Type with your eyes closed: The dead girl. The dead girl. 14 is what you heard at first but Google turns up 13, 13, Hala Hala Something. Shot in the back at a school protest. Is the second name same as the first a typo? How do scholars spend years writing books about books?

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Imagine someone writing the word “protest” on a black- or white-board. The order of letters, a list of terms. Say to yourself, you are a teacher of English, you convey fixed rules, forgetting also must have a syntax as inconspicuous as the body continuing, nostalgia stuck billowing, ditto homeostasis, eros as identification, distraction that sustains and saves us. Is this why I have to massage the scar, so the layers of flesh don’t stick together forever, creating a wooden soldier at last at least?

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Government, state, power, forces, security: refer to what? A game of chess? I can’t remember how any of the pieces move, except the one that can pounce in a prim swift L. I need to do laundry, I wish someone would lift my forehead off gently and set it on a pedestal like a reconstructed antique vase. I want a label also, affixed to the white wall next to me. White letters on white on white. The writing is just to bind the whites fast. Behind my back. The game is over when no one (else) can move.

 

 

 

A stupid helpless brightness intrudes regularly, and battered taxis circle dingy roundabouts anchored with statues, weave around each other like bottom feeders, circadian, trapped. What has consequence here is linear trajectory, a formerly cloistered vector multiplied and spent, a handful of empty brass and the tactile pleasure of letting the held shells drop at random. Whereupon, wherein, whereby, whereas, he refused to look at and fled from. My body’s textbook cut, mirror mirror, unclotting rev of engines, eyesight is forming as gluts of cells divide and divide again, sheering from ago and thence, not yet garnered by fright—

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Emotion which spends itself on subjectivity, thou-fraught abundance, sure, cash in hand, one’s breath in tandem with another, another’s, or conscripted outside the scope of audiovisual recording devices into singing No One Is A Liar to myself, since how much of the surface of the terrestrial earth is being remotely monitored at this second, thus the dead girl, therefore the dead girl, whereupon redundant pixels broadcast through a night, while local to a few rooms only, the smells of people who once touched her and some made her cry.

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Here blind as glue, my thinking growing cataracts. Here glowing drunkish blue for who must dwell in awareness of her helplessness: the dead. Girl, a clasp you fumble with, no one to put that necklace on for you, to manage the chain’s cool drape behind your back, me, I am here still feeling, no need to rewind and play back. Breath falling on your hair unfelt, unfeeling, the texture of most wood you touch is actually that of varnish or lacquer.

 

 

 

 

I am interested in supplementing my own smells.

I am applying to my wound oil and honey.

Christ, a knife, a bird carved from green wood. The word life

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The words stuck behind the forehead with brainfog of sad calories can’t. Rend your tents God said or something like that. I don’t have a tent, someone cut open my belly instead. Now I smear a little honey on that place, evenings. Then suck the rest off of my finger. I like the taste, like time continuing. To go. To the color of worms paling, stretched thinner exerting themselves towards disappearing into wet earth. A letter once you learn to write it in cursive disappears the memory of the effort into the tendons of your hand and wrists, a theater quarantined by instinctive lacunae and that pretty much sums up victory, thanks.

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One day when he came to my bed and lay down in it he said they gave the body back yesterday and he said the name but I didn’t know it and forgot. It had lines down it—the body—cuts, black, down the chest, they had had it for weeks, opened and kept. I said I don’t understand why they would give it back like that, don’t they want to hide it, what happened. What they did. You don’t understand he said, or maybe he didn’t. I still don’t.

 

 

 

But I liked the thing clipped to my fingertip like a clothespin-turned-irradiated-cave, it was sucking my pulse onto a TV screen with the blind doggedness of sunflowers crossbred with lasers, a little green line, a field of hummocked graves, oscilation, wavelength, Blake attacking the sky with the tip of his umbrella, Chaplinesque and better off at least than Oedipus or Lear blind yet still challenging the parameters of their stiff helplessness with speech—

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And the weird slick heat when they pulled out the stint—from friction, I guess—felt like a hot worm plucked from my belly. Undone in a trice. By the milk of human kindness plus or minus what we are capable of making. One pleasure of being we is uttering it, my job is just to fix the grammar, this may hurt a little, but it is not in our best interests to rush me, thanks.

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I am also the Viking in the 9th century carving his name into the upper banister of the Hagia Sophia, hailing inside a symphony or the Pacific the instinct to play ditto, pull out a knife and start hacking away into whatever armrest, Igor was here. Ribs, or what are known as ranks of men, candle flicker, a zipper keeled open with zzzzzz, sounds like armed to the teeth, might love me.

 

 

Naming the rampant new melting jellyfish sun after a John Donne poem was a good one, though what genius nursed on helplessness could have done otherwise, O wilderness of cells pierced with light? They could see the bones in their forearms through their closed eyelids because they raised their arms to cover their faces, of course thought courses toward shelter through cadence, predictable, even predatory, when incredulity is also a kind of mental armor and even dressing has to be relearned—For DNA, read half-life. 

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Between bouts typing I smooth pink worms of eyecream from a tube under my eyes and over my eyelids. Watching in a mirror, with one eye then the other. With mortality too there are procedures and this comfort often guarantees that dictators are somewhat loved just as my fingers know where all the letters are without reason or scrutiny. Please use reasons and details to support your answer. I for example like to organize an avalanche for example with just my tympanums and synapses firing, hushed white, new powder lifting from the windshield’s brightness, acceleration wind and blindness, plus a keyboard for percussion, made in China or wherever. 

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I cringe shut all my fringes like a black jellyfish asterisk deleted inwards against any loss ie touch, I depress a button, a screen glows, Select a Power Plan: (selected) : * Balanced 

 

Via of against:

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I will mention the dead girl and thus be noble. I am shit or maybe worse he said giving me his usual excuse for fleeing. Then fled. Flesh of my flesh. Unscramble the nadir untwist the coded saturnalia twirling a glassy morning glory down the drain with a rooted gagging suck. You emerged also dragging a fleshy cord smeared with blood after you, and after: that game of telephone ended in limbs and cicatrix, leaving you to salve your binding nonesuch with which so-called native tongue?

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I am applying honey to my wound. From Athenian pines. No joke. Every night, I smear a careful smile glistening sidelong. Then I suck my fingertip and talk to you out loud. No no no, how could you—

 

 

 

Like applying glue for a fake moustache backstage of a vaudeville skit I follow every night, I am starting to like the taste of honey as a habit. The tidiness of the taped bandage. White belly-moustache, a kind-faced bland bachelor. And your absence.

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Tonight I hope to dream I am a whale. Belle of Leviathan. For tulle, Hiroshima. For huge, read sad.

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Hala Hala, in Beirut I looked at pictures my friend showed me on Youtube of people releasing hundreds of paper lanterns into the sky, its night just fallen. They rose, somehow floating. Somewhere in Poland. I thought at first it was just white shapes painted on the deep blue walls of a hotel ballroom. Then I understood the walls were a life I had imagined and would not ever have or have to leave as others touched my skin with their trying hands. No such sea partitioned, nor to be parturated in advance, nor could be. My heart is really beating but it is meaningless to say so. Thanks.