anywhere i can find to put words

out in the miles from it, out in the long-way-home.

the radio station gone abstract in the distance between. the night sky ancient in its visibility. utility poles lining the highway, one's only companion, one's only reminder of modern invention.

it's night and the road could be straighter.

it's night and it's cold and we've got nowhere to be.

it's night and we could be driving faster, i mean if there were any purpose to it, i mean if the place we were going were any better than the place we left behind. it's night and the radio has become a texture. an atmospheric augmentation. an augmentation of the atmosphere: sonic pallet in gray, nothing ventured, nothing gained; nothing offered, little observed. what had been a news report about death on the high seas now crashes in on an indeterminate shore. what had been a song about falling into something the songwriter originally understood to be love turned into avalanching falls of waste water from the nuclear power plant. what had been a traffic report. what had been a preview of all tomorrow's best shows. the story, the signal. the broadcasting tower just barely in sight. i remember. i remember.

the sky is old and getting older. the night is dark and clear. in the old sky, things are remembered. count the stories: the stories about personalities, heroes and villains. the stories about relationships, mothers and daughters, the discoveries of young lovers, the assumptions of old lovers, the hanging ellipsis of lovers that never were. a boy and his cat, a girl and her dog, the mistake and necessity of a hunter catching the eye of that animal he has most recently exiled from the living world, vital essence leaking out the spear's wound. we are all ever always at the whim of another's survival. we are all ever always living on borrowed resources. driving long distances in unfamiliar territory. driving at night under a clear and ancient sky. driving with the radio on, but what's the difference? driving with the radio on, but then again, who could say?

in this story, there is no protagonist. it's a story devoid of earthly structure.

in this story, you are a protagonist, but you might not realize it in time.

you've decided from this moment forward that all your stories will be about the elements of a story that are overshadowed by the devices of narrative: the quality of the light, the flow of one space into the next, the journey at night, alone on an empty highway, a utility pole another utility pole, the radio an experiment in abstraction occasionally stabbed through by incomplete thoughts.

jesus is watching, the radio stabs through each hand, all at once out of an opaque field of static. then: what will she see? maybe somewhere, maybe someone, maybe something will come to light. will she see?

the story, the signal. the broadcasting tower just barely in sight. headlights set every stage they skim over, ever en route to anywhere but. sometimes one cycles the windshield wipers just to give themselves something to do. the path is clear and then it isn't and then the path is clear again: squirt squirt, squeak squeak, all the while driving along, all the while just passing through. it could be about the destination, but tonight it's not even about the journey. it could be about the shape of things, the shape of time, but then again, what do you even know?

in the making of a story there are offerings to be made. people want to know: what is the purpose of this? and people want to know: what's the point? people want to know. isn't that always the way of it? so what's the motivation here? what's this character's end game? why did you construct this image, to what other images does it relate, is the character's reaction consistent with what we already don't really believe?

i used to believe i was driving to someone, when i'd drive alone long distances at night. i used to imagine this as embodying my longing. sometimes i saw it as an offering to my longing, giving it some purpose, giving it somewhere to go. instead as ever it went nowhere. instead as ever it was always a story without real purpose, no protagonist, no plot, the only stage i'd ever set a pair of headlights passing over a landscape i never really saw, a landscape i will not ever see again.

the room is empty or the room is filled with nothing. in the empty room, the room filled with nothing, i set down an empty tin can. i set down a tin can with the store brand cream of mushroom soup label torn off. i set down a tin can taken from a stranger’s recycling bin and filled with orange dirt from the nearby construction site. in the room filled with nothing i hold one end of an incense stick over my lighter and wait for the catch, wait for the flare, wait for the slow smolder. in the room filled with nothing i stick the other end of an incense stick into a tin can filled with orange dirt. i drop the lighter by the can. i lie down on the floor next to the lighter. in the empty room, in the room of empty, i lie on the floor. i close my eyes. i lie on the floor and close my eyes. i bring my knees to my chin. i wait for the moment. i wait for the very next moment. i wait.

so talk to me about longing.

you know the pull and tear of it. the dark tangled hair of it. talk to me about the way another’s eyes turned after you again and again every time you crossed his path and every time another crossed your path and every time and every time another crossed himself temple to shoulder to shoulder, crossed himself en route to your temple, took a new name in desire, took a new shape in the way that desire took him. we all take new shapes in desire. we all make new shapes in desire. so talk to me about longing: as if i don’t already know, as if there is an answer in the way a memory bucks and swells beneath, remembering the thrust of it, remembering the start of it, the shake of it: remembering the way we make our way in an absence of ways to go.

there’s a path to it, you know. there’s a path. just a way from one place to another. just a way that makes one place and then another. you know, once something becomes a destination, it also becomes a place. for a long time, i was not a place yet. i was something. i was a convergence of somethings. i was cruel and unfathomable hunger left unfulfilled. the words jumble together. the letters do not make a shape. sentences do not climb skyward but jumble before us in unseemly tangles. you understand that before you knew my name i did not have a name. what i was called was merely a suggestion, a form i could take. before you spoke my name, my name was a placeholder. a proxy to gain my attentions. a means of summoning me to meals or protecting me from getting struck by a bus. before you spoke my name it was not a name, just a sound that came out of people’s mouths in reference to me. an abstraction, a boundary of infinite options, something to be filled in.

what were you before i spoke your name?

who about you’d always been.

unwitting initiates often do not appreciate the process they are taking on until they have finished that process. and so: i do not appreciate the process of my initiation. sometimes i fall back far enough to see the shape of this and it is frightening. it is frightening because: it is potentially illusory. it is equally frightening: because it is potentially true. i cannot prioritize my fear. i cannot quantify the truth. so instead i rationalize. i deviate. i qualify. i wonder if i am intended to work both sides of every true mysteries in my life: the shadow and the object of it, the illusion and the reality. if i am meant, perhaps, to see the way reality supports illusion and the necessity all illusions have in a basis toward reality.

all told, i may well have methods of mood management that are overdo for some scrutiny.

i wonder if i am meant to love in a way that cannot be satisfied. if i will always long. if i will always hunger. if hunger gradually takes me over and blots me out. if hunger eventually becomes my new name. ghost as hunger. haunted by hunger. haunted by desire, urge, the unknown: the desire to make the unknown known, to find the unknown within the known, and back, and forth, and back, step it up, step back, again.

again i see that the the root of all language is desire. language exists because of desire: desire for connection, for satisfaction, for survival. and perhaps all these energies - connection, satisfaction, survival - go back to desire. because desire is what fuels us as much as it exhausts us, in the end. we pull life up into our bodies with every breath to let it leech away into the earth when our lives are over. we exist because of desire, so to condemn desire might be the origin of evil. but do with that information what you will. i was talking about shadows: not just shadows within my persona, but shadows of ideas - how love is shadowed by anxiety, how love is embodied in hate. how enthusiastic fantasy can become unimaginable with one crucial variable changed. how speech is inevitably married to silence. connection. what is connection shadowed by?

the room is empty or the room is filled with nothing. in the empty room, the room filled with nothing, i set down an empty tin can.

soaking myself in sage, sobbing out the commute. it's all white candles and black tourmaline from here on out.

i ache for a project, a creative investment, some means of artistic expression as a path through this two-mile deep rut i've stumbled into.

i ache for it. i have notions. tips of icebergs, assemblage concepts. all i need to do is find an accord in placement and then fix the matter into place. all i need to do is find an accord. somehow, it never comes together. i get overwhelmed, i get distracted. i can't find the time or the place. i don't write, i don't even read. iceberg tips. this frozen land. this place of ice. maybe i'm more frozen in this rut than fallen in?

thel leans out her window to get a better sight of the clamor on the street. the thick folds of her skirt rattle the bottles on the sill before she remembers them and presses her skirt clear with her palm. it isn't him, of course. it's never him. regardless, she keeps waiting.


i ache for a project
a creative investment
some way out of this