When I was talking to you earlier today
I accidentally slipped
ended up behind a wall.

The wall was my face
and then it did the being there
with you
for me.

Now, for me, saying a face was a wall
evokes the dissociative effects
of a bad head cold. That’s really not what I’m talking about though.

I guess the head cold
could be a parallel analogy

but it’s too literal.
Nothing literal works here.
So that’s what happened.

I was no longer doing
what we’d been thinking of as talking
but instead was doing watching.

I watched

and the thinking-of rules were evident.
The game-and-ritual rules were evident.

Here, maybe this will do it: try and imagine
someone dancing
full costume
a ceremonial dance
full of meaningful gestures.

Now imagine their thoughts in that moment,
and the same-timeness of those thoughts
with what you can see,
with their eyes shooting significantly back and forth,
with the slow-rising knee,
with the limbs
in one-minded, immaculate accord
with the shifting tempos,

and the severance of the two
itself likewise simultaneous.

Does this work?
Maybe not.
But I’ve been watching
while you passed the ones
going away from you on the street
when you recognized instantly and accidentally
not only
the familiar
methodological body
but the familiar
arbitrary mind,
like the gooey insides of some strange
spotted shell
that don’t repulse
but rather remind you
of the taste of warm milk,
of being awake before your parents,
and the light at that time that you notice now
only in memory,
of original deviances
the meaning of which you notice
only in memory.
I know it happens. I saw you.
You put your ear to the shell
before you could even think about it
out of the fear of forgetting anything.

You put your ear to the crack in the wall
where your confidant has whispered the nights away.
This time a worm crawls into it
and your powers of perception
immediately become
inconceivably greater.

When I was talking to you
earlier today
I slipped behind a wall
and your hair was brown
and cut into a mullet
and your eyes were brown
and your face had yet again changed shape
because perhaps you’d been
limiting your nutrition again,
and your brown eyes are looking at me
like someone trying to make out the lettering
on a street-sign that’s too far off.
Doesn’t matter your vision’s 20 20.
We’re trying not to be literal here.

The question is
what can I mean to you?

but that’s not my question.

The question is
where are we going together?
but now
what looked like a street-sign
pointing to your yearning exploded
is, on closer look, just an advertisement
for someone else’s life.

When we were talking earlier
I noticed you’d really made your hair
into a kinda severe mullet
just like you said you wanted. It reminded me
of something, and right in front of you
I went down instantly
inside.

That morning when I rode up the road
with the skinhead boy
in his pickup. Windy road by cliffs
Water to the left. He had dense blue eyes
and the devil’s numbers burned into his left arm.
Told me of the death-magnetism
of the bridge we were crossing:
car and human parts
wrecked below us on the cliffs,
equal parts jumpers and crashes.
As a kid he would come awake at night
alone on the bridge, his clothes
hung over the branches of the trees
behind him on the way down from his house,
at the hour of non-distinction
between the water and sky
a tiny pale body.

Certainly the rocks were jagged.
Certainly there are
the bridge rules
and the stories of their origin.


Skinhead boy says we can all make up origin stories.
Take the mullet- it’s a thing now,
but where the fuck did it come from?
So I say some guy’s hair was getting in his way at work,
but his girl loved that long hair,
liked to pull it when they were fucking
or whatever
so she just grabbed a handful at the front
where it hung over his eyes, you know?
and just chopped that off
but kept the back.

Origin story. The first mullet.

Origin story: The fantasy of drowning contently:

When we were talking
earlier today
the eyes of your pale body looked for me and asked my rules
as if they could be yours too.