We wake to the world still turning, the business below the proscenium, the sky projected on the scrim. The routine written on the windshields, the secrets scrawled across our faces. The story carries over, some vaguely unsatisfying reminder from an equation we never quite figure out. Ancestors tales skewed hard to modern attention spans, most of identity the operant of intermittent reinforcement. It was once so that it might be again, it wasn’t so it may be yet, and the numbers fall and fall. Somehow the light got left on. The flickering between the frames, the candle always burning.
So you sleep with the windows open. You drowse in your skin while the moon looks in. So you scroll down screens or sort through messages, living in this memory that’s never at rest. Awake to witness shapes full of intention, transgressors made of trousers and trunks, this restless grasping at the strings. The moment always vividly missed, extinguished in the tangle of sense and cognition, the monkey thinking it’s a joke teasing such sharp swift teeth. Dashed against this continuity, the discovery at the borders of being, this name full of dreadful wonder.
It’s there like the weather, the patina on the bronze Buddha in the garden, the rust gathering at the hinges on the gate. These slow fires and sudden conflagrations, the spark before the blaze. Synapses busy ticking away at the plot and the fabric, bellyfuls of hard hungers and happenstance. Here and now again and again, the dull report of the drum machine, the metronome of the missing moment. This light the blazing into atmosphere, every measure a rate of oxidation. Each of us a fire started by a want in the world.
