All the same, Clea is fierce in her imagining of loves whose bodies she sees no more than twice a year. And she too has an ill-fated love (in Narouz) of whose existence she has not been made aware nor can she spare its death pangs, loneliness calling out for the unknowable beloved when caught in the situation of dying.

(Nearly excised: In the way of illustrating to myself that soon I'll need a paragraph break, she is leaving the room: she has seen the extent to which she is an Other—by that I mean censorious, tyrannical. Yet if she is like most subjects she is concerned above all on realizing her own ends, pursuing her Will how she'd better retrieve her own project of subjectifying, subject-constructing, and the like: writing, love, learning, and finally, the F bomb.

I am finally unable to revive my writing about literature by steeping it in quotidian Ids and Egos; for these can still be seen truncating discussions on cyborg selfhood, ghosts in machines and leading to truly well-applied theories of relativity: knowing there is no actual point but throwing ideas up to make life interesting, at least if one stays at home reading as I do.
The problem I find is a benefit for Harraway; it might approach a solution. She says that a cyborg begins its existence lacking any notion of lacking anything: there has been no Fall for the cyborg race. It simply began, for all it knows: except we know how it happened, and the cyborg has in its databases access to all that we know on paper; and as a cyborg, it too can feel the portents of this knowledge, the qualities that defy normal terms in our daily lives, all that elusive stuff experienced most frequently with music or before sleep, betwixt the shower and the street. This could be the uncanny, but as an inescapable buzzword in literary studies, for the purposes of this paper, the uncanny will happily take a break.

We can all agree that the tone established in the last movement was caused by lighting (primarily).

"Good work here," said I, the father, the prince of pauses. I am endorsed by a mother who never knew misery until she met my father the contractor, the would-be architect who wasn't interested in the great schools of building and design. I cannot say why he never took it in that direction, simply not one for grand moments in history, even those forming the backdrop of his art?

My feet, disturbing dirt, land just before the door, half on and half off the Welcome Home mat. I am most welcome here, I see the props of an extended family through the fog of the door window. On the dining room table, poking out from a heap of bills is the brim of an orange hunter's cap bowed from a shaggy unkempt head whose owner was last seen marching up a path through tall pines. I'd like to call them spruce, but those form the border between our property and Ray's--they are taller than you'd expect of a line of Christmas trees, and would have lost their convivial roundness if they weren't set so tightly together. Our property (technically their property) is surrounded by a breed of pine that is freakishly tall and thin, not one of which has collapsed during our valley's periodic windstorms.

I wonder what I've abandoned, the people recently depicted or merely mentioned. I have only just now introduced them...you know why? They mistrust me and my artistic plans, they insisted on working for me only if I cast my personal motivations aside. It wasn't a set of ghosts they have successfuly fled until now. They did not, in point of fact, flee. More likely I forgot to collect them after school: two sisters, waiting an hour before closing their books, just slipped their other belongings back into their bags, glanced at the time, and trudged off. They aren't likely to suffer regret on my account, they know I haven't changed. But I persist in summoning them--join us at once, Steff, and call your mouthy sister Emily, let her know your brother is in town, he might step out of his bedroom in time to interact lest this family never look and feel like the real thing. But he's been dyeing his hair black, Dad, he avoids the sun for a pasty complexion and all that. His reality isn't doing so well, the sisters maintain, closing with, "Certainly you are so bold as to call James yourself."

Moving to the straightened arrow

Try to manage complaints on an empty stomach.

"Just answer the question about the cat!"

Now, he didn't have to say when to show up. We already knew this was a Nazi-evil bastard, a damn brat kid wearing a black hunting cap, likely for squirrel
(to contrast out of season).

And what can the spring say upon your nasty return?
That we didn't know how much like typing with your left hand this would be. Wow.
Who's going to hit the space bar next month?

Just wipe your tonsils in the sink, of formaldehyde they stink.

Bitter alone, in a cage of sorts, caring for children, Claire strikes us as haggard.

Her fleeing now is immanent. Against scraggly old hair a lovely sheen--not dormant but certainly nothing overt, the kids won't be hurt. She can go.

The schoolyard cackles a coyote, the kids come back.
Not always for the noise...of a triangle struck just once, meaning: get back here, I see one.
Their hearing it is just fine.

So easy to miss, no one ever did. But first I gotta hear it, me apart. An incredibly dense and lush song:
The Good Life
by
Weezer.

Sure, you'll need headphones for the whole dose. Somehow easy to miss so much.... in the ears is that anger, having to have a chorus--and the conclusion is three or four vicious, heavily ironic crashes.

Your goddamn younger brother keeps popping up on Facebook, I have no time to add this kid.

Speak when

Dedicate your sacred moment each day to my bad news, and you shall repair.

This stuff makes me itch.

Would you like to borrow a lighter?

Shake it in the wind--but not too much!

smallish pub

There was a small hole I could peak through--to see what I was up to.

It was a matter of faith. For years I had practiced the life of a faith-based person, full of fear, wanting revenge on the flesh, craving in a tragically backwards fashion my own redemption. It had turned morbid long before my quitting the religion could make it stale.

Fishing around for compliments at a local pub, I heard the Mountain Journal people cavorting at a table near where I had sat before laying my arm on something sticky. Their topic: Vietnam vets residing too close to an old blown-out dynamite factory with no potential for repair.

Stories were shared, memories skewered by the resident critic of the Journal, the same who sketched what the artist later rendered full in color and dimension. The subject of homemade whiskey was dropped when the bitter local sap dripped from the interlocutor's palette.

They moved on to textual questions while nodding intonations toward my corner of the pub.

Not to suggest they knew of my proclivity with a pen....but it did seem I was a candidate, especially if their conversation were suddenly to lag. Do not imagine the old bookish hick, dear reader, unless somehow you've an historical understanding of the following:

That any manner of strength could go into felling and stripping trees into logs and directing them down the local creek system towards the Allegheny river; that this could be managed by strong poets and muscular husbands alike, each for himself interested in personal or familial well-being. I ask that you consider these diverse white heroes of a hilly new economy for the sake of a story that has no intention of developing. But to regroup: the lumber industry had its ramifications, they cannot be reduced to the necessities of the brute.

My thread was canceled, or should I say transferred, before Last Call.