On Being Often Lost

Homeless, that's the work of another class!

"A bacchanalia with any of the thin yellow papers or the mint could be patient. There could be tears from everything that usually lays down between the tall machines where this sex won't be heard and it can't be confused for being as wet or uncomfortable as it really is." Crunchy with street salt, my name’s not so amazing as it could be. Hello it’s me sitting here in Sophies’ Busy Bee. I don’t have to look up, I can’t even try to. My eyes are being held by Kobo Abe’s novel, Box Man. As it goes along, I’m transcribing it, word for word into this ringed notebook from the bodega where I buy my beer. Many have written about this book’s appeal but I’m not essaying about any of the resounding metaphors of that Kobo’s teased from post war reality. I’m trying to consume this book as literally as I can. Not out of identification with the protagonist’s isolation, so much as it’s glorification in iconic home decorating sense. The loving way in which Kobo describes the box and its interior made me wild with the desire to hang curtains and make shift colostomy bags on the interior of every surface I saw.


Taking acid in Ypsilanti and listening to Throbbing Gristle, there was something about the donuts and the coffee around 6 that morning. The cops at the counter bummed us some cigarettes and we walked back home. Normal was something we had been trying to build from the complicated things that the others had left behind. Our diet was just the hungry that was left after the angels took our spoons. Instead, our diet would be the lame turds and dust that we would make until we met our own little kids. We would be the prairie at night and our system, our language was the quiet of the grass. The whisper of it being a strong that’s amaze-balls.


From someone's longish account of floating by quietly. Siply they've said, she was laying there. Her wings were folded in and her toes had become beaded as if from extreme cold. 303 West Straight St. right inside of this great state of Here as its shadows cast. In 1885, the same year that Mark Twain published the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn there was a slow French boat delivering the Statue of Liberty to New York City. In Chicago, there was a skyscraper being built while the Federal Government was making it illegal to practice polygamy or plural marriage.


Goodbye Anna Siply, your clock begun in Ireland, as a nunly nun with many responsibilities among those folk you choose divestment. Among the cascade of tumbling wooden fences, through the ownership of so many days, feeling huddled and trapped. While your neighbors were working to be parsed like the old seconds that are tossed for dollars on the candy, you sailed away.


"What do you think of Proverbs, the sayings of the wise?"


"It's wet and we should move between these doors?" Anne say’s, “We can both lie on this plankbed and we'll soon be together with peace.”


"That's not where we're at, not at all," he answers, "we're nearer this end than to thee!" His kettle sputters. "More pens than faith, that's what I've been saying. When I was a little shorter, my folks would take me around the corner. The big blue episcopal church was next to the run down lot with the trailers. Then a tornado rolled around on it until the church left blue kindling everywhere. Afterwards this shit eating guy is walking around. He lived inside one of those trailers, I'm guessing. He sees me and points to his garden. "Look at that," he's yelling, "the corn’s higher than the church now!"


To be consumed as a complete moment than as a photo of this painting, one that's still in the progress of tasting itself as if it's a streaky mess whose layers are too thin to navigate its own too hot or too cold bits. Instead, this mess turns it's reflexive eye backwards and it chooses to romp in the deviousness of early modernity as that code is itself cooling into something that will become slightly more sleek as it gasps, irony irony. There is no longer an object, nor a proper state for such as this. It's just a heavy whomp stuck in a stateless place between the seconds where it's been verified by a cell phone for sharing among the teens whose teens and other simple folk wield power. Is that punk enough? For sure, my eyes have worn Betty better."