Because honestly, you know, once you start, why stop?  That’s what I’m saying to myself while I’m doing this.  Why stop?  My entire life was built around stopping when people told me to stop, around not starting until someone told me to turn the page of the booklet and begin reading, and you will have thirty minutes to complete this part of the section, and if you come to a stop before the thirty minutes are up, put down your pencil and stop.  Otherwise, when time is up, you will be told to stop and you must then put down your pencils and stop.

And no peeking.  No peeking.  I know what goes on under there.  I’m here now, and there’s very little you can do about it.  There’s still too much for these things to ever really end, they just move and move and move, pulsing through the night like unforeseen shapes, like mystery objects held aloft by ignorance and incredulity.  And there’s the ball now, rolling across the lawn and starting to make its way back to you.  Thank God we live on a sloped lawn, that’s what I say, otherwise we might not ever get that ball back, and the light is in the top of my eye, moving up to the point in my head where the rhino’s spike meets the ant’s antenna, and there’s this moment of moving through red silk and velvet, there’s a moment of being passed, through vessel to vessel, being handed off like a baton in the last desperate footrace and okay, that doesn’t mean anything but who’s worrying about that here?

We’re riding along the inside of a crimson worm, making its way through a new red world, a moment of flesh caught and projected upon the universe, and for that one moment, all the parasites are perfectly willing to wreck everything good.  There will be no more berries, there will be no more secret hideouts, there has been and will only be, for you and for him, the little miss and the sensible gentleman, but one choice, the conformity of city living, the stability of country living, the mystery of why we lock ourselves in the safe deposit boxes of our houses, as if we weren’t people but precious gems, to be kept from the avaricious public when possible. 

And I say there’s something wrong with that.  The roofs of Prague are different now; I can see it with my own two closed eyes.  There is very little left for one to do when one has done this.  There are moments where even I wonder what the hell this is all about—small toothpicks, striations of blood on the wall and on the back of the hands, I can see a man’s throat, much more closely than I ever thought I would, and there’s a moment in the way it will come down.  That is the way it will come down---with robot dogs and minutes of stolen merchandise coming down the pike---women and children being choked with stolen bed sheets, small men given to displays of oddly provocative behavior.  The whole laughing at what they see in front of them, the carefully laid camera obscura of the TV set, showing us a mirror version, perhaps even upside down if not handled correctly, of the way we really are.  That would teach us, and now there’s just not enough time to make those moments become anything other than juice, anything other than the truck which has the sting and the morning tar that has the sign, and the broken pieces of my heart, left alone and having far too much time and running out and already feeling like a renegade.  And then there’s a woman and she can tell what is happening and I don’t even know what is happening.  I am not done. I am not with it.  I am both there and here and it’s a horrible fact of life that some people will require you to be in more than two places at once.  And it doesn’t even make sense that you tell them that you can’t do it.   They just say it, with their straight teeth and their regular bowels and their version of famous New Yorker stories where everyone is white and middle class and frequently struck by the careful thought out moment of resignation.  They don’t have to say the stuff they do, but they do.  At some point, I’m going to be asleep, I’m not even going to be writing, I’m just going to moving the cursor about with the gentle tide of my snoring.  You would think that would be a deal breaker but I wouldn’t know.

I have moments to dedicate to the queens, to the few this last month who actually could be mistaken for royalty because there was something askew and inbred and almost dangerous about them.

And this is the sort of thing I don’t want to see. I don’t want another person to come along and try to keep me awake.  I’m perfectly capable of passing out on my own.  And this is walking backwards and making sure that they leave correctly. 

In the past there were quite a few more things.  Such as, I don’t know where I am.  There isn’t enough money in the world that can satisfy me as much as that answer could.  And I’m here, caught right at the moment between wakefulness and sleep and it could go either way, and we might end up with clear lovely painted art that shows two men throwing a third to his death as if the cover had to announce, eh guess what, we’re fucked up.

Well, yeah, sure you were.  Fucking had those books in my hands. And I’m almost there, I haven’t really been doing this for very long and already the edge of the curb has moved, and already the sky is filled with the graceful supple arc of face-crushing bullets and bone breaking dum-dums and all the moment where the cordite sticks to your hands and your hair so much so that you have to take up smoking so that people around you just think that you’re a regular dipshit with a death license, not this new supermodel Roy Lichtenstein, four dot, three color process form of a fool, who stinks of a dead heap, who smells like the gardens in Year Zero, fertilized with the bones of the dead and gone.

And there are cars leaving here now, and the moments that will come after this will be almost the same, and there is a rain falling on the bale and the keyboard, the dry rain of language and there is little I can do, because the boats are in the harbor and the goats are on the shore, and the gulls have made their deals with the old people.  The old people feed them and the gulls fly about, keeping their eyes open for death. And when the dead start to make it near the old person’s neighborhood, the gulls will let them know, and then the old people  can go on vacation, travel inland, try to lose death on the Greyhound or by flying on the plane, or wherever one chooses to make one’s way in this empty parking lot world, and none of this has anything to do with what’s really going on, which is that the choppers are starting to close in and you can hear them trying to cut the sky into nice sliced pieces.  The world the helicopters want is a world where the sky is sliced up like bread and served, still somewhat hot, to the people who want to butter it.  The mystery men.  The radio operators.  The TV weather guys and the football players, still addled on the drugs for their bad knee but taking dancing lessons because they read that was the point, that they were supposed to come up with something to take their mind off the pain, and dear god, the pain, it rolls through your fucking knee and you just sit there writhing, biting your tongue so you don’t wake up the wife, even though she will admit to you later that you moan in your sleep every time you turn over.  The drugs keep you asleep but your body feels the pain that isn’t reaching the mind, and you moan in your sleep like a lost man, like a dead man she is lying with in her bed, as if you were a soldier that died in some war, and you only show up at night, moaning in your bed and doing your best to keep her from her own safe refuge from the world.  But you don’t know this, so when you wake up birthing pain through the hole in your knee that they closed up just a day or two ago, but you can still feel it coming through, a large helping of pain, more than enough of it to go around, and the tops of the gazebos are filled with maggots, and the birds will never cry here and the ants move like capillaries along the inside of your kneecap.

And that must be what it is, the surgery didn’t go well because some ant made it in and rearranged everything, and that’s why your feet tingle.  They’re not asleep; ants are making their way through the bottoms of your feet.  They wander there looking for food you might step on, maybe some of that yummy birdseed left behind by the women for whom the world is a word spoken not by themselves, but by others, or else spoken by themselves late at night, by themselves, as if they were sleepwalkers, but they aren’t.  The moment is here and then it’s gone and you can’t see the fog, the fog that wraps its arms around the transistors and the radio towers demanding just one more dance, oh come on, who’s it going to hurt.

And there is little more than the turn of the tinny, the sweep of their hand and you’re through it, you’ve forgotten it. The light is back and it’s the light of the hot brutal sun, the sluggish tear of magma that hangs in the sky like a morning mitten ,and there is nothing more for you to do, you’ve forgotten it all and this will make everything else you worked on look like the fucking Louvre, they should’ve just taken the last one and hung it in the fucking Louvre and who knows, maybe no one  else does it like this but for now, this will be how you will do it, you will hop in the car after and you will not look back and you will take the highway exit, and even though no one has told you to begin, you will begin.

[1832 words (although most of them don’t qualify), 8:46 p.m. Dec. 2. 2001)