I stepped out so things could progress without me.
The knot of the self; take it out. The know of the self:
what is the rope? The ability to nullify the self
in favor of the landscape, or a lover, or a bowl of fruit.
What happens when I no longer want to meet you?

Something interesting. A legitimate answer, but
it leaves a hole. Nothing lasts forever: we know this.
Looking changes the looker: we know this. It's easier
to talk about one thing at a time: I know, I know.
Mortal love? Sure. Lovers abandoned and desperate?

Sure. Longing and suffering? Of course, of course.
You want it to mean something. Sad pink cakes.
Five strange blue things. You want to have it glued
together. The days were short and the halls were long.
Something like that. Crawled up the pleat of my coat:

a shadow did. Shut the basement door: a ghost did.
It accumulates. Grounding the abstract offers several
pleasures: certainly. Love, maybe love, maybe
bathtub: certainly. Grabbing the throat of it: that's
what we always do. You can disconnect it or you can

try to glue it all together. He could glue it all together.
I could. Who's speaking anyway? Not really a problem,
says the moon. Since y'all look the same from up here.
We could pull it apart, spend our whole lives pulling it
apart and have no time left to do anything smart with
the pieces. The wrong things have been wired
together. Things that shouldn't touch. The sooner
you embrace it, the sooner it will leave you. Okay.
The bruise: milk yellow. You are what you cover up.
Okay, okay. These damages are connected. I glued

more pictures to it: doctored, rigged, unverifiable.
There were boxes in my head and I moved them
around, pretended it changed something.
It didn't work. I plugged my cord to see
what kind of a lamp I was. It didn't matter.

What is a ghost? What is a painting? Yes and yes,
the same answers. My mind wanted a reward, so
it filled in all the gaps it found, smoothed it all out.
I lost the important parts and I set about restoring.
Wanting to show and not being able. Sometimes

the wing of the bird and sometimes the bird
trying to fly. The bird eats worms. At least that
one pure thing. Put yourself in the painting:
you are responsible. Broadcast from a smeary place:
you are responsible. Wearing your dead face,

your man face, your real face: you are responsible.
Clomp clomp down the mines of thinking--
the compromise: where the thought wants to go
and where you want it to go. Truth is relative
to the model: big deal. Mathematicians extend
the natural language: big deal. Precision is necessary
so we can know what we are investigating. Yes, yes:
show me. What holds it together? Glue, some kind
of glue. The image remains as a body would. I turned
the image over like a rock, but then the worms.