A. There is a hill I climb quickly to follow sunrise by surprise, and the subsequent days of unlimited mercy, a kindness granted, a getting over things, an ablation that doesn’t hurt anymore. Not like before.
B. There is a hill that slopes down to such degrees that even sinking in the heels, the half-cleats, doesn’t prevent the earthflow–just bearing into sinkholes that open, then close.
A. I will stay awake for many days, re-excited, tasking myself with re-tasking, re-enumerating the list of didn’t do, to-do, will-do, I swear.
B. I will sleep for many days and lament torpor, the inability to phone, retrieve the mailbox, step from the house. Therefore, the car hidden, so no one suspects. The neighbor at her window.
A. There are pills that can be taken to hearken sleep, but most of them will not work. There will be some distortions of sensory detail when driving or quickly turning one’s head. Fatigue accompanied by disrupture, a restlessness. Nights of vigil to learn higher plateaus, productivity. For a while at least.
B. And pills to re-awaken that usually do not work or take an eternity to work–to climb out from the sinkhole after beaten up by oneself for events that led to difficult choices or choices that led to unpleasant events. All that lying still to retrace what was jeopardized back to the reverse-domino effect origin. This will happen again over and over, unfortunately. You should know.
A. Then a gaining, such as weight and a buoyancy of behavior, an ironic lightness of gait, ease with “being” so to speak with no points taken off for nomenclature. There don’t seem to be enough notebooks or pens to capture the reels of sound-scuplture, music-light.
B. I lose things, such as weight. Some philosopher would scribble “being” but have points taken off. And the hours and days blur abstract paintings, but the oil never dries. Canvases that upon wakening, disappear.
A. Pecking like nervous birds, I cannot leave the scab alone where the tick bite won’t go away. The dissection with the quarter-moon fingernail. Too many frenetic days to even out the horizon line. While juggling too many. many things that split into fractals and variables and cannot be properly contained.
B. Falling horizontal after trying to stay vertical, landscape instead of portrait. Yes, trying to stand upright to figure it all out, but all the figures plummeting as in the bank account. To figure out a proper exit from banality, or maybe you would call it “ennui.” But you aren’t here.
A. Day will fall into opalescent pillows, night clouds, stretched above the fields where we live. More like a dream fraction ill-remembered in the haze and set to poetry.
B. I try to listen but the passageways are coated with a residue of sorrow. Then ink-curtain crush of indigo velvet, spills in a mess.
A. I am talking way too fast. Frenetic, you could say.
B. But frenetic is exponentially better than not speaking at all.