I’m never being straightforward with a pronoun. There was a reason. An explanation? A promise — to close a window.

The stubborn walk home from the train, sulking. Really didn’t ever know what I was doing, even when I ought to have known. When literally pressed against a wall, back down.

This feels like a line in spite of.
This feels like a spiteful line.
This line feels like spite.

Idea of compass. Suggestion of circle. A spinning song,

I’m all fragment and it doesn’t suit me. I’m all gone with missing. There is no asking for her(e).

Feels like tipping, like the bucket is going to spill

Folded up, all edges —

Even the sharpness is a circle

Transformation without cutting —

A small white boat, sharply absent ocean

Birds climbing upward, a carving

Marked impossibly far from the thin yellow lines of sun.

What code
Is outgrown, too old for breaking
Structure,

A singular reality

Really, counting days
Before going under

A new line,
Fixed
Perhaps by empty

Space,
That the echo
Would have been enough

Science, though
Hollowed out
Is not reassurance

Insurance,
A window is left obscured

Fuzzy field of vision,
Whispered word

Repeated: repeat, repeat, repeat,

What code
Is too old, breaking
Structure before going
Under,

A new line

A perfect circle is not a problem solved. A perfect circle is not a line but doesn’t preclude the existence of lines. I have probably written nearly exactly that sentence before.

Two plates, twelve screws. Will I ask to keep them? Would I keep them in a jar next to the urn, my souvenirs of the saddest year, my proof of a singular reality in which these ashes and these pieces of metal belong wholly to me.

Let’s say that I might have scraped it, the bottoms. Let’s say that it’s always been that way. That’s not the same as finished.

Isn’t it pretty, the completeness with I am erasing myself from the story. Isn’t it clever, that the story is writing me back in. What I am in conversation with is obscured intentionally. From me, too. But the story remains informed.

The writing about the writing is the writing is the story is the circle is a line and where we meet, again.

Let’s say that I am not a character. That’s not the same as being real.

You exist in ink. But this was promise
Finally, my silence. A strange kind of redemption
But I will never be strong enough for
All that I can’t know to protect from
What I’ve tied up in you and what you were.

Pilgrimage for a disciple cannot
Rebuild that road and thusly wanders.

I am plagued.

2. And You

You exist, but I have left you be.
It is purposeful, to keep you tangled and safe.
Late at night, staring up at a painting, forms
A couch, a catch. For that once,
Holy conversation, when you asked if you could.
I will not separate you out
Or mention forgiveness.

We know that I pretend, you and I
Have seen the howling bottoms of it.

3. But You

You exist in my bones. How many versions we’ve created
Convenient mirrors to distract. How I’ve grown
Used to your inhabitance. How I’ve used you.

You do not deserve this company I allow
You to keep. But a poor arbiter I remain
Indoctrinated not fully but full with an echo
Off of a tinny roof and summer rain.
Cure the nightmare,

I am waiting.

And “try to keep perspective” on what might be a different kind of settling altogether. And “keep calm”. Keep outside the situation altogether.

Before it was distilled, before there was too much context, wasn’t it better? Wasn’t it easier? “It was never easier.” It wasn’t ever easier.

The middle of the night is one of the longer scenes. The settings aren’t complex but the range to be evoked is overwhelming.

I try to remind myself that I am just a vessel. Or, I am collecting experiences. Or, what a memory is and is not worth.

Remember memorizing villanelles to recite to your brain to slow it. Appropriately obsessive compulsive. Auden and Bishop as weapons.

As a child took to fight image with word and that quiet order of repetition.

Behind this: entryway, unguarded. Instead of this, exacting and precise.

Not to draw up the plan but to write the plan. There is a literal problem of geography that is complicated by chronology.

The outline isn’t sharp, enough, yet. This/that is throwaway. This that is everything.

Earlier in the car we’d talked about leaving the kitten alone overnight. I said to E.: It’s not separation anxiety. It’s much more specific and obvious. If I’m not with him, he will maybe drop dead.

The problem is circle not syllogism.

I have been worried about poetry again. About my poetry its worth and cursed purpose. How it stands in the way of the story. This is my project, then, perhaps: To worry the poems to death, to kill them and let the story live.

Yes it is, absence-defined presence. It is two stories, that which did happen and that which did not happen. And all the iterations of what might. I cannot abide a one-sided conversation; this is worrisome.

And suddenly there is no window.

He refuses to participate. Worse, he willingly participates.

Oh, that’s just a poem. Don’t worry, you will know.

Its constitution, firmly established precedents. You will

Pretense was an old favorite, and it creeps into that half-reality of that nightmare.

Look at the urn. Believe only what you can see –

If you have to cling to science, that doesn’t constitute belief.

Why          does           that          still           matter.

Give a line assistance and it will breathe.

Look at the urn. You cannot validate your suffering.

Not to write at all. Assert that independence from the burdensome knowledge.

You cannot cling to this validation. The residuals approximate the variables.

I liked to watch the frightening way the wind kicked up the sand.

To push past precedent, passed pretense          why that still –

Resounds for me, sound it out again because the lines are separated.

An original story. A story toward the bottom of the pile of stories.

You are left talking to yourself if you can’t believe in anything.

I’ve considered writing more than I’ve written. I do not have a boundary.

I have never considered it’d be better not to write at all.

There is always audience. You, he, they, her, it it it.

Take away its power by figuring out how to stop being angry. No, it’s not easy –

Take away the only comfort I knew was mine, deserved
Take away the only kind of reassurance that still mattered

You are left, a year later. You do not want to be the more loving one.

Jump with me, play the game where I hide the meaning poorly, evenly split.

Line, it’s all line again. The angry line. The defiant line. The needling line.

Percussive, scraped –

Too much too intense too line story that original binding, first edition.

Her she isn’t, and you weren’t, and they aren’t. It won’t stop.

Play a game for me, where you give the meaning, poorly.