THE DARK PROLIFERATES EVERYTHING

Let’s not get into this now—this driverless car that could easily crash that neither of us can afford, this city taxi cab (that will drive too fast near the bicycle lane)—or step into this afternoon of apple-green light, prescient of a tornado, maybe hail

this daydream that keeps playing on repeat in the same colors but different shades (violet, orange, and teal) but lands nowhere—a residue-lassitude of something, some-such—statues of stone (from a lost century) that can’t touch, cold under silver-green olive trees that shade the sun.

It’s not a good idea, this late, to eat a pile of pancakes or pontificate abstractions, touch the abacus beads, unfold the map of forgetting with all its holes, removed pathways between synapses—and the dark proliferates everything; sleep’s arrival can be impatient only at first, and some sentences may be better composed in daylight, pitched to a stranger on a train or in a coffee shop (and you’ll be rewarded for your good behavior).

It might be best not to discuss recent erasures, deletions, omissions, betrayals, tiresome conversations (misrepresentations)—until disturbance doesn’t taint angles of events (spins, interpretations), the war that goes on in the back of your head and elsewhere, a narrative that takes on a trajectory all its own: Hoarder of Lost Things in a Tale of Burning Houses.

On some days, there’s magnificence (inexplicably) in the smallest of spaces at every step, and other days only broken things catch the surface—until there is a spilling of violins that settles night down into purple (evaporating) for night’s black velvet dress beaded with star—and it’s exhilarating to hold up the oval mirror, so the moon can see itself spilling light, a gift to the darkness all its own.