I didnt write any of it

I didnt write any of it. I didnt name any of them. There are things coming from outside of me, swirling into my day and night, and propping me up, and coaxing me forward. Without me, what would I need with the apartment or the ocean. Those things and places just seem to make me happen. Against their eternal stillness I know that I am not still or endless. But I dont want to take anything from them. Those vaster fields which allow all of this to happen are just contexts. They set things up in a chain that leads back to me, from sea to cloud to sidewalk to pipe to tea kettle. But those bigger bodies that make this day of mine dont comment or shape; they are silent. The silence is disorienting, it is incomparable, but it isnt new anymore. Her name is not among the displayed. I have looked for it. I think she is too new. Or she just isnt. Something that cant find a place, jostled between where I am and where the ocean always will be isnt named. It will never be fixed, it doesnt leave prints in the dust. I cant constrain it.

The apartment grows cold in the dim. The afternoon rays would have warmed it. I skipped them. The cycle of the day is a nuisance. It stops things from happening. If I lived in the day it would drag me with it, sweating, heaving, looking askance, and finally shrugging into the foamy edges of the sea. So much is lost, but remains. So many things forgotten, but only by me. Waiting to come out into the world through me, thoughts to be sorted and grouped under fluorescent light and left to disintegrate in cubbies and slots, gone by morning, gone during the stopped night. I dont like it all to move past me. I sleep through those moments that might grab me and hoist me back into the tide. Those are moments when one thing becomes another. I dont want to lose anything for what it might become. In the off afternoons I sleep in the north room and the sun banks off of the brick wall across my bed, hot and limp. I fill the bed with sweat and I cant sleep. I cover myself with sheets and pillows. Nothing matches. When they soak through the sun yawns brown through them. I hung heavy blackout curtains in the front room so that I could make tea while the sun suspected the horizon, and I forgot the day. Steam puffed out of the spout. The air was cold and moist and loathed the lingering day, then forgot it.


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