Lately I have not been feeling myself. I walk around like a figure missing its ground. I see a braid of smoke a hand passes through and envy hands, how smoke stays on skin, the faint hairs of a cheek a hand brushes against. Used to be enough to be the blown engine of a VW outside of Durango, whiskey we killed watching our father die, a bad painting I loved because our mother loved bad paintings, without irony. Lead sinkers in the gray bay of self— There! I’d say, strapped to the mast of a tall ship in a Turner painting, or a grip dangling from the center pole of a circus tent above a troupe of dachshunds trying to find the tiny pedals of tricycles. I collected myself like I was vying to be the last pawn shop in New Jersey. Now I am not even a whir of gnats on a dirt road, a threadbare cloud on a ridge line, the steam riding off an old man stepping out of a sauna. Days nothing seems to tie me to me. The more I live, the more the rucksack lightens, the more I can’t find myself in the mirror of the world, and roam storefronts as if I have misplaced myself. When I was a kid, I used to keep a Pringles can filled with volcano rocks someone once sold as Apache Tears, one weird-ass way of marketing pain. Gone now, as the name of the boy I bailed out for stealing CDs from Walmart for the girl he crushed on. Which is not really a crime I explained to the cops. The girl loved Stevie Nicks so much I found her stoned under blackberry bramble, listening to Landslide on a Walkman. Perhaps it matters to say they were Apache or Pueblo, Inde or Kewa, that they were minor thieves flung far from home. Perhaps all they wanted was the ground inside each other. But even as I say Landslide, Walkman, I feel the scree of words, the pawn shop emptying out. The things that made me are ether now, as clear as those who went and died and took what mattered—bodies, a joke, a late meal that wove itself into morning— as if they had packed for the afterlife. And empty and whole and empty, the air inside me tastes like leaving, and leaving tastes like rain that never comes. Which I love like breath on a window, like someone else drawing a heart, a face, a pleasure in the taking. No wonder, I am marveling over the demo crew slaying each other: Fuck wad, lug nut, waste of skin— Cuts, we used to call them, nicking wing, heel, gutting into laughter. Then, tender tender, as one with angels or dogs, where the wound is transom, the words hold them to the ground, and I am whatever hovers when they go.
"A complete and original copy of Shakespeare's very first printed collection of plays set a record Wednesday when it was auctioned off at just under $10 million. This was the first time in almost two decades a copy had hit the market. Referred to as the First Folio, the collection was published in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare's death."
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“Is there an objective world? One of the older, modern philosophical questions. Yes, well….yes and no, is my answer to that question and my poetry’s answer. Whatever objective world there may be, I have only limited access to it as it does to me. What is most real abides not in an independent, verifiable place outside myself nor somewhere hidden deep inside me; rather, what is most real grows in the meeting place."
