I don’t pray but imagine myself in prayer, across the room
I look at myself where my ghost double is bargaining, making
what I’m sure is a good offer, a good trade. I want to assassinate
a prodigious musician in broad daylight and take his place.
If I can be casual, I’ll say that now the day is done with me
and I will take my leave from it. How quickly I feel myself alien
when left to my devices and an image occurs to me of taking
this skin of mine off like a wetsuit and hanging it fireside.
I imagine how if I had a small child, I would put her to bed like a
shipwreck below me I saw through clear water. Where in all of this
howling — a deep contempt for time. All of the spirits and haunts in
this room are speaking to me, admonishing me to go. The sound of some
unnatural music piped in on little wires — What I need you to do
for me is to resist the impulse for me. The problem with earth is that there
are things here that evoke too much pleasure — so much that they
stop us in our tracks — that they create fanatics and zealots
and sick freaks and deviants. Any real god would never have left
this type of thing just laying around you can be sure of it.
I think of a gray place with you in it where we found the same
jagged little rock once and then we found it again without searching.
It was there and it was searching for us, you know, as stone tends
to do as anywhere you fall there is a stone to catch you in its cold mouth.
It’s still there you know and we could find it again if they gave us the time.
Every kind of winter animal made a pass through the snow and one
kind of creature fought the other and was struck and buried
and each god knew their work on earth was complete for a season
and each creature who won basked in the bright future it would
build for its beautiful children and even with no language or
numbers or symbols of any kind, each violent and wild animal
knows what each small pleasure costs. Hang me, I said – dead,
in a black forest, discussing payment for the right eye and for the left eye,
a dark ocean alongside it, the whole thing in crisis.
— a black ocean, a new ocean.