Most arguments: This isn't what it should be. The better arguments: This isn't what it never is. Nothing touches—
I'm kept company. You see: The hand. It's a friend. I'm sure you—
I'm sure you—
But does the hand ever leave?
The timing! Quick: Huddled, the hand must see me as such. Huddled in the corner and sniveling. Although: No. Again. (no) Not scared. Insofar. Torpid. Diprot. A palmless cypriot. How this affects the Difficulties? How it asserts them. Don't be silly. Don't be stupid. Don't be indulgent; no pretense. Hand. Check. Light. Check.
Pen: Check.
Pen.
Paper. And now: Pen.
Pen: PEN. There.
Engendered. A danger to ourselves, right?
A fucking pen.
A fucking. Certainly.
Another invitation to grab at it? To grab again? I should shout an inquiry: AM I A DOG? DO YOU KNOW I'M IN HERE?
A pen would be too convenient a symbol.
Do you realize where I am? Do I?
Benign, the hand has been, and patient. The white pill was passed on. A supplement. A get well soon card. A truck. A boulder. The square that I've thumbed and all but eaten could very well contain my passage out. A map. A key in folding. The pen a supplement. A thorascope. A weapon. Or: Toys. All is toy, amusement. Closed circuit television and me a star. Memorabilia with my naked form: Episode 100101001: XXXXX pisses in box! Shits in his box! Sleeps! Legions from the highest regions. Hordes. Trolls in underbaths. Approaches teem with posterity, admiration as ploy. Or perhaps the hand enacts a session of monument, a procession, building, pill (none) to paper to pen to a baby sun: a baby sun, spinning on a gentle axis.
But, ahh, with the pen I can test this room for slope like never before. I would grab the pen, lay it down, watch — no, listen — for a roll. After all, common inertia was stripped and laid bare long ago. Forced to adjust. I could very well be living on an inverse plane. At the very least angled. Much rarer. Finally I'm given a measure! Blessing! Blessing!
Could I draw the shape of this? Could I mark the shape of blank?
Paid: The days of logical lubrication. Looks in books. Tracking. As I see it, knowing is a feature for those above ground. Abandon hope. Invoke your right to wealth.
Invitations. The pilclass="underline" to EAT. The paper: to CRUSH, to EAT. The pen: to FEEL for INK. The pen: to STAB.
To stab.
There, a light; revolt. What about that? What would He say if I attacked? Royal. What would he decree? Praise, surely. Praise and then appraise. Must be scored, everything must be scored. Bowel movements, quantity and quality, stickiness of lingerie catalogue pages, bowls of blank eaten, mouths fed, sets of wheels, geography. A constant syllabus, a constant index. A private consult, though, and not open to the public. He, frail near the end of him but always kingly in spittle and dip, belonged to the family. Belongs ever still.
Inhabits. In, habits.
So what if I did pick up a pen and bring it down in the hand, set it into the mold of bright, given without fear of a swift retreat, me nearing. Can it smell? The white white — so near yellow — contains something in the thread of it, it must be power. Or what if the hand, upon nearing, screens full of holes and puckering blood? And then: What of my company? In what proximity? Blood is not vapor; blood is a human trail. Are they there, one to each side of me? And what of above and below? Why don't I hear them, their moans? Movement? The thought of it all nearly stops me dead now, on the far wall. The horror of others supersedes other horrors. I'll take the fucking pen, then. I'll move it. (see) But first, moving forward.
Now, as the feet move: A little provocation, some needling. When the pen is taken, what then? Is there, in my hand and heart, a vocation suddenly formed? Responsibilities and regularity etched permanent in residual dust. Herein lie a father. Hush. Hurting. A transmission, no? A set, a string of code, manifest and deluged. And after all — an audience? The old story of fallen trees, their sounds; a potboiler, the end-all question of that century, science pegged a footlength behind the capacity of design; that of: In what motor lie the I? And is it shared? So, for one like me who cries in public — but let the ions and tears merely flow positive; the contemptible is best coveted! — let me scream a bit and claw at the rafters while being torn toward the floor: A boy possessed of toys is a boy until someone speaks.
Another plod up and another string: Seems to me cells are to be escaped. Cells. We leave both and we are free to roam in lattices of light.
A pen! We cordially invite you to—
THE NUREMBERG TRIALS.
8pm. Look sharp, be sharp.
Step, repeat to come. What of the unseen thicket? Its disappearance? Mourned are the days in which sailors and colonial postees are torn apart by phantom creatures — ecologically fondled then left to dry; possibly extinct — in savannas, mourned are the nights in which knees are cut on bristle. Retreats seemed unlikely, then.
No.
Another step, halving as I go. Avoiding, clearly. Feigning mistake. I must take note of permutations of the piano, and my god how they've warped.
Nearing.
A slow dread found alone in old media. All of it: It's all a filth, but not junk.
Now—
Here.
It is, in cylinder. How a meaning, an arrived essence of a thing, when fixed, memorized, made rote, how meaning circumvents the stuff that gives it reference. How reverence is removed. How the thing continues, as itself, above no beyond — no outside of the thing. Words reached around, the light, its patterns, grasped behind. A sonorous fucking and dragging away.
Oh how the quality of mental health has declined.
White palms again.
With my back to its light I am a cast and a mold. Aware of this. Also aware of how not I want to move. So I won't. Better, yes? The pen (nope) in second order sight. That's how I treat free misgivings—
Turkey, and an elbow emerging from a formerly gobbling ass. The emerald glass, hilted, slipping down his nose over and over, the free hand to push them back and come down with forefinger and thumb and swipe away the grease on a nose. Hard job, this stuffing, he decreed. Hard job, he decried.
More of the illumination roulette. Let's say the hand sees true and witnesses my back, the pen created and taken. Might a reward be waiting in light? As long as I stay fixed, a gloss of white cherish. Ehh. Can't chance it. Must remain mobile. The forgotten paper. Couldn't bear to see the glyphs on it, if they are apparent. Ready to ship.
Closed. Roulette spun. Ball on black.
Here I am again with my tools. How convenient. What comes next? A cave fire? Perhaps an oblong stone? Bone piles? Fuck. Toss it.
And now I cannot ever let the paper drop. Blank! Palms up in surrender. Wares the white pill, waves the white flag.
Body in degenerate. Feeling for mirrors and nothing more. Sifting for a solution; my hands will sweat. The grime will coat the paper in time. But: Who says your hands are clean?