(e)
There are signs in many windows down here that have nothing to do with governance or commerce. They have the feel of inactive social media profiles no one's bothered taking down. Increasingly the street is in denial about these signs; it knows, on some level, that if this were Candyland the signs would read something like Gingerbread lifeforms welcome here. Tourists who hang around long enough discover this city wears a name tag on a date with its wife, that it has videoed itself in a mirror touching itself to another mirror, that every day in this city a child is born who, before the age of consent, will tattoo their own usernames and passwords head to toe. And by the time the child's parents have the last tattoo removed therapy will be decided against. Not due to the removal's expense but to its serial nature. The parents will be allowed, over the course of the removal, sufficient time to think and decide that therapy itself may be responsible, however indirectly, for the blank patches of skin propagating on their child. It's just that kind of city now. It's a city that people in the places I don't fly to at lunch are afraid everybody in will fly away from all at once. Little do the people from the places I don't fly to know, the refugees they're afraid of aren't from my city. They're from towns like theirs. They converged upon my city instead of sticking with you and yours and keeping up a marriage, which anybody's history with home forever is. No, my city is not their home, it's the brand-relationship they want in on so bad they’ve convinced themselves it’s home. Calling my home "home" defines them as the sort of spirit that emigrates from family until it hits ocean.
(f)
With a cheek to the street black ice isn’t black, it's just very thin ice. Watching my own blood peninsula make its way down MLK, I'm worried it might start steaming at the edges. Then I worry it might, asphalt dimple by asphalt dimple, touch white lines that bound the crosswalk. What happens if the blood from my sleeve grows so long that it leaves the crosswalk, crawls up onto the curb, soaks the possum stacks and inundates them, penetrates behind them, regroups, and heads back up the steps, and under the mahogany doors into the AAPPL, finds my copy of Mirrors and retracts retracts without anyone stepping on it or tires rolling through it or the cold hardening a film on its surface or drying it flat or compositionally altering it whatsoever, no interruptions at all? I once saw a series of renderings of the root structure of an old growth forest and it’s impossible not to see a network in those images, some kind of cognition being aimed for—that same whatever it is is in my body right now but every line within the network is made of bee sting and it’s throughout the space below my neck, and my neck is in a position like that of a formal swim stroke and I’m taking a breath but instead of water Martin Luther King. And wouldn’t you know it, the Head Librarian and other white people are blowing out of the AAPPL, sprinting. The Head Librarian’s hands leave the sides of his face and raise, pleadingly, in front of him. He is trying to evoke something out of the sky. He kneels down next to me like he’s known me forever. Like I am his little doggie
"Gingerbread lifeforms welcome here" was genius. Some real good stuff in here. Bravo!
I bit heavy. But I like returning to it, to read just one more bit.