i want all of this to mean something.
pray to a bad religion. call a number until the dialtone, repeatedly. perhaps the receiver is on the other end, will pick up the phone, can finally hear you. renounce the gods. they weren’t listening. attention as an act of desperation. cannot fault gravity, trying its hardest to perform a thankless job. keeps you here, still—doesn’t it? keep close company among sunk stones, lofty deadweights.
wake up, scald some tea leaves, wonder if divination can pour its heart out at the bottom of an empty cup. who tends to your church? remember, there used to be a cathedral here before the ramparts raised along the banks. it used to be a sightly thing, all that verdant greenery. now, how do you tend to a place so overdefended it forgot the weaknesses in its bones. commons, made inaccessible. inquire how might anything grow in the grey.
you exist to me, and that’s the worst thing i’ve ever heard. in the fogged-up mirrors of my periphery, in the ghastly sharp shiny fragments of my confessions—splinters lodged in the fleshy underfoot. notice: this all takes up space. one molecule bonded with another, scaffolded synchrony, vibrating at scarcely detectible frequencies; does not know how to do anything but hold itself together. was never asked for more.
and soon you’ll say i exist too much.
stuff self-sacrifice into a yawning mouth, heed its warning for once. slake the thirst of indifference with a faithless promise. half-light slants through the blackout curtains, arrives with fresh covenants. take a long walk outside, suppose you will have it all figured out. no more than than a shattered figurine, porcelain dust strewn on the roadway. sit down, the day’s not over yet.
what the day miscarries
the last thing i read was a poetry collection on a train in southern taiwan. i keep mining the notes from that mid-april train and trying to coax some sense out of the scrawls. i’ve had “you exist to me” as a phrase in the drafts for ages (say that out loud, such a weighty thing; doesn’t even know its own power). the days have felt torturously long recently so this piece is a little long and discursive—it’s all runoff.