How The West Was One—the tug of what could exist or the tree branch hallucination above the active hurricane. Slices of life in the circle island petri dishes, but they’re contained by the canvas like an epitaph on a tombstone due to a constant barrage of reminders everydayeverydayeverydayeveryday; I was reading about the beginnings of the Portuguese Empire in the 15th century and then it went 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21 in my head and here I am for my dash showing my ass to the world in oil.
Or my passport’s Great Golden Seal forking over $100m in fresh tank ammunition to Israel without congressional review as the death toll in Gaza nears twenty thousand. This just after vetoing the UN’s ceasefire resolution. What color is the tie at the party again? Journalists targeted on a quiet hill—Issam Abdallah’s blackened camera, Al Jazeera’s burning vehicle.
Or an embrace. Of the subconscious, of the baring impulse, towards trust in background updates and shadow syntheses and how “Any thought could be the beginning of / The brand new tangled web you’re spinning / Anyone could be a brand new love.” Maybe a blonde occipital blip on a lavender-gray day.
Or Mom and Dad’s documentary on medical aid in dying, the public service of seeing it all go down in real time. Over many dinners we’ve discussed our hemisphere’s enduring phobia of the cosmic seasons. So there it is stripping us down to our structure.
Or our constructed chapters as records to revisit while we can. All hits no skips, even the duds.