen, continues to hammer
+| nail after nail into timber after timber,
+| but the wind [finally blows][] him into the growling ocean
+| and the ship falls apart on its own.
+
+[louder]: apollo11.html
+[finally blows]: theoceanoverflowswithcamels.html
@@ -0,0 +1,86 @@
+---
+title: The Sixteenth Chapel
+genre: verse
+
+id: sixteenth-chapel
+toc: "The sixteenth chapel"
+
+epigraph:
+    content: "Canadian High School!"
+    attrib: David Letterman
+    link: 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PI_pwLyeoqk'
+
+dedication: Max
+
+project:
+    title: Stark Raving
+    class: stark
+    order: 17
+    next:
+    - title: Last bastion
+      link: last-bastion
+    - title: Something about all music being performances of _4&prime;33&Prime;_ in places where other bands happen to be playing
+      link: music-433
+    prev:
+    - title: Worse looking over
+      link: worse-looking-over
+    - title: Riptide of memory
+      link: riptide_memory
+...
+
+| If Justin Bieber isn't going for the sixteenth
+| chapel, I'm not either.  I admit he is my role
+| model.  He's so current, so fresh and so new,
+| and Michelangelo is so old, his art so dated.
+| Where is the love in those old paintings?  All
+| I see is [creation][], [judgment][], and [death][]---
+
+| and I don't get the preoccupation with death.
+| I'm about life!  Ever since my sixteenth
+| birthday, when me and my two sisters all
+| nearly died when the car I was driving rolled
+| into a creek.  Even though I've [forgotten the date][],
+| I think it keeps me thinking on the new,
+
+| something Biebs would be proud of if he knew.
+| I look at him, and see the [opposite of death][]
+| in his eyes, his youthful smile: though someday
+| he may [be a father][], and later host a Sweet Sixteen
+| for his daughter (for whom I know he'll buy a Rolls),
+| death will never find him.  Living will be all
+
+| he'll ever do, because it will be all
+| he'll ever need to do.  He is the eternal new,
+| the [forever youth:][] this is the simple [role][]
+| of every celebrity, to let us forget death.
+| Bieber didn't make a mistake on the Sistine
+| Chapel's name.  He merely showed that someday
+
+| all old names must go, that on some day
+| a name must die so that the thing, which is all
+| that matters, can stay as it was in the sixteenth
+| century: fresh, ostentatious, and brand new.
+| In a way, [the name becomes a Christ][], experiencing death
+| so the world doesn't have to.  But I am wary of this role
+
+| for a name.  It seems a name gives meaning, rolls
+| the general idea together with the concrete, daily
+| toil of the mundane.  Are not life and death
+| intertwined?  Is not everything tied up all
+| with everything?  I guess I'm saying the new
+| necessarily comes from the old, as every sixteen-
+
+| year-old has a parent.  [Life rolls to death][], and all
+| is tied together.  Each day is born of night, and dies so new
+| morning can occur.  Even the sixteenth chapel holds death.
+
+[role]: words-meaning.html
+[death]: deathstrumpet.html
+[opposite of death]: death-zone.html
+[creation]: creation-myth.html
+[judgment]: movingsideways.html
+[forgotten the date]: riptide_memory.html
+[be a father]: i-am.html
+[forever youth:]: about-the-author.html
+[the name becomes a Christ]: nothing-is-ever-over.html
+[Life rolls to death]: ouroboros_memory.html
@@ -0,0 +1,57 @@
+---
+title: Snow
+genre: prose
+
+id: snow
+toc: "Snow"
+
+project:
+    title: "Buildings out of air: Paul in the Woods"
+    class: paul
+    order: 23
+    next:
+    - title: Reports
+      link: reports
+    - title: Stagnant
+      link: stagnant
+    prev:
+    - title: Man
+      link: man
+    - title: Shed
+      link: shed
+...
+
+_[I don't care if they burn][]_ he wrote on his last blank notecard.
+He'd have to go to the Office Supply Store tomorrow after work.
+
+He looked at what he'd written.
+He'd been thinking about this for a while, felt the frustration build slowly like a [thundercloud][] 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.
+[He didn't want anyone, not even the notecards, to know what he was thinking.][thinking]
+He decided to try for more of an interview with the paper.
+
+_Why?_  asked the notecard.
+_Because there is nothing important on any of them_ he wrote back.
+_What do you mean?
+You have some good stuff in that top drawer there._
+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.
+_It will take so much organization_ he wrote.
+
+_Why is organization important?
+Remember the trees, [how they formed rows][] without trying.
+No matter how the ideas fall, they make something.
+[The snow][] [does that too][]_ he wrote.
+_It doesn't try to make anything but it does._
+
+_No the snow is different_ the notecard was annoyed.
+_The snow is a blank canvas that humans build into shapes or doppelgangers.
+It makes nothing on its own._
+
+[I don't care if they burn]: fire.html
+[thundercloud]: serengeti.html
+[thinking]: lappel-du-vide.html
+[how they formed rows]: axe.html
+[The snow]: one-hundred-lines.html
+[does that too]: weplayedthosegamestoo.html
@@ -0,0 +1,29 @@
+---
+title: "Let's start with something simple:"
+genre: verse
+
+id: something-simple
+toc: "Something simple"
+
+project:
+    title: Autocento of the breakfast table
+    class: autocento
+...
+
+| in mammals the ratio between bladder size
+| and urethra is such that it takes
+| all of them the same time to piss.  Take
+| for example the fact that Fibonnacci
+| numbers show up everywhere.  How can you
+| look at this at all of this all of
+| these facts and tell me to my face there
+| is no God?  And yet there isn't
+| you murmer quietly into my ear over
+| and over like a low tide sounding
+| its lonely waves on an abandoned beach.
+| The ocean that birthed us holds us
+| still.  We are tied, you and I, together
+| in her arms.  The [moon, caring father,][moon]
+| looks down from a dispassionate sky.
+
+[moon]: moon-drowning.html
@@ -0,0 +1,33 @@
+---
+title: Spittle
+genre: verse
+
+id: spittle
+toc: "Spittle"
+
+project:
+    title: Elegies for alternate selves
+    class: elegies
+    order: 22
+    prev:
+    - title: The shipwright
+      link: shipwright
+    next:
+    - title: The squirrel
+      link: squirrel
+...
+
+| My body is attached to your body by a thin spittle of thought.
+| When you turn away from me, my thought is broken
+| and forms anew with something else.  Ideas are drool.
+| Beauty has been slobbered over far too long.  [God][]
+| is a tidal wave of bodily fluid.  Even the flea has some
+| vestigial wetness.  We live in a world fleshy and dark,
+| and moist as a nostril.  Is conciousness only a watery-eyed
+| romantic, crying softly into his [shirt-sleeve][]?  Is not reason
+| a square-jawed businessman with a briefcase full of memory?
+| I want to kiss the world to make it mine.  I want to become
+| a Judas to reality, betray it with the wetness of emotion.
+
+[God]: howithappened.html
+[shirt-sleeve]: lovesong.html
@@ -0,0 +1,38 @@
+---
+title: The squirrel
+genre: verse
+
+id: squirrel
+toc: "The squirrel"
+
+project:
+    title: Elegies for alternate selves
+    class: elegies
+    order: 23
+    prev:
+    - title: Spittle
+      link: spittle
+    next:
+    - title: Swan song
+      link: swansong
+...
+
+| He is so full in himself:
+| how far down the branch to run,
+| how long to jump, when to grab the air
+| and catch in it and turn, and land on branch
+| so gracefully it's like dying, alone
+| and warm in a bed next to a summer window
+| and the [birds singing][].  And on that branch there
+| is the squirrel dancing among the branches
+| and you think *What if he fell?* but he won't
+| because he's a squirrel and that's what
+| they do, [dance][] and never fall.  It was erased
+| long ago from the squirrel, even
+| the possibility of falling was erased
+| from his being by the slow inexorable evolution
+| of squirrels, that is why all squirrels
+| are so full in themselves, full in who they are.
+
+[birds singing]: mountain.html
+[dance]: movingsideways.html
@@ -0,0 +1,45 @@
+---
+title: Stagnant
+genre: prose
+
+id: stagnant
+toc: "Stagnant"
+
+project:
+    title: "Buildings out of air: Paul in the Woods"
+    class: paul
+    order: 27
+    next:
+    - title: Building
+      link: building
+    - title: Stump
+      link: stump
+    prev:
+    - title: Options
+      link: options
+    - title: Snow
+      link: snow
+...
+
+"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 [yelling over a hard wind][].
+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.
+
+"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 [yelling to him over the wind][].
+"Speak up" he thought to the voice, then remembered it was his own.
+He wished he'd remembered a book to read.
+
+He looked at his hands to pass the time.
+[They were dry in the winter air][] 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.
+[He was surprised that he was the only one on the bus.][]
+
+[He was surprised that he was the only one on the bus.]: stayed-on-the-bus.html
+[yelling over a hard wind]: sense-of-it.html
+[They were dry in the winter air]: hands.html
+[yelling to him over the wind]: cold-wind.html
@@ -0,0 +1,70 @@
+---
+title: Statements
+subtitle: a fragment
+genre: prose
+
+id: statements-frag
+toc: "Statements"
+
+project:
+    title: Autocento of the breakfast table
+    class: autocento
+...
+
+## I. Eli {#eli}
+
+"Can one truly describe an emotion?"  Eli asked me over the walkie-talkie.
+He was in the bathroom, & had taken the walkie-talkie in with him absent-mindedly.
+I could hear sounds of his piss hitting the toilet water.
+
+"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 _Price is Right_ and texting Jon.
+
+Drew Carrey was doing his wrap-up speech on TV when Eli finally came out of his room, red puffy streaks covering his face.
+His eyes and nose were red too, which was almost festive against the pale green and white of the [wallpaper][].
+I had been laughing at the goofy costumes on the _Price is Right_ and the jokes Jon was texting me, but when Eli came out of the room I stopped and just looked at him as well as I could.
+He was staring at my right shoulder as he said, "Go home now."
+
+"What?"
+
+"[I said go home now][].
+I don't want you here anymore, because I just remembered I have someone coming over and I have to clean."
+
+"Look, Eli, I'm sorry---"
+
+"It doesn't have anything to do with you, I swear.
+Just go, okay?  [Go home now][]."
+
+I got up and tried to give him a hug but he withdrew from me sharply.
+So I walked around the coffee table as he sat down, not looking at me anymore, and stared at the blank TV.
+The blanket I had been sitting in was crumpled next to him like a dead bird.
+I opened my mouth but thought better of talking, and closed the door behind me slowly.
+
+## II. Dimorphic {#dimorphic .verse}
+
+[Oranges][].  Poison.  A compromise \
+between Mary & [Judas][].  Blue \
+baby blankets swaddling greedy lawyers.
+
+Can one truly describe an emotion?  \
+I cut my ankle with a razor blade.  \
+I can only go one at a time.  Humanity \
+has a seething mass of eels \
+for a brain, mating in the water so forcefully \
+that it could [drown you under the moon][].
+
+## III. Declaration of Poetry {#declaration-of-poetry}
+
+You have to go one line at a time, and you have to start on the first or second line.
+
+[Judas]: spittle.html
+[wallpaper]: wallpaper.html
+[I said go home now]: lappel-du-vide.html
+[Go home now]: riptide_memory.html
+[Oranges]: seasonal-affective-disorder.html
+[drown you under the moon]: moon-drowning.html
@@ -0,0 +1,28 @@
+---
+title: Stayed on the bus too long
+genre: verse
+
+id: stayed-on-the-bus
+toc: "Stayed on the bus too long"
+
+project:
+    title: Autocento of the breakfast table
+    class: autocento
+...
+
+| It was a [gamble][]
+| I lost---thought I could get closer
+| than the library, stayed
+| on past the admin building,
+| back down the hill to my beginning,
+| the driver's second-to-last stop.
+| [I have to walk now][],
+| through the wind and sun, past
+| [traffic][] moving merrily along
+| taking their own gambles
+| staying on or getting off
+| too soon.
+
+[gamble]: hard-game.html
+[I have to walk now]: lappel-du-vide.html
+[traffic]: theoceanoverflowswithcamels.html
@@ -0,0 +1,49 @@
+---
+title: Stump
+genre: prose
+
+id: stump
+toc: "Stump"
+
+project:
+    title: "Buildings out of air: Paul in the Woods"
+    class: paul
+    order: 34
+    next:
+    - title: Early
+      link: early
+    - title: Swear
+      link: swear
+    prev:
+    - title: Joke
+      link: joke
+    - title: Stagnant
+      link: stagnant
+...
+
+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.
+[There was no sound but his footsteps, his breathing.][]
+Instead of an axe, his right hand clutched his notebook.
+His left was in his pocket.
+A pencil perched behind his ear.
+
+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.
+
+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 squirrel][] 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.
+
+A crow called hoarsely to another, something important.
+Paul looked up but could not see the black bird in the [leaves of the trees][].
+He looked back down to the cream-colored pages of his notebook.
+
+He was surprised that he'd written _YOU CANNOT DISCOVER ART_.
+
+[There was no sound but his footsteps, his breathing.]: music-433.html
+[A squirrel]: squirrel.html
+[leaves of the trees]: death-zone.html
@@ -0,0 +1,43 @@
+---
+title: Swansong
+subtitle: alternate version
+genre: verse
+
+id: swansong-alt
+toc: "Swan song (alternate)"
+
+project:
+    title: Autocento of the breakfast table
+    class: autocento
+...
+
+| This poem is dry like [chapped lips][].
+| [It is hard as teeth][]---hear the tapping?
+| It is the swan song of beauty, as all
+| swan songs are.  [Reading][] it, you are
+| puzzled, perhaps a little repulsed.
+| Swans do not have teeth, nor do they sing.
+| A honking over the cliff is all
+| they can do, and that they do
+| badly.  You don't know where I'm going.
+| You want to tell me, [You are not you][].
+| [You are the air the swan walks on.][]
+| You are the fringe of the curtain
+| [that separates me from you][].  I say
+| that you are no longer the temple,
+| that you have been through [fire][]
+| and are now less than ash.  You are
+| the subtraction of yourself from
+| the world, [the air without a swan][].
+| Together, we are each other.  You
+| and I have both nothing and everything
+| at once, we own the world and nothing in it.
+
+[chapped lips]: time-looks-up-to-the-sky.html
+[It is hard as teeth]: no-nothing.html
+[Reading]: poetry-time.html
+[You are not you]: about-the-author.html
+[You are the air the swan walks on.]: swansong.html
+[that separates me from you]: elegyforanalternateself.html
+[fire]: fire.html
+[the air without a swan]: finding-the-lion.html
@@ -0,0 +1,39 @@
+---
+title: Swan song
+genre: verse
+
+id: swansong
+toc: "Swan song"
+
+project:
+    title: Elegies for alternate selves
+    class: elegies
+    order: 24
+    prev:
+    - title: The squirrel
+      link: squirrel
+    next:
+    - title: Telemarketer
+      link: telemarketer
+...
+
+| Swans fly overhead singing goodbye
+| to we [walkers of the earth][ithappened].  You point
+| to them in formation, you tell me
+| you are not you. [You are the air the swans
+| walk on][alt] as they journey like pilgrims
+| to a temple in the south.  A curtain
+| there separates me from you, swans
+| from the air they fly through.  I say
+| that you are no longer the temple,
+| that you have been through fire
+| and are now less than ash.  You are
+| a [mirror][] of me, the [air without a swan][trumpet].
+| Together, we are each other.  You
+| and I have both nothing and everything
+| at once.  We own the world and nothing in it.
+
+[ithappened]: howithappened.html
+[mirror]: moongone.html
+[trumpet]: deathstrumpet.html
+[alt]: swansong-alt.html
@@ -0,0 +1,64 @@
+---
+title: Swear
+genre: prose
+
+id: swear
+toc: "Swear"
+
+project:
+    title: "Buildings out of air: Paul in the Woods"
+    class: paul
+    order: 25
+    next:
+    - title: Options
+      link: options
+    - title: Tapestry
+      link: tapestry
+    prev:
+    - title: Reports
+      link: reports
+    - title: Stump
+      link: stump
+...
+
+> [EVERYTHING CHANGES OR EVERYTHING STAYS THE SAME][]
+>
+> First, a history: I was writing my
+> thoughts in a book.  I got a typewriter
+> and typing things in a book
+> became impossible.  I began typing
+> on 4x6 notecards.  I ran out of
+> ribbon in my typewriter.  I wrote
+> on the 4x6 notecards.  I bought a
+> new ribbon and new notecards.  Now
+> again I am typing on notecards.
+>
+> What have I been typing?
+> Thoughts, impressions maybe, a log
+> of changes to my mental state.  I
+> waited long enough and I began
+> recording them in the same way.  If
+> I wait longer the ribbon will run
+> out again and I'll write again, on
+> notecards or in my book.  The same
+> thoughts in different bodies.
+>
+> That's what it means, "Every
+> thing changes or everything stays
+> the same."  It might as well be
+> "and."  Local differences add up to
+> global identities.  It's a [hoop][],
+> right?  And we keep going around
+> and we think it's flat but it's
+> round like the Earth.
+
+
+Paul pushed his chair away from the [Writing Desk][] and stared at the notecard.
+He stood up, knocked his head on the lightbulb, swore.
+He pulled the notecard from his typewriter and crumpled it up with his left hand.
+With his right hand he reached in his pocket and pulled out his cigarettes.
+He put one in his mouth, threw the paper in the corner, grabbed his axe, went out into the woods.
+
+[EVERYTHING CHANGES OR EVERYTHING STAYS THE SAME]: planks.html
+[hoop]: ourobors_memory.html
+[Writing Desk]: finding-the-lion.html
@@ -0,0 +1,100 @@
+---
+title: Table of contents
+genre: table
+
+id: table_contents
+toc: "A table of contents"
+
+epigraph:
+    content: We are awash in the unseen and science has made us aware of the flood.
+    link: http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2013/11/05/243081116/dark-matter-eludes-capture-science-and-the-unseen
+
+project:
+    title: Stark Raving
+    class: stark
+    order: 1
+    next:
+    - title: Ouroboros of memory
+      link: ouroboros_memory
+    - title: The Big Dipper
+      link: big-dipper
+...
+
+--- ---------------------------------------- --- ------------------------------------
+ 4. [The look she gave me][]                  4. Half-hours in heaven are three times
+                                                 [that in hell][]
+
+ 5. [Not out of anger][]                      5. [Pay the toll][], mister, or nothing
+                                                 can get done
+
+ 6. [A desire to understand][]                6. [Misattributed][]
+
+ 7. [Seven syllables amble][]                 7. [Disassociated][]
+
+ 8. [To drink at the pond][]                  8. [Advice from a cereal box][]
+
+ 9. [Two fall in and drown][]                 9. [The challenges of][] a modern life
+
+10. [Odd-numbered ponies][]                  10. Probability and the American
+                                                 [Dream][]
+
+11. [Buck and Whinny in the moonlight][]     11. [Two friends throw dice][]
+
+12. [To die tomorrow][]                      12. [Fears of death][]
+
+13. [To be everywhere][]                     13. The [solipsist talks to God][]
+
+14. [All at one time: my motto][]            14. [A phone conversation][] following
+                                                 receipt of an ill-timed love letter
+
+15. [Of a perfect world][]                   15. Woody Allen at [the horse races][]
+
+16. [This morning the sun][]                 16. Whether you say [good morning][] or
+                                                 good night
+
+17. [Wandering through the window][]         17. A traveler [waiting on the mountain][]
+
+18. [Alights on my shoulder][]               18. The impenetrable object falls in
+                                                 [love][]
+
+                                              1. [Liquid messenger][]
+
+                                              2. [After a gate closes, dogs bark][]
+
+                                              3. [Finding old men at dusk][]
+
+--- --------------------------------------- ---- -----------------------------------
+
+[The look she gave me]: ouroboros_memory.html
+[Not out of anger]: lappel-du-vide.html
+[A desire to understand]: boy_bus.html
+[Seven syllables amble]: i-think-its-you.html
+[To drink at the pond]: initial-conditions.html
+[Two fall in and drown]: love-as-god.html
+[Odd-numbered ponies]: worse-looking-over.html
+[Buck and Whinny in the moonlight]: sixteenth-chapel.html
+[To die tomorrow]: last-bastion.html
+[To be everywhere]: amber-alert.html
+[All at one time: my motto]: exasperated.html
+[Of a perfect world]: death-zone.html
+[This morning the sun]: big-dipper.html
+[Wandering through the window]: poetry-time.html
+[Alights on my shoulder]: moon-drowning.html
+[Liquid messenger]: music-433.html
+[After a gate closes, dogs bark]: riptide_memory.html
+[Finding old men at dusk]: about-the-author.html
+[A phone conversation]: phone.html
+[that in hell]: telemarketer.html
+[Pay the toll]: no-nothing.html
+[Misattributed]: howithappened.html
+[Disassociated]: howtoread.html
+[Advice from a cereal box]: cereal.html
+[The challenges of]: call-me-aural-pleasure.html
+[Dream]: in-bed.html
+[Two friends throw dice]: deadman.html
+[Fears of death]: seasonal-affective-disorder.html
+[solipsist talks to God]: boar.html
+[the horse races]: one-hundred-lines.html
+[good morning]: big-dipper.html
+[waiting on the mountain]: mountain.html
+[love]: lovesong.html
@@ -0,0 +1,60 @@
+---
+title: Tapestry
+genre: prose
+
+id: tapestry
+toc: "Tapestry"
+
+project:
+    title: "Buildings out of air: Paul in the Woods"
+    class: paul
+    order: 17
+    next:
+    - title: Window
+      link: window
+    - title: Toilet
+      link: toilet
+    prev:
+    - title: Phone
+      link: phone
+    - title: Swear
+      link: swear
+...
+
+_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._
+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.
+
+The dictionary also had this to say about "hymn": that it was possibly related to the old Greek word for "[weave][]."
+"[Weave what][]" Paul wondered to himself.
+He wrote this down on a new notecard.
+_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._
+
+_Maybe she wove the tapestry for Odysseus.
+Maybe she wove it for herself.
+What did she weave it of?
+[Memory][], maybe?
+[Or dream][]?
+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._
+
+He wrote _**NOTES FOR A HYMN**_ at the top of this notecard.
+
+[weave]: likingthings.html
+[Weave what]: roughgloves.html
+[Memory]: ouroboros_memory.html
+[Or dream]: in-bed.html
@@ -0,0 +1,66 @@
+---
+title: Telemarketer
+genre: prose
+
+id: telemarketer
+toc: "Telemarketer"
+
+project:
+    title: Elegies for alternate selves
+    class: elegies
+    order: 25
+    prev:
+    - title: Swan song
+      link: swansong
+    next:
+    - title: We played those games too
+      link: weplayedthosegamestoo
+...
+
+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.
+
+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 [ocean][], 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.
+
+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 [eagle perched][] 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 [report][] covers explaining his script.
+When Larry made a call to a potential customer it always went the same way:
+
+"Hi, Mr/Mrs (customer's name).
+My name is Larry and I'm with (client's name), and was just wondering if I could have a minute of your time?"
+
+"Oh, no, sir; I don't want whatever it is you're selling."  (customer terminates call).
+
+Larry had only ever read the first line of the script on the wall.
+Sometimes he had an urge to read more of it, to be ready when a customer expressed interest in whatever it was Larry was selling, but something in him---he liked to think it was an actor's intuition that told him it was best to improvise, though he worried it was the futility of it---kept him from reading further into the script.
+So when Jane said, "Sure, I have nothing better to do," he was thrown completely off guard.
+
+"Um, alright Mrs ... Mrs. Loring, I was wondering---"
+
+"It's Ms, not Mrs.
+Em ess.
+Miz.
+No 'r,' Larry."
+She sounded patient, as if she were used to correcting people about the particulars of her title.
+But how often can that happen?
+Larry thought, and he was suddenly deeply confused.
+
+"Oh, sorry, ma'am, uh, Miz Loring, but I wanted to know whether you'd like to, ah, buy some..."
+Larry put his head in his hand and started twirling his hair in his finger, a nervous habit he'd had since childhood, and closed his eyes tightly.
+"Why don't you have anything better to do?"
+
+Immediately he knew it was the wrong question.
+Even before the silence on the other end moved past impatience and into stunned, Larry had a mini-drama written and staged within his mind: she would call customer service and complain loudly into the representative's ear.
+The rep would send a memo to the head of telemarketing requesting disciplinary action, and the head would delegate the action to Larry's immediate supervisor, David.
+David would saunter over to Larry's cubicle sometime within the next week, depending on when he got the memo and when he felt like crossing fifty feet of office space, and have one of what David liked to call "chats" but what Larry knew were lectures.
+After about half an hour of "chatting" David would give Larry a warning and ask him to come in for overtime to make up for the discretion, and walk back slowly to his office, making small talk with the cubicled workers on the way.
+The world suddenly felt too small for Larry, or he too big for it.
+
+Quietly, with the same patience but with a [bigger pain][], Jane said, "My husband just left me and I thought you could take my mind off of him for just a minute," and hung up.
+
+[ocean]: theoceanoverflowswithcamels.html
+[eagle perched]: mountain.html
+[bigger pain]: arspoetica.html
+[report]: reports.html
@@ -0,0 +1,45 @@
+---
+title: The night we met, I was out of my mind
+subtitle: or lying in the dark
+genre: verse
+
+id: the-night-we-met
+toc: "The night we met, I was out of my mind"
+
+project:
+    title: Autocento of the breakfast table
+    class: autocento
+...
+
+| My head is [full of fire][], my tongue swollen,
+| pregnant with all the things I should've said
+| but didn't.  Last night, we met each other
+| in the dark, remember?  You told me time was
+
+| pregnant with all things.  I should've said
+| something, to draw you out from your place
+| in the dark.  Remember, you told me time was
+| only an illusion, [and memory was][] only
+
+| something to draw.  You, out from your place,
+| I out from mine, that night, I believed in you.
+| Only illusion and memory were one, lying
+| [down on your couch][], through the night you drew
+
+| me out from mine.  That night, I believed in you
+| when you told me you loved me.  I lay
+| down on your couch.  Through the night, you drew
+| a picture of our [future together][].
+
+| When you told me you loved me, I lied
+| [in the dark][].  Remember, you told me time was
+| [a picture of our future][] together.
+| My head is full of fire, [my tongue swollen][].
+
+[my tongue swollen]: plant.html
+[a picture of our future]: last-passenger.html
+[in the dark]: apollo11.html
+[future together]: one-hundred-lines.html
+[down on your couch]: early.html
+[and memory was]: riptide_memory.html
+[full of fire]: found-typewriter-poem.html
@@ -0,0 +1,44 @@
+---
+title: The sea and the beach
+genre: verse
+
+id: the-sea_the-beach
+toc: "The sea and the beach"
+
+project:
+    title: Autocento of the breakfast table
+    class: autocento
+...
+
+| Waiting for a reading to start
+| when there's nobody coming anyway
+| is like waiting [for the tide][]
+| to make some meaning of the beach.
+
+| The sea doesn't know or care
+| what the beach even is, let alone
+| its cares or its troubles, its
+| little nagging under-the-skin annoyances
+| [that make the beach the beach][].
+
+| Sandworms, for example, or those crabs
+| with big pincers on one side
+| but not the other.  Those really get
+| the beach's gander up, but the sea
+| doesn't care.  The sea
+
+| only wants to [caress][] the beach
+| with its [soft arms][], to tell the beach
+| how much it's loved by the sea,
+| that complex of water, salt, and
+| the moon's gravity, the mercury
+| rising up and down slowly, like a [yawn][].
+
+| The sea only cares about itself.
+| The beach lays there and takes it.
+
+[for the tide]: cold-wind.html
+[that make the beach the beach]: real-writer.html
+[caress]: plant.html
+[soft arms]: something-simple.html
+[yawn]: serengeti.html
@@ -0,0 +1,43 @@
+---
+title: The ocean overflows with camels
+genre: verse
+
+id: theoceanoverflowswithcamels
+toc: "The ocean overflows with camels"
+
+project:
+    title: Elegies for alternate selves
+    class: elegies
+    order: 7
+    prev:
+    - title: Ars poetica
+      link: arspoetica
+    next:
+    - title: The boar
+      link: boar
+...
+
+| We found your [shirt][] deep in the dark water,
+| caught on the clothesline of sleeping pills.
+| Your head on the shore was streaming tears
+| like sleeves or the coronas of saints saved
+| from fire.  The burning bush began crying
+| like a child who misses his mother.  Traffic
+| slammed shut like an eye.  God's mean [left hook][]
+| knocked us out, and we began swimming.
+| Bruises bloomed like algae on a lake.
+| Your [father][] beat your chest and screamed
+| for someone to open a window.  The air
+| stopped breathing.  Fish clogged its gills.
+| Birds sang too loudly, trying to drown out
+| your father's cries, but all their sweetness
+| was not enough.  No polite noises will be made
+| anymore, he told us, clawing your breastbone.
+| He opened your heart to air again.  Camels
+| flowed from you both like water from the rock.
+| God spoke up, but nobody listened to him.
+| We hung you up on the line to dry.
+
+[shirt]: lovesong.html
+[left hook]: roughgloves.html
+[father]: angeltoabraham.html
@@ -0,0 +1,39 @@
+---
+title: Time looks up to the sky
+genre: verse
+
+id: time-looks-up-to-the-sky
+toc: "Time looks up to the sky"
+
+project:
+    title: Autocento of the breakfast table
+    class: autocento
+...
+
+| I wish I'd kissed you when I had the chance.
+| Your face hovering there, so near to mine,
+| your mouth pursed---what word was it you pronounced?
+
+| When I think about you, [something in my pants][]
+| tightens, and my thoughts run, and I realize
+| I should've kissed you when I had the chance.
+
+| I want that moment never to be past
+| like Keats's lovers on the grecian urn:
+| his mouth pursed, her figure turned to pronounce
+
+| her hips in ways that are not feminist.
+| But time strolls mildly on, not glancing at my
+| wish to kiss you when I had the chance,
+
+| whispered like a [beggar to a prince][]
+| outside his palace: time looks up to the sky,
+| purses his lips, and hears what I pronounce
+
+| but pays it little mind.  If he would just
+| turn back, bend down, and follow my design,
+| I would have kissed you when I had the chance,
+| as your mouth pursed and you pronounced goodbye.
+
+[something in my pants]: howithappened.html
+[beggar to a prince]: about-the-author.html
@@ -0,0 +1,39 @@
+---
+title: To Daniel
+subtitle: an elaboration of a previous comment
+genre: verse
+
+id: todaniel
+toc: "To Daniel"
+
+project:
+    title: Elegies for alternate selves
+    class: elegies
+    order: 27
+    prev:
+    - title: We played those games too
+      link: weplayedthosegamestoo
+    next:
+    - title: "Death's trumpet"
+      link: deathstrumpet
+...
+
+| There are more modern ideals of beauty
+| than yours, young padawan.  Jessica has
+| some assets, that I'll give you easily,
+| but in my women I prefer pizzazz.
+
+| I don't want to bring you down, or make you think
+| [that your perfected woman isn't so][trumpet].
+| It's just that, like Adam said, 2006
+| has come and gone.  What did she do
+
+| in that year anyway?  IMDB
+| has, surprisingly, none, though in '05
+| she's in four titles.  _Sin City_
+| I've never seen, although from many I've
+
+| heard it's good.  But it's still irrelevant---
+| no matter how comely, she lacks talent.
+
+[trumpet]: deathstrumpet.html
@@ -0,0 +1,39 @@
+---
+title: Toilet
+genre: prose
+
+id: toilet
+toc: "Toilet"
+
+project:
+    title: "Buildings out of air: Paul in the Woods"
+    class: paul
+    order: 11
+    next:
+    - title: Leg
+      link: leg
+    - title: Toothpaste
+      link: toothpaste
+    prev:
+    - title: Hands
+      link: hands
+    - title: Tapestry
+      link: tapestry
+...
+
+Paul only did his reading on the toilet.
+
+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."
+
+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 [notecard][] on the subject.
+
+He stopped to catch his breath.
+Reading it over, he realized he was completely wrong.
+"Paper is made from trees" he thought "and so is furniture."
+He had thought that ART and CRAFT were two separate enterprises but he realized in a flash that they were two sides of the same building.
+Were there other walls?
+
+[notecard]: treatise.html
@@ -0,0 +1,49 @@
+---
+title: Toothpaste
+genre: prose
+
+id: toothpaste
+toc: "Toothpaste"
+
+project:
+    title: "Buildings out of air: Paul in the Woods"
+    class: paul
+    order: 36
+    next:
+    - title: Father
+      link: father
+    - title: Treatise
+      link: treatise
+    prev:
+    - title: Early
+      link: early
+    - title: Toilet
+      link: toilet
+...
+
+He couldn't [find a shirt][] 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 [that peach][] he ate two weeks before.
+Another looked like toothpaste but he was paranoid it was something else.
+
+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 [Observation][] Paradox" he muttered to himself.
+
+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 [went red][] 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.
+
+[find a shirt]: no-nothing.html
+[that peach]: http://www.bartleby.com/198/1.html
+[Observation]: problems.html
+[went red]: statements-frag.html
@@ -0,0 +1,68 @@
+---
+title: Treatise
+genre: prose
+
+id: treatise
+toc: "Treatise"
+
+project:
+    title: "Buildings out of air: Paul in the Woods"
+    class: paul
+    order: 15
+    next:
+    - title: Phone
+      link: phone
+    - title: Underwear
+      link: underwear
+    prev:
+    - title: Hardware
+      link: hardware
+    - title: Toothpaste
+      link: toothpaste
+...
+
+> TREATISE ON LITERATURE AS "SPOOKY
+> ACTION FROM A DISTANCE"
+>
+> There is this thing called "spooky
+> action at a distance."  Einstein
+> mentioned it first I believe.  It
+> is about how two electrons can act
+> like they are right next to each
+> other although they are very far
+> away (lightyears even).  For a long
+> time this puzzled scientists until
+> someone (not Einstein) figured out
+> that maybe the universe is a
+> hologram or projection.  So what
+> appears to be very far apart in
+> the hologram might actually be
+> very close in the substrate
+> reality.
+>
+> I want to talk about this
+> effect in literature.  In literature
+> the writer writes words on a
+> substrate (paper) and later the
+> reader reads the same words off
+> the substrate.  Although the writer
+> and reader might be very far apart
+> from each other in time and space,
+> they experience the same effect
+> from reading the words.  Even the
+> writer reading his own words after
+> he has written them becomes a
+> reader and feels who he was at
+> that time, [like a ghost][].
+>
+> PROBLEMS:
+>
+> Maybe the substrate isn't
+> paper it's what the writing is
+> about.  [Where is the hologram][]?  Are
+> physics and literature comparable?
+> What if the universe isn't a
+> hologram what then?
+
+[like a ghost]: howtoread.html
+[Where is the hologram]: toilet.html
@@ -0,0 +1,46 @@
+---
+title: Underwear
+genre: prose
+
+id: underwear
+toc: "Underwear"
+
+project:
+    title: "Buildings out of air: Paul in the Woods"
+    class: paul
+    order: 3
+    next:
+    - title: Dream
+      link: dream
+    - title: Wallpaper
+      link: wallpaper
+    prev:
+    - title: Hymnal
+      link: hymnal
+    - title: Treatise
+      link: treatise
+...
+
+He dropped the penny in the dryer, turned it on, and turned around.
+"What" he called upstairs, pretending not to hear his mother's [question][] 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.
+
+"Did you get them" she asked when he opened the basement door to the kitchen.
+She was sitting at the table playing [dominoes][].
+"Get what" he asked.
+She peered at him and said "my underwear."
+
+"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, [crusty mayonnaise][] he'd seen already on the way down to switch his laundry over.
+"Paul" she said in that way that means [Look at me][].
+Paul [looked at her][].
+
+"You had to get them out of the dryer to put your clothes in.
+Where did you put them?"
+
+[question]: exasperated.html
+[dominoes]: phone.html
+[crusty mayonnaise]: riptide_memory.html
+[looked at her]: angeltoabraham.html
+[Look at me]: found-typewriter-poem.html
@@ -0,0 +1,29 @@
+---
+title: Walking in the rain
+genre: verse
+
+id: walking-in-the-rain
+toc: "Walking in the rain"
+
+project:
+    title: Autocento of the breakfast table
+    class: autocento
+...
+
+| I can walk through the rain, [that rare occurrence][]
+| and never be hit by a drop.  There is a space around me
+| that refuses to be [penetrated][] by weather of any kind
+| be it rain or snow or sunshine.  [Is it cold I hear you][]
+| asking in your voice soft as a breeze.  No it is not
+| [particularly cold][].  If I were to describe it as warm
+| [I would be lying as well][].  If I were to pretend I heard
+| you, far-off, mirage, breeze on the horizon, [no truth][]
+| would ever be said to have come from [my frozen lips][].
+
+[that rare occurrence]: collage-instrument.html
+[Is it cold I hear you]: seasonal-affective-disorder.html
+[particularly cold]: cold-wind.html
+[I would be lying as well]: todaniel.html
+[no truth]: no-nothing.html
+[my frozen lips]: swansong-alt.html
+[penetrated]: lovesong.html
@@ -0,0 +1,48 @@
+---
+title: Wallpaper
+genre: prose
+
+id: wallpaper
+toc: "Wallpaper"
+
+project:
+    title: "Buildings out of air: Paul in the Woods"
+    class: paul
+    order: 31
+    next:
+    - title: Punch
+      link: punch
+    - title: Window
+      link: window
+    prev:
+    - title: X-ray
+      link: x-ray
+    - title: Underwear
+      link: underwear
+...
+
+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 [TV in the next room][].
+Someone was cheering.
+They had just won a car.
+
+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.
+[The wall without the window on it, with the woodgrain wallpaper.][]
+"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."
+
+"[Do you really think anyone will want to read about you][do you]" she asked and walked out of the room.
+
+[TV in the next room]: statements-frag.html
+[The wall without the window on it, with the woodgrain wallpaper.]: in-bed.html
+[do you]: http://www.confederacyofdunces.com/
@@ -0,0 +1,43 @@
+---
+title: We played those games too
+genre: verse
+
+id: weplayedthosegamestoo
+toc: "We played those games too"
+
+project:
+    title: Elegies for alternate selves
+    class: elegies
+    order: 25
+    prev:
+    - title: Telemarketer
+      link: telemarketer
+    next:
+    - title: 'To Daniel: an elaboration'
+      link: todaniel
+...
+
+| I saw two Eskimo girls playing a game
+| blowing on each other's' vocal cords to make music
+| on the tundra.  I thought about how
+| once we played the same game
+| and the sounds blowing over the cords of our throats
+| was the same as a wind over frozen prairie.
+| We are the Eskimo girls who played
+| the game that night to keep ourselves warm.
+| I run my hands over [my daughter][]'s
+| voicebox as she hums a song
+| about a seal and about killing the seal and about
+| skinning it and rendering the blubber
+| into clear oil to light lamps.
+| I remember you are my lamp.  She remembers
+| you although you left before she arrived.
+| I can never tell her about you.
+| I will never be able to express that taste of your oil
+| as we [pushed our throats together][spittle].
+| I will never be able to say how
+| we share this blemish like conjoined twins.
+| I will fail you always to remember you.
+
+[my daughter]: and.html
+[spittle]: spittle.html
@@ -0,0 +1,94 @@
+---
+title: What we are made of
+genre: prose
+
+id: what-we-are-made-of
+toc: "What we are made of"
+
+project:
+    title: Autocento of the breakfast table
+    class: autocento
+...
+
+There is a cave just outside of Flagstaff made from ancient lava flows.
+We went inside it to where the darkness was a presence, it walked with us like a Christ, our footsteps fell dead on its walls.
+We learned what space felt like, and drowning, and being crushed, and going blind and deaf.
+We made up words to push the feeling away, to goad it like mockingbirds fighting hawks.
+We called it creepy to its face.
+It stared back dispassionate.
+
+In a bathroom I know there is a low thrumming that comes from the air ducts in the ceiling.
+It comforts me in the same way the smell of toilet-water calms my stomach, it is a sound so close to quiet, so close to the porcelain whiteness of the toilet, it pushes all other noise away.
+It is deafening quiet in its most real form, its most realizable form.
+
+The eggs on the floor, broken.
+Not the eggs in their journey to the floor or from the farm or from the hen on the farm, in the cage, glowing under fluorescent lights, its neighbors pressed to its body, rotten-smelling, grotesque.
+Not the fateful meeting with the floor.
+Not the long wait in darkness for the fluorescent dawn, cacophonous with pain and smell.
+None of this: the sunlight on the kitchen tile, the refrigerator softly humming, the eggs on the floor.
+The yolks glistening.
+
+I compose with music best.
+Under its meaninglessness [I am able to hear the silence][], a different meaninglessness, a somehow-deeper meaninglessness, the inverse of repeating a word until it is only sound.
+I can hear the taboo, the never-spoken, unacknowledged.
+I write to drown its sound, with the scratching of my pen.
+
+Silence lies underneath us all in the same way \
+the Nile has a river underneath ten times as large \
+(though this is an urban legend, apparently) \
+
+I threw a party in my dream and went to the bathroom, down a long dark hallway.
+I began to leave and noticed the bathtub full of stuffed animals in a heap.
+I examined them each in turn: an elephant, a tiger, each backgrounded by white tile.
+A warthog sat at the top of the heap.
+It caught my eye, I stared, it slowly winked, sneering.
+I reached out my finger and poked it, like the Pillsbury Doughboy.
+It responded in kind, chuckling.
+I woke with a start, terrified.
+It had made no sound.
+
+There are at least two kinds of silence, in the same way that there are at least two kinds of sadness.
+There is the silence of after, the staring, open-mouthed silence, the what-do-we-do-now silence.
+There is the silence of before, the still before rainfall, the just-woken-up.
+
+There is, now I'm thinking about it, the silence of between:
+the waiting room after the heart attack,
+after the phone call,
+after the hurried drive,
+the fast walking down hospital hallways,
+the finding the room,
+my family,
+their faces the silence of after,
+the TV quietly playing _Maurie_,
+the silence underneath that; the waiting room _before_ the doctor comes in,
+tells us what happened,
+the chances,
+before my parents drive down,
+their three long hours in the car,
+before we become the Hospital People for five days,
+camped-out,
+loud,
+cackling,
+crying,
+doing crosswords,
+watching her die.
+
+The silence of wondering whether we could've known each other better.
+
+The silence of the long trip we prefer to believe she's gone on, which is really the silence of her absence.
+
+The eggs on the floor, broken.
+
+In other dreams, all I've watched all of my family dying.
+My father I remember best: he was on the wicker rocking chair on the porch, staring at the back yard, the evergreen trees in a magic triangle, their branches intertwined.
+We were all on the porch, and I heard like a far-away bell the moment of his death.
+I woke up crying, my throat closed with grief.
+
+Leaving after the goodbye at the hotel, [realizing I won't be home][] until Christmas, that I'm on my own long trip, someone on the radio station I'm listening to in the car screws up transferring tapes, broadcasts dead air.
+The silence yawns like a chasm, lasting for years.
+[The wind picks me up and carries me away][], I see everything from a great height, I see the future.
+I'm waiting.
+
+[I am able to hear the silence]: music-433.html
+[realizing I won't be home]: lappel-du-vide.html
+[The wind picks me up and carries me away]: riptide_memory.html
@@ -0,0 +1,37 @@
+---
+title: When I'm sorry I wash dishes
+genre: verse
+
+id: when-im-sorry-i
+toc: "Whem I'm sorry I wash dishes"
+
+project:
+    title: Autocento of the breakfast table
+    class: autocento
+...
+
+| Your casserole dish takes the longest:
+| it has some baked-in crust from when you
+| cooked chicken last night.  Washing it
+| allows me to think about this poem's title
+| and the first few lines.  Now that I've
+| written them down, I've [forgotten the rest][].
+
+| While scraping at something with my finger-
+| nail, I catch myself wondering again whether
+| you'll thank me for washing your dishes.
+| I realize that this would defeat the point
+| of my gesture, that this has destroyed
+| all good thoughts I've had about saying
+
+| "I'm sorry."  This, [this is the reason][] why
+| I am always apologizing: because I never
+| mean it, because there is always, in [some
+| attic][attic], a thought roaming that says, insists:
+
+| "I've done nothing wrong, and I deserve
+| all I can take, and more than that."
+
+[this is the reason]: http://plagiarist.com/poetry/1703/
+[forgotten the rest]: elegyforanalternateself.html
+[attic]: real-writer.html
@@ -0,0 +1,59 @@
+---
+title: Window
+genre: prose
+
+id: window
+toc: "Window"
+
+project:
+    title: "Buildings out of air: Paul in the Woods"
+    class: paul
+    order: 18
+    next:
+    - title: Question
+      link: question
+    - title: Writing
+      link: writing
+    prev:
+    - title: Tapestry
+      link: tapestry
+    - title: Wallpaper
+      link: wallpaper
+...
+
+_**[HYMN 386: JOKES][]**_
+
+_"[Tell us a joke][]" 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, [his bright red hair][].
+His nose becomes redder in the cold.
+Hours pass.
+All but the most dedicated of joke listeners leave him to rot ~~for all they may care~~._
+
+_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 ~~"Thank you."~~
+He vanishes from the clearing.
+The last joke listener sits on the log and looks up at the sky.
+[The moon is full.][]
+The world creaks on its axis._
+
+Paul looked up to the space on the wall where a window should be.
+The shadow of his face wavered in the candle light.
+He looked back down at the card he'd been writing on.
+He read the card.
+He crossed out the _for all they may care_ in the first paragraph, and _"Thank you"_ from the second one.
+"[What could he say][]" he thought to himself.
+"What could he possibly say to her."
+He went outside to clear his head with a cigarette.
+He took his axe with him this time.
+
+[Tell us a joke]: joke.html
+[HYMN 386: JOKES]: hymnal.html
+[his bright red hair]: ronaldmcdonald.html
+[The moon is full.]: moon-drowning.html
+[What could he say]: elegyforanalternateself.html
@@ -0,0 +1,55 @@
+---
+title: Words and their irritable reaching
+genre: prose
+
+id: words-irritable-reaching
+toc: "Words and their irritable reaching"
+
+project:
+    title: Autocento of the breakfast table
+    class: autocento
+...
+
+Somewhere I remember reading advice for beginning writers not to show their work to anyone, at least that in the early stages.
+The author argued that it took all of the power out of the idea, like a pressure-release valve, before any of that creative power got to be applied to the page.
+It made me think of "[Meditation at Legunitas][]," when Hass writes "that each particular erases / the luminous clarity of a general idea."
+As a self-confessed General Idea person, I identify with the remark: it does seem as though, no matter how lofty the idea I originally have for a poem, once I sit down to write the thing I quickly get bogged down in the details, the particulars.
+I guess the writer of that lost article must work the same way, leading to their advice: if the "luminous clarity of a general idea" is so fragile that just beginning to write it down ruins it somehow, _telling_ people about it is even worse.
+
+But back to that Robert Hass poem: while he does say that thing about the "luminous clarity of a general idea," and he adds to it that "[a word is elegy][] to what it signifies," his tone is lightly chiding this philosophy.
+He opens his poem with "All the new thinking is about loss.  / In this it resembles all the old thinking," which to my mind lampoons both the new and the old thinking for not having anything new, ultimately, to say.
+He attributes these thoughts to a friend, whose voice carried "a thin wire of grief, a tone / almost querulous" about that loss of luminous clarity.
+The speaker of Hass's poem remembers a woman he made love to, once, and this image takes over the poem in all its specificity, from "her small shoulders" to his "childhood river / with its island willows," to "the way her hands dismantled bread."
+
+Even in disproving his friend's remarks through his imagery, the speaker of "Meditation at Legunitas" admits that "It hardly had to do with her"---and here is the heart of what Hass is saying about poetry.
+A poem hardly has to do with what it's written about, on the surface level; as Richard Hugo says it in [a famous essay][], a poem has a "triggering subject" and it has a "real or generated subject," which for Hugo in "Meditation at Legunitas" is something about the way that not only general ideas, but particulars, such as the body or hands or "the thing her father said that hurt her," which is such a beautiful generality that is somehow also a particular truth, are luminous to poetry and to life-as-lived.
+The philosophers can say what they want, but we experience the world bodily and particularly to ourselves.
+
+There's still a problem with language, however, to which Hass speaks by the end of his poem, with those repetitions of "blackberry, blackberry, blackberry," in that, as Jack Gilbert says in his poem "[The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart][]," "How astonishing it is that language can almost mean, / but frightening that it does not quite."
+There is still that "[irritable reaching][] after fact & reason" that language, as communication, requires---I think Keats would agree that he wrote about a near-unattainable ideal in his letter that only Shakespeare and maybe Coleridge and a few others could achieve, this "Negative Capability."
+Gilbert furthers Keats in asserting that no matter what we write, "the words / Get it wrong," that utterance is itself that irritable reaching.
+
+In Gilbert's poem, though, he does reach after something.
+In the second half of the poem he begins to imagine what the "mysterious Sumerian tablets" could be as poetry, instead of just "business records:"
+
+> [...] My joy is the same as twelve \
+> Ethiopian goats standing in the morning light. \
+> O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper, \
+> as grand as ripe barley under the wind's labor. \
+> Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts \
+> of long-fibered Egyptian cotton.  My love is a hundred \
+> pitchers of honey.  Shiploads of thuya are what \
+> my body wants to say to your body.  Giraffes are this \
+> desire in the dark.
+
+This is my favorite part of the poem, and I think it's because Gilbert, like Hass, reaches for the specific in the general; he brings huge ideas like the Lord or Love or Joy into the specific images of salt, copper, or honey, or like he says at the end of his poem: "What we feel most has / no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses and birds."
+This, ultimately, is what Keats was getting at, and Hugo, too: that the real subject of any poetry is not capturable in the words of the poem, but that rather a poem speaks around its subject.
+To be honest, all [art][] may do this.
+What sets a poem apart is its honesty about that fact.
+
+[Meditation at Legunitas]: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/177014
+[a word is elegy]: words-meaning.html
+[a famous essay]: http://ualr.edu/rmburns/RB/hugosubj.html
+[The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart]: http://www.smith.edu/poetrycenter/poets/theforgottendialect.html
+[irritable reaching]: http://www.mrbauld.com/negcap.html
+[art]: art.html
@@ -0,0 +1,43 @@
+---
+title: Words and meaning
+genre: prose
+
+id: words-meaning
+toc: "Words and meaning"
+
+project:
+    title: Elegies for alternate selves
+    class: elegies
+    order: 4
+    prev:
+    - title: And
+      link: and
+    next:
+    - title: On seeing the panorama of the Apollo 11 landing site
+      link: apollo11
+...
+
+"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.
+
+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 [disingenuous][].
+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 [inverse of everything][] is not.
+
+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.  [It is][].
+
+[disingenuous]: likingthings.html
+[inverse of everything]: i-am.html
+[It is]: arspoetica.html
@@ -0,0 +1,49 @@
+---
+title: Worse looking over
+genre: verse
+
+id: worse-looking-over
+toc: "Worse looking over"
+
+project:
+    title: Stark Raving
+    class: stark
+    order: 4
+    next:
+    - title: The Sixteenth Chapel
+      link: sixteenth-chapel
+    - title: Something about the nature of poetry and time
+      link: poetry-time
+    prev:
+    - title: Love as God
+      link: love-as-god
+    - title: The moon is drowning
+      link: moon-drowning
+...
+
+| [The radio is screaming the man][]
+| on the radio will not be quiet he is
+| pushed far into the background
+| while some NPR talkers murmur over
+| his screaming he lost something
+| very important.  He says it over
+| and over but they do not listen
+| they think of their children at home
+| lying [in bed][] dreaming sweet
+| childhood one of them is staying over
+| at a friend's house they are staying
+| up late they never want it to be over
+| not like the man.  His life on the radio
+| will be the only one he ever has
+| his life it is wasted he's being spoken over
+| such pain is in his voice.  I wish you
+| could hear it.  [It's something never over][].
+| Suffering everywhere always and over it
+| the same serene murmur of the comfortable
+| distracted or worse looking over
+| the [shoulder][] and quietly looking away.
+
+[The radio is screaming the man]: moon-drowning.html
+[in bed]: in-bed.html
+[It's something never over]: nothing-is-ever-over.html
+[shoulder]: last-passenger.html
@@ -0,0 +1,41 @@
+---
+title: Writing
+genre: prose
+
+id: writing
+toc: "Writing"
+
+project:
+    title: "Buildings out of air: Paul in the Woods"
+    class: paul
+    order: 7
+    next:
+    - title: Notes
+      link: notes
+    - title: X-ray
+      link: x-ray
+    prev:
+    - title: Leaf
+      link: leaf
+    - title: Window
+      link: window
+...
+
+He sat down at his writing desk and removed his new pen from its plastic wrapping.
+He remembered how to fill it from _[The View from Saturday][]_, which he'd read as a kid.
+It had been one of his favorite books.
+He remembered the [heart][] puzzle they completed, the origin of the word "posh," and most of all his fourth-grade teacher [Ms. (Mrs? He could never remember)][ms] Samovar.
+He smiled as he opened the lid on the ink well he'd just bought.
+
+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.
+
+As he [swore][], stood up and away from the table, and went into the house proper for paper towels, he resolved to buy a typewriter.
+
+[ms]: telemarketer.html
+[The View from Saturday]: http://www.elkonigsburg.com/
+[swore]: swear.html
+[heart]: swansong-alt.html
@@ -0,0 +1,46 @@
+---
+title: X-ray
+genre: prose
+
+id: x-ray
+toc: "X-ray"
+
+project:
+    title: "Buildings out of air: Paul in the Woods"
+    class: paul
+    order: 30
+    next:
+    - title: Wallpaper
+      link: wallpaper
+    - title: Yellow
+      link: yellow
+    prev:
+    - title: Yellow
+      link: yellow
+    - title: Writing
+      link: writing
+...
+
+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 ~~sound well~~ the sound.
+
+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."
+
+She drove him to the hospital in the car.
+[The radio stayed off the entire way.][]
+Paul wanted to turn it on but ~~he didn't want~~ the desire not to annoy his mother was stronger.
+They drove in silence.
+
+At the hospital after the X-rays and stitching and pain medication prescription the doctor said "You got lucky, son.
+If that axe had hit a half-inch lower you'd [have lost your hand][].
+You won't get full mobility back because we had to tie the tendons, but with therapy you should be able to work it pretty well."
+
+On the drive back home all he could think was that he was glad he didn't hit his writing hand.
+
+[The radio stayed off the entire way.]: worse-looking-over.html
+[have lost your hand]: roughgloves.html
@@ -0,0 +1,44 @@
+---
+title: Yellow
+genre: prose
+
+id: yellow
+toc: "Yellow"
+
+project:
+    title: "Buildings out of air: Paul in the Woods"
+    class: paul
+    order: 29
+    next:
+    - title: X-ray
+      link: x-ray
+    prev:
+    - title: Building
+      link: building
+    - title: X-ray
+      link: x-ray
+...
+
+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 [refrigerator][], 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.
+
+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.
+
+"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."
+
+[refrigerator]: feedingtheraven.html