catching

Well, there it is: ever since the scabies your hair has been falling out—stress, probably— and now whatever body, so informed, has you sitting with a shrink on a beanbag holding your wrist and taking deep breaths. Oh, it’s a sad story. Oh, I don’t know what you’ll do.— Here’s a guess, though. You’ll scratch at the pits until the pits are raw. And the hair, the hair’ll go too, by tearing, by force, by loneliness, and, some time from now, there you’ll be, all child, tugging my arm into the hallway, where you’ll unload your little stories: scabies and baldness, loneliness and b

And this? This is asking:— . Oh great thought! Great mirror! Mine is no more a body than— ? I thought, and thought I was asking between two unmarked worlds, like roads.— I could take you, too. I could carry you through two lives: one which builds, and so bursts godly open and ruins at last. One which was ruined (all along), I suppose.

Mr. Williams, the earth cannot have us. Put in the ground, we diminish, yes, but we are calloused. We have bitten our way out of the sacks, the cruel amnions, the eggshells. We are certainly not so hesitant, so soft as the thorns you mention: what we find we raze or eat.— We are men, Charlie, running. Not away. Not from. We are a race between brothers. And if a thing so little as grief is to catch us, we will end, yes, but not just.

You tell me I am full of stupids. There I go again, my I-hope-I-hope-I-hopes retarded by the small grief-witherings of my babied age, my goo-goos and gah-gahs clambering to a downfall at the first sight of anything. What else must you think? That I do not move so brashly, or with such courage as to actually touch the world, that I instead wait courteously for it to touch me, and then retreat my boo-hoo body to its bed of silly youth and leave it there for months, sleeping off the shakes and the swan songs, the ear-ringing of my little handful of astounded experience? I wonder what it is you want when you have me over for sandwi

Daily, I shove out the old lives, born still images, some of them wrapped up like a caul, these underdeveloped darlings pressing their fingers to a small glass of the world; they want to be loved. I imagine pulling them out of me, their bodies at the end of a very long sort of string, a kind of meat and hook, or a trick of magic, these thousand bound handkerchiefs out of my two human sleeves.— I’ve found I have made you out of everything. I have made you out of God’s throat, out of God’s toes, God’s sedated little bones. I have made you out of limestone, out of whole batholiths and salt of earth. I h

        1. You are openhanded. Of course you are openhanded. Yours is a more civilized hand than God’s, a softer hand, a slower hand. And your mouth discloses the first great secret of the world. I cannot hear it. It is a secret for your mistresses and your four wives, and for your mistresses and your four wives only. The child will learn it on his own. You may edify him this way, you may make a lesson out of it— though I will learn close to nothing. Perhaps how to make my expressions less vacuous, my hands softer and more civilized, my tongue-pallet the purer. Hand me that Made

And the screen on this window, also, is impotent. The horseflies get through, or else they bear their larva there, in the space between the screen and the window, maggots whose lives will be better than their mothers'. So go the Aprils: I at the window with the annual babies, the babies swarming and flickering like a wrath of God, panicky, droning out their vespers. I have learned that if I press my hand against the window they gather around it, stingers out, their wings' vasculars going black, the weakest of them bending, or in some other way traumatizing themselves down to the sill, twitching their furies to the end. What Your Fou

          1 Lay me, seated, at a table-faction of smiling dead: cadavers raising their forks and scalpels to their chests, gladly dining on themselves. Turn my head to that Roman rot; to the unknowing hairs of their long, unattached noses, strands overtaking the upturns of bottom lips; to the fingernails that question their place in the ranks of graves, and cusp the hollow of wine glasses like they do their own long-dissolved souls; and turn my head away from you—especially you, e sempre.          2 Yesterday I discovered the virility of your hands           (and not my own)— N