fingernails into palm. what a fucking
ache

nothing makes it better

try to bury that

Helen (IIII I)

I no longer
remember if it was you
   holding the door open

stop putting longing in me

You have a surface
I’m sure you have a surface              

I keep mistaking sounds, have I said this? Yesterday or a few months ago the leaf in the breeze at my back was\ a man passing on a bike. When I turned. Or the other way around. Wind as birds last \week. (\And I was thinking about the shape of wind, because you feel it in a shape,\ don’t you? or hear it? this convolving into something less than not-present). Someone’s in the halls.\ and I can’t tell if they’re crying or laughing. I hate how I caught myself up in that cliché. That tropes have wrapped up my tongue. I want broken glass there\. I want to swallow teeth. You see? Caught.\ Turns and turns. When I step into the shower I hear \whispers. This isn’t story now.\ none of this is story\. Turn off the faucet and they’re\ gone. When the water’s running again, they\ creep\ back\ up. they don’t reach the drain.\ That voice’s still out there\ gasping. And I still don’t know. It goes on and on.

Sophocles misreading

Immortality isn’t the plan. It is the enemy.

"But aspects cannot be added up."

Helen (IIII)

I can make you


he said

Helen (IIII)

I turn and you’re there
are no ways there
is no sense in this
question is a wound I
never saw you arrive

Helen (III)

| Why | are | you | always[ | stood | in | thresholds]? |

Helen (II)

Or how their passing by leaves stones in the pit of my gut
taste of sleep on the mouth

and afterimage
caprice of eyes so still

"Your
face
bewilders
me,
you
are
such
a
breather."

"ᴋʏʟʏᴛᴇᴍɴᴇsᴛʀᴀ: Go ahead, but if you go off to war and leave me behind in the house,
and you are over there, during your long absence
what sort of feelings do you think I will have in that house,
when I see the chairs she used to sit in empty,
and her bedroom empty, and I sit alone"

this is the stab in the throat
that bleeds five whole hours after.

you know his name
or this sense of his coat against your palm

What is this new
         what is this you so woe-compressed you'd do the same
                   as her as him you’d do the same
wouldn't you you do the same

"The Mind is so near itself – it cannot see, distinctly – and I have none to ask –"

"During the days and weeks I was working on this play I used to dream about translating. One night I dreamed that the text of the play was a big solid glass house. I gloated above the house trying to zero in on v. 363. I was carrying in my hands wrapped in a piece of black cloth the perfect English equivalent for lupein and I kept trying to force myself down through the glass atmosphere of the house to position this word in its right place. But there was an upward pressure as heavy as water. I couldn't move down, I swam helplessly back and forth on the surface of the transparency, waving my black object and staring down at the text through fathoms of glass."

ᴅᴇᴀᴅ ʜᴏᴘᴇ sidewinds away no longer
blood in this I try to say when it goes I go too or slip
lose routine
time measured by moon now light always clawing off it

"A.M. dread"

O
wane. earth pushing back
stones do not want me. do not want