no one’s writing elegies for the many electrons whose chastity will be compromised by the trip these words take from the rural acres within me to your cavernous needs or saying anything else would dignify this life consumed by ideas of status      always discomfiting and braided scrupulously into address and other concessions to ersatz virtuality in human companionship that form an index of fears directing me by clearing the table until I’m reduced and free within ever-diminishing vocabularies and branchless deformed diagrams coddled by the bald revulsion of my psyche from the plans of its current husk in a stammer that presents itself within the theater of my present as laughter      unbelievable laughter for the wasn’t      for the helix of how we’re deciding never about the inversions of tomorrow last behind our deflating thought balloons pre-decked and -creeped out in solid November blue between plexiglass apartments making      as in shaving or obits      uncomfortable distinctions between the living and the dead who demand immediate removal from all situations through the mouth of a zombie      defined for these purposes as a refractor of life unconsummated by speaking      undisciplined in breathing      and generally unwilling to go      even if it’s just to another narcoleptic library of buttons      meaning humanity arranged alphabetically with each keystroke coming at one’s “time”     the rapture a word with billions of letters      or even attempting a surface a little closer to the un-worth-it-ness of most minutes dripping vapid revolutionary patter onto forcefields of obliviousness created by the collision of self-regard with the technology of its logic taken to ever more spiraling and baroque ends of fractals beginning with eyes unable to tear themselves away from themselves      making a web of webs like crosshatching shading the banks of the Lethe in the overwrought art of another time when alienation engendered by classical references was thought a fortunate byproduct of making them if not their point altogether      for such are the anxieties of wealth      the buildup of resistance to need until each day is a menu of escalators dotted by the most fabulous sighs wearied of all styles ideas observations moods or anything conveying effort or death-avoidance rather than the living death found in sparse corners of complete luxury made by undulating walls of chameleons becoming indistinguishable from each other or a thousand-chameleon collaboration called “Waterbed” that I saw in a gallery window match-girl-style as I walked alone through the culture canceling bars and knitting attention from time-privileged keepers of skim milk faces impetuously lacking even a dusting of gravity      but it wasn’t then that I began to harbor a fantasy of immediate passive nonexistence      to be instantly gone      industrial accident      undetectable illness      tainted food      to be done     and soon      but tragically and without effort      a consumer’s death      a void already encompassing us in an actuarial sense      and it feels so good      the thought I mean      the thought of the possibility      that infrequent tree that immediately fulfills all excuses and heralds the long-awaited arrival of assumptions detached from all facts before our gaze pivots away to a video online of a reporter swallowing pills as she says in dense gestures that she’s a title hovering like a drone over a spiritual text written in the gap vibrating between the ground truth of her actions and what she’d wanted to happen      her memory an unreliable reader taking occasional bites from a black muffin and making incomplete copies of everything in plaintive earnest pastels until another hand hits reset and one color comes from all directions      brings the ventriloquism of the senses to the front row and cancels now as sculpted seconds flake off like scales through stripes of sun and dust      green drapes of dust in the solicitous air admitting all of this      but only this      this wonderful movie      this manifesto of fall leaves set to the music of passing trucks      this soul untorn by a night of downs      this eyesore ambience of all the pleasure we live for but can’t any longer stand      that no one’s standing within      or expelling the magnanimous melting ache from the turn no one is taking toward Saturday’s little-known 5 a.m. or any day’s second desk covered with lies told for the sake of the pain they’ll cause you when the tick-tock of tectonic descent into a life quite different from any you’d pay for in the currency of your own breath reveals itself in the drip drip drip of indignities and sleights that gradually calibrated expectations down to what remains of the force of your personality      the weight of a single piece of paper upon another      but maybe I’m not thinking of this the way one should as a funnel that runs from life to life so that a void up here implies an abundance down there      like in parenting how a child who wants more of you gives you less of what you ask or the youngest part of the root is the end while whole areas behind may be mostly or entirely lifeless      so what good are they except as a line that connects one thing to another even though the weather keeps modulating the default settings      requiring constant adjustments that drive the pendulum out further and further      and I know the moral of this story is acceptance      if not immediate then one email at a time      even if all dashes are hoped or I can’t stand the sight of my own voice      even if I’m convicted of attempted sleep during the soul removal process by a less expensive fate      even if we wake up together in an edible mirror whiffing drafts of extinction as we skip an auspicious mind-melding opportunity      even if nothing happens at all      and this I think is what Lesley was getting at when she told the parable of the sleds during parent education night at Elmer’s day care after we’d had the second big snow of the season      that when we      the parents of small children      take our kids sledding in the morning      the older kids are already there because they get there before our kids      because they always get there first      and although they didn’t think of it this way      the older children make sledding possible for our kids by preparing the runs     flattening the snow into chutes that keep the littler ones on course      but when we first arrive      the older children tell us we can’t sled there because it’s their hill      though eventually they relent and even show our kids how to do it      how to sit      how to get going      and then the older children even push the little ones in their sleds down the hill and cheer when they make it to the bottom      and this      Lesley said      is how our children learn that play is encoded with instruction      that this is why our children have so many seemingly nonsensical rules in their make-believe      that they master form before content      and Lesley invited us to think of this not only as a series of petty dominations but also as a scaffold around the building of experience      not only what happens but the circuits along which it’s delivered      methods of knowing      headphones of water      newspapers of stamina      fashion of mishaps as past-tense gin minced massive lists that miss has-been hacks asked in rasped hints if fasting on rent lasts after a pinch from glad-handing flacks sent to ratchet up glints of cancerous stats entrancing the pansies dancing in Kansas wind hacking clapboard and sin into vast caches of flab fastened with straps to twin masks that went hand-in-hand with twin mandibles gabbing in matching accents that an acting stint in Flint Michigan isn’t as bad as it

isn’t as bad as it

has been in the past that bent winter plans into absent dissent against absence that attacked with intense instant pants the askance sense of a man as a plant or rancid spam inimical to gnats that didn’t lack trash pinned back with cash scammed from sand in a land grab for gas as in Solaris      the Tarkovsky version      and how the woman who has appeared in the space station realizes that she is not Kris Kelvin’s dead wife but only his projection of her because she remembers nothing that he himself doesn’t also remember      how what if this is our existence in relation to the mind of God     that what seems impenetrable within us represents the extent of God’s thinking on the subject      that it’s impenetrable because there’s nothing there      that those chapters are unwritten      that there is nothing to grasp except the boundary of the knowable and the sadness and elation of reaching it      time blanching in the fist     eyes half closed as billboards disappear upon viewing and tones render out from the complete maybe whose direction can be known but not its strength      and I’ve been in the corners correctibly talking for as long as I can remember      but I’m just looking for more of myself in a lesser present and a wider ground

            My writing began bemused with the glamorous sentence of English syntax, swelled up or rolling past, a tangle from which meaning, the fantasy of solidified thought, stages its periodic escape on the schedule of sound manifesting within the eyes as transsensory smell absorbed like the physical paper before you by a flat mental plane you live your life believing is the present. My dreams do not arrive by mail. They do not arrive at all. They call and leave long messages of which this is a transcript braided into words along arbitrary vectors in physical space, left to right and top to bottom in one of the corners of this unknowable shape, given more than its due for these affectations of permanence, old technology for storing the voice for sending across distance, time, and mortality, for the convolution of voices, their combustion and repulsion, like your own that you hear within mine but that I can’t hear back—you’re at a distinct advantage unmatched by my control over this unspooling of phenomena that’s only a thread of your total experience as you sway in and out of whatever we collaborate here, for now and possibly later in reflection if this device has worked as the culture intended.

            But the culture’s fundamental image of literature is the treasure map. I have no fundamental image, I have the contents of my skin. It is the only place I exist. I was born on July 14, 1978, or that’s the premise I’ve been working with. I don’t exist here, not even as evidence, but the mixture evokes luxurious possibilities, that’s what I think about, not actual presence or the fully ingested pill.

            It takes so long to learn how to read. Mostly I’m just looking. The best moments have a blinding flare around them that overwhelms the rest and is all that matters later, to me I mean, the person at the bottom of this pile of laundry. Or is that you? Split the difference, it’s him, the desire to be known by everything, to know everything, of which the language is testament, not in content but in waking up, so untrustworthy, such dark impulses, so awkward to bend into an instrument of peace. Language is not an economy, no more than an economy is natural. That’s what I find so interesting, the art, which for me began in the cracks, irony though it can’t stay, all those hilarious and tragic distances, not unlike my own from the event, from the fully ingested pill. What I mean is I miss you, I miss you even when I’m with you, I miss you structurally and permanently. I miss of the pain of your talk.

            This isn’t what I wanted to do at all, but now all I feel are distances between “sentences laid end to end” (Virginia Woolf) and the rhythm of distances, steps or jumps, or chasms the mind balks at crossing.

Paul Killebrew was born in Nashville, Tennessee in 1978. His two full-length poetry collections, Flowers (2010) and Ethical Consciousness (2013), were published by Canarium Books. He currently resides in Maryland and works as a civil rights lawyer.