Passes Through

One

39 He did, after all, have a deathbed conversion. Insight into evangelical thinking. Not always humanitarian, but useful. Dangerous visions conjured up strange old fears. Mediocre stuff filled in most of the gaps. Otherwise, the museum would become too overwhelming. He loved forbidden things. Found in the library. Without much effort. Containers of silent speech. Each one captured a steady stream. The end of my idea of love. He remained an unshakable presence. Quiet only in sleep. I took to biting my knuckles, while he aspired to give ever more precise interpretations. This severed the links in our network of hidden affinities. If you can’t one 40 resist the temptation to yell in public, do so with a phone to your ear. He says his voices are witty and supportive. Only occasionally cruel. After a quick falafel. I felt like shit. The color of redwood bark on a name tag. His office was noisy. So he took a day off. He had an affliction due to the appearance of foreign images. They accompanied brash sounds. If only I could have read everything there. It was exasperating . He uncovered a whole new set of chores. Choose one and discuss. There are no connections between his extensive views. That’s not a good sign. It’s crucial to determine how the voices manifest themselves. Migraine headaches follow the impulse to illustrate them. Private wishes are written with children’s blocks and printed on thin rectangles of handmade paper. Sometimes, he can only think of what he will never be able to do. The problem of owning instead of renting. Someone else’s right thing. Crushing a bedbug. A difficult decision. What a softy he is. Something inside him wants to hurt me. So full of things. Jokes. Bad smells. The odd use of heartlessness. The rude characterizations. References to old books. He spent so much time trying to remake them into usable structures. He hangs his inner process on them. Just like me. He’s capable of dastardly behavior. Unavoidably engrossed in the details and defects. No chords. Only the sound of my head beating against the wall of a windowless and doorless cell. A twitch. A scratching of the nose. A colorless whistle. Some part of me wanting to die. The same part that’s ready to kill. He has a way of making everything I do seem unimportant. But he doesn’t mean it. I will have an ego. Immense. In an instant it can make me forget him. I become the citizen of this other 41 world. The objects discussed are merely mirages born out of despair. Speak them. Or throw them away. Why do we expect gratitude from the reintroduction of other ideas into our own? What makes that so appealing? More and more. Like surprising an old friend. We’re decent people here. Decent people don’t give alternative histories. They let the dead vanish. There is no continuity. Not much physical evidence left. A senseless road. Marked in each example. Where one keeps slipping in the dark. Ending up on one side or the other . Out of balance. Always a peculiar and awful taste. Twisting around inside. I like it when he calls me daddy. Some of my come landed on the sheets in shapes I’d only seen in his drawings. The ones I’d helped him organize. He invented forbidden things. Blunt. Full of anxiety. Racking up the let downs that come with these firsts. I was thinking fuck you. I wanted to eat what he perfectly arranged on the linoleum. Between his legs. He wore ripped-up fashion accessories from a boutique. Feigning indifference. His head thrown back. I thought so hard that he was no longer a possible object. He became an imaginary being. I thought he would appreciate spontaneity. I thought he would be grateful . Instead he lost his erection. Avoiding the shame of the familiar. Yes. In the middle of nowhere, everything eventually becomes landscape. Rushing by us between stops on a train. Letting go of whatever knowledge and history were once locked up in these stories. Circles within circles. Smaller and smaller. See how little room the dead require. In a world of only liquids, walls are always changing. Always hidden. The café where I write these words was a convenience store. Just weeks ago. Numerically sensitive readers will have noted 42 how my voice has...