I wrote a story but it was too long. I lugged it from friend to friend I wasted all my gas. They would see the story's length and the first thing they said was to cut it down, a line here, one there, it doesn't really matter, it's a story, we can know that in fewer lines, what does it say, it must include the whole history of a civilization, including dates, to be written in such a drawn-out way. So in place of the story, which I've shelved, I offer you this story about the story, as an advertisement, as a precaution.
In handling late-comers, the doorman is so strict, he sits them dog-style, upon benches, against walls; they never come late again, but always stare, cage-like, at him.
If I rub my tongue along my teeth once, I play with them all day; otherwise, it's as if they're not there.
Mountains are the same.
How long has it been since you've panted::::saying, "Forever?"
Clear blue or grayed, sheet-glass or textured, booming or muffled, swelling or flattened, warm or cooled, soothing or maddened, inviting or alerted, she will be ours, the surface of her fears parted depths entered pushing us pushing in till Fear breathes water::::our gills burst through near behind below our ears the small flaps of flesh flapping until muscled and flapping grow wide and stiff for flapping fill our cheeks empty them::::our spines arching our bellies filling-out flat::::our arms kept at our sides melt into us::::we are without feeling in our legs and feet but see how they've joined and sprouted fins and become tails on others::::our faces incapable of expression our greatest joy.
A dirt-dull yellow-green ulcerous hedge::::whose tiny magenta scars spurt yellow rust onto the feet and legs of tapdancing bees::::slowly jumps a head-high raw wood picket fence::::whose fine sunlit gaps combine black veiny stem and shimmering leaf with telescopic splinters of branch, shrub, and pampas frond from in the near distance, and housing, field, automobile, and street from in the far distance, creating marvelous, sometimes frightening, images of people, who by moving my astigmatism side to side and crouching in the livingroom are lurking right outside on the walkway peeking in, who make noises as distinct as footsteps, shifting posture and clothes, rustling hedge and bumping fence::::that protects a sunbaked concrete slab about the size of a Pollock canvas, and as poetically stained.
A gull who is blown out over a pure white desert, who rubs his eyes with his wings in disbelief but then figures he's just gone color-blind, who is so hot and so dry, dives, though he hasn't seen a fish below all day, and dies immediately upon impact.
Since you cannot possibly understand what it is like to tend sheep, the closest equivolent is how you are supposedly in charge of Gordon, though you don't feed him every night, and you complain, and you haven't taken him for a walk in over a week, you cannot possibly begin to understand the significance, the horror, of a wolf stalking your flock of sheep. If you were to see a wolf you'd recognize it as a dog and try to pet it, you'd be attracted to its savagery and bravery, and you'd run-off to live with it, be raised in its wolf pack.
Antonin carries the relic as if he believes as all others, that its significance is symbolic and not actual. And yet he declares it is truth, what it is. And no one tries to take it from him, which illustrates their disbelief, for if it is what he claims, they would take it from him, perhaps over his dead body. Is it the cane once owned by Saint Patrick? Maybe or maybe not. But in that Antonin believes it is, it is. But it does not follow that since no one else believes it is, it is not, for they do not know.
Once dead we continue to live as organic matter nourishimg other organic matter; once dead we are lost with the same disorientation experienced by the newly blind, only it's not a matter of sight alone, but of everything; once dead we are the location of our dead body slowly deteriorating until dust and even then still deteriorating, deteriorating infinitely; once dead nothingness. Here is one certainty: we cannot procrastinate in death.
You are avoiding this as if it were a conversation with a stranger about the evils of the world.
Most people do not understand that the Universe is infinite::::they cannot hold a conception of nothingness or emptiness or infinity, and so when we attempt to describe the emptiness inside each and every person, they laugh it off, don't understand, confuse what we're saying with their notion of god or of the soul.
Once a war is fought over the aquisition of drinkable water or a location with breathable air, then we will take a hard look at our destruction of Earth.
The child who you spanked, who you spank, who you are spanking right this instant is only language so you tell it to stop crying, stop, and you cuddle until the warmth of the enbrace flames::::you burn a stick over this fire and then with the charcoal write these thoughts across the pure whiteness of your memory.
If you pretend long enough you go insane, you go on living, keep breathing, as clear as water, as full of germs you cannot see, nor care to, you are still in the ocean, you haven't clinbed up out of it yet.
You have come no further in life than the end of this sentence.
Being human is feeling ancient. Humor through tragedy to insight. Balloons have fun in relation to our playing with them.
We will die the same death as our father, ejaculate the same child as ourself, our breasts will produce milk, nourish us, and god will look down. Where there was once grass there will be boulders. Where there are boulders there have been grasses. We've gone to the edge of the world on board\'20soon god is negative, we are ourselves!\ Naked, we are not so naked that we have forgotten our sentiments, but we are so bare we have no movement, so skeleton that god is blank. We admit to a childhood we never lived, and live a childhood which remains our own.
We are allowed to be savages Michelangelo says as his first incision enters the corpse-leg of a young male. He carves a straight red line down the calf then parts it ever so gently, like lips readying to kiss lips. The blood of the cold leg stays with the leg. The muscle is lifted and laid on the table. It is mauve surrounded by white tissue, with hardened blood that is almost purple. But it is not color which interests him. Carving flesh is much more immediate than carving stone he says, it involves less interpretation. He begins to cry.
If the sky floats as it seems to, the Earth sits as it seems to, and if this is so, then the oceans lie, in fact all water, except waterfalls, which fall. And people, people walk or they don't. They lie and they float and they sit don't they, I mean people can only imitate their surroundings. But from where do they imitate thinking? Trees breathe, that is no mystery. And the other animals, even plants die. Most of all people fall, following the course of their mysterious thought.
Instead of ink I write with saliva; of course you refuse to believe this, how can I show you, we are so far apart, I can neither physically show you, nor explain why I do it, for it is automatic writing, and once the words dry on the paper they are gone, faded, once imagined now forgotten, such is the process of the mind, which allows me to imagine something over and over, and write it down over and over, which dries and fades to nothing, rewritten and rewritten so that it is etched in the paper, tearing the page, really tearing it, which of course finishes the paper; the place of my words undone, the words themselves vanished, I'm left to believe in the performance itself, which I neither perform on call nor with any consistency or accuracy, is the closest I will ever come to death, to the death I long for, which I live through over and over, and which keeps churning my life, whispering to me over and over I must go on, I must.
That looks like a place where someone would piss the dog thinks. So he drags his nose to it and sniffs. Nothing. Nothing there. Such a setting and not a thing. The dogs here must not understand the beauty of building corners. His pissing is weak in his disgust. The dogs here piss on yellow fire-hydrants, piss yellow, with yellow predictability, yellow simplicity. Upon seeing another dog he struggles through the throng of humans and takes a closer look. Ah! A fine piece of ass, he thinks in a scream. He travels right up to her ass and sniffs. She moves off quickly, embarrassed. No head on that one's shoulders he thinks, or, perhaps she has converted to human aesthetics? How can someone find ass-sniffing offending? He is an artist, he believes, an artist at living. Every event, every object, every living being, has made him outcast for his thoughts, for his acting dog-like to their faces and asses.
Stars let loose spume, black that fills the void, space. These points of brightness hold the black, then let loose from under their crusts. I've seen even our sun do this, outside the knowledge of science, for they study how stars form, I study how the blackness forms::::it permeates each Earth animal, is breathed by them, breathed out again, becoming lighter so leaving Earth. Each star in each galaxy breathes this incredible blackness::::I've seen them coughing like smokers; and each planet through osmosis eats and then discharges blackness::::this blackness, the same blackness settling upon us each night.
If the veins of my body expanded::::became rivers, my bones would protrude through the Earth's crust like white arcked trees and I wouldn't hesitate to sit under them for shade.
Night came, you wouldn't pee outdoors, held your fright still life as if fruit, faced the open would night-time is, kissed me woven basket kisses, and walked into thin liquid darkness. You returned with downcast eyes, 'hidden moons' I called them; you said you'd seen me squinting through the window.
What do you call the shape of a casket? A rectangle? But it's really an extended cube. Yes. One word is applied to a flat thing, a concept, and an extended cube. I propose we do this with all language; words will represent all three dimensions: flat meaning physically flat, the concept of flatness, and human nature applied to the word so that the word is performable. Language like a monkey without arms. Exactly.
I don't do this very often::::and I want you to receive it when all you have is a tiny not even wallet-size image of me; my actually standing in front of you, you would see what I can't show you, from a distance I've created. But I need my arms around you, and, perhaps, to feel.
I've no idea the conclusion of this, a story, none of its beginnings, less these lines which represent introduction, but poorly so, having stated nothing. The form is more or less derived from others written the same size. The words are mine, now read they're yours as well, belonging both to chance and reason. Shells from an ocean of words. Story from an ocean of stories. I've no idea the conclusion, and recognize very little of what is here as mine, as anyone's. Perhaps a wave of conclusions has tossed this sentence here which I conduct.