What is it that’s changed
upon ingestion
of three-quarters
of this cake donut
I’m eating?
Was it just a metabolic thing?
The fact that I’ve been eating too lightly
and drinking too heavily?
Or is it something to do
with my being alone?
That explanation must preclude
the cake donut, the metabolic theory
that I woke from the dream this morning
to something untouchable
in each specific sense,
woke to my body specifically
and the body’s adjectives
shriveled uselessly into themselves,
chunks of the world
in the world
without origin or context.
(this last most apt phrase’s being stolen
is, of course, totally appropriate)

or in terms of memory: the city lay down

off the mountain, to our left, a spatter of glint
in the dark like wet grass in the too-bright
and you’re at the right angle
for seeing spectrums
in simple happening.
Gatlinburg, my grandfather says
and points a leather finger
down through the dark
at the patch of lights
off the mountain-
the one we’re walking towards,
that I’m trying to make you see
as a wet field
in the slant-hour of the morning
because I think that image
may have something to do
with the untouchability feeling
and maybe the naming of those lights
and our walking towards them
has something to do
with eating the cake donut,
with bringing the out in
and changing the world
inside my stomach.

Are you not seeing it? Makes sense.
I’m forgetting the main distinction I was banking on.

Do we at least agree on the Like Rules?
maybe the likes aren’t meant to operate
on all these axes at once:
real night
imagined morning,
real town in Tennessee
imagined glint of leaves of grass.

What a fancy philosopher once said about Tigers in India
might apply here:
(the same friend who said
the thing about the chunks
showed me this, of course)
“There are two kinds of Tiger Rules”

Thus: Gatlinburg: the patchy weeds and floral stubble
growing on the island in the middle
of a big two-way road in Louisiana

Thus: Los Angeles: my each untouchable sight this morning
before ingestion of three-quarters
of this cake donut

Thus: A tiger in India: the words a tiger in India

This is something that’s always been despite constant misrecollection
of the rules that constitute it

: the cake donut conditional on you this morning

or

: conditional now and always
and so always as it has been exactly: alchemical.

: that is, there are no Tape Rules.