the page before

I say this right as it begins, it is inexpressible. All the figures, all the fugues-- the need to change direction aching away even as that limb is severed. The belief in the wheel, whatever does the steering. The life of the hamster thus assured. So that forever of roads untaken, that long descent into somebody else's scheme. The water falls to find its level. The pot boils, watched or not. I feel the plot peeling away, I sense the mask about to be removed. I watch the world so that I won't miss it. Then I forget what there was to see.

That was me then, all grope and paw. That was me then, the sweet slow kiss of each mistake. The lights turned low and dished in the sink. The long denial asleep in every touch. I see it as a picture, but it was really just however awake I managed in that place. I see it as a moment, but it has been memory ever since we met. Things changed, and I wrote some stories. Things changed again, and I told myself some tales. Fuss and tangle, and the ache only more so by the bliss of embrace. The life seems like something fabricated, and poorly so at that. A worn through play and a worn down player, who'd have thought the ingenue would be you?

I feel as though I have been painted on the present. I feel just like the light as it meets the screen. Something flickers, then is gone. One can only wonder goes the routine. One can only hope its faithful corollary. I am placed in platitudes, a still life on a failing branch of language. I am wrapped in mud and pine needles, the evidence of a vague pressure all that is left. I am that measure, subtracted from the whole. I am that empty, the eye as it wanders away. All the misremembered tenses, every misrepeated trope, spark to mark the fiery fall. Here so certainly on the earth, my life mistaken for that much light.