from EVERY TIME I DECIDED NOT TO SET MYSELF ON FIRE

So what

if these were

notes not

for something more

finished, but for something more

like ruins, not Gothic

Revival Horace

Walpole fakes, not stonewashed

jeans, but real ruins, lived-in almost

to death, a little ruin

of a typewriter that bit rib-

bon ribbon ribbon

until each blackened tooth

smashed, guiding a whole polis

of letters into the sky or bouncing

in the backs of trucks, bags,

boxes? Say these ruins weren’t

like other ruins in

that they were (not actually)

invisible, as in, “invisible

to commodity,” like no one

would ever stand in front of them

in a photograph, or rub

one of their crumbly faces

into ghost, or point

at a dot on the crease of a cheap

map, but ruins only

accessible by stumble, a ruin you come

upon like someone else’s

life left between a stand

of hairy pines, and no one thought

to walk there again, it wasn’t

a way anyone going

somewhere would go, a huge fucking

mess, not left to someone

to deal with, but devastating

in its beauty

because it’s someone else’s so

gone you just know

you’ll never know anything

factual about it, or the person

whose life it was and now

only is, this gorgeous

nothing pointing

everywhere but at itself, this event

you (now) and only now (you)

are allowed to see, an event

that barely even unfolds, but just sits

there in all its inaccessibility

like a flood that isn’t

a real flood because it never moves

and it can’t be a real event

because there aren’t any streets

to walk home on, or string

to unravel, there is only this ruin

running in place, that no one

else will ever happen

across, that no one will ever not

miss, and in gaping before

it it turns

out you have missed something

else, everything, some fat

animal staring at a reason, a bear

bloated and furrowing, so soon

enough you don’t

even see this, this ruin, this impossible

strip of “life” that will

drift with other endless parts

of you you lost

along the way, over all

this time, will shift

and disappear like another

gleaming doorknob

in Brigadoon, so as always

to stay where you are

not, a great big floating thrift store

of late appendages

that orbits just

beyond your horizon

of consciousness, that leaves

you here, a fool in one

of Beckett's plays

fingering walnut shells

to remember the meat

Every Time I Decided Not to Set Myself On Fire

You flicker

Let’s say you are flickering

More than that

Let’s say you glitter

This has to do with occlusion

The occlusion of your light by a foreign body

Though surely the term foreign is too loaded

A body neither yours nor mine occludes both

of us from each other

But briefly

And then again

So briefly, and repeatedly, that we glitter

Or you glitter and I flicker

We are still and yet we seem to move

We are helplessly animated by the brief

occlusion of our lights

That is what we are

Not according to our will

That is what we are

That is what we are

This night