investigation of self IV: intangible

investigation of self III: tangible

i dream of touching myself

feeling soft skin

and believing i am here

the sweet spot

the place of transition/the sweet spot between being and non-being

as night comes on

in the dream

investigation of self II: value

case a.

case b.

room to breathe

what remains

mostly i spend time appraising the abandoned house, what it is, what it once was, what it might become and then behind me quietly existing and asking for nothing, i discover the branch with leaves and the boot.  how often do we miss these things? the house seems so formidable but what of the trees that surround the house? what of the man who once walked through?

i want to put on the boot and do important work.  i want to stand like a tree and be - do important work.  instead i take the photograph and leave.

***
The Sweatshirt


it is 8 years since we buried my father and i am crossing a threshold, my new language rumbling, plate tectonics between my slim jaws that beg, come back and see me grow.  there is a honey mustard sweatshirt in my mother's drawers.  once it wore his body.  could he even have begun to imagine in the meat of his mind that one day i would bud breasts and wear it?  i suppose he wore it when he drank beer and smelled his strange and specific mash of aftershave and cow shit.  i press baby powder scented secret into my newly stinging pits and pull on his sweatshirt, my breasts barely discernible beneath the flaking emblems on my chest.  in the mirror i appraise the dull reproduction of his pale blue eyes on my own face and smile; directly through his absence i ripen.

investigation of the self: location

 case a.

case b.

what i'll never know because of the nature of footprints

i learn who i am in retrospect always catching up with myself god i walk so quickly and who knew that corner was going to be there and what then what after what when my foot has already passed the threshold this i lament that it will be too late.

anything might happen

anything might happen at any time

anything

anything might happen at any time

anything ~   anything!

even the moon can be written upon

as familiar as the rock upon me like a chest is and the trees bearing down on me

as familiar, 
this bare page breathing, 
come~

we meet the new day in prayer

this does not mean that we are dumbly happy

this means that we are aware

it is complicated

what faith is this structure?

i tell you this house was built in 1879.  i tell you the man who built this house, a man with dirty blond hair swiped off to the side, a sturdy jaw and freckles still, loved a woman before, much earlier, 1867, and she died.  she died young.  she had long brown hair that twisted on her chest, matted and crude, so far from what it once was as she labored for breath.  what she had was something that deteriorated her flesh, consumed her body.  as she was living she was dying, even then as he sat beside her, spoke with her, held her hand, even then the structure of her was leaving.  

 you tell me how, after this, a man has faith to wake up in the morning, to brush his teeth, his hair, eat a piece of toast.  you tell me how a man has faith after this to pick up a piece of wood, a hammer, a nail, to build a house.   you tell me how he falls in love again.

you tell me how any one of us has faith.

and yet we do.  

we have to, or what are we?

wall, another investigation into consciousness

self examination

the frozen swamp

while the world sleeps

outside the dirty windows
the earth moves
like a thought that forms
and unforms
and forms again
before it thinks a word
as words are water weeping
small trickles and tiny skin vibrations
sensations of the mind
lugubrious passionate nothings
but this is not sadness
it's ultra grief so hot it's cold
like when sensations at the faucet are what
and when we nearly die or cry or
we are maybe almost laughing
but mouths are gone like earthworms
and we shift again
the earth us all and nothing
just beyond the shutter of the eye

i am here

the tree, the tree is here

i, i am, too 

(i think) 

but without root