1.

My poetry received responses, usually rejections, with notes dashed across the page, or atop a line: "searing but unfocused," "radiant if schizophrenic," "apocalyptic without an apocalypse." The comments were in general a note that I should concentrate and redouble my efforts at cohesion, and then resubmit them for another read a few months later. I tried to assimilate them in my practice—the procedure of erecting white space in mourning over the black specks along its flanks in such a way that the mourning weren't also a celebration—but nothing seemed to work. It was like a dialectic of light and dark, so that as soon as I moved towards one, I sacrificed the other. It was like trying to reign back the temporary lapses in synaptic transmission in favor of some other kind of lapsing. Probably the kind of lapsing that produces a soundproof narrative instead of a handful of phrases that echo against the words of others before effervescing into thin air.

But then, the air is never really thin here. Some times it's so thick I can feel myself choking on the dehumidified voices from the past: Hegel, Lorca, Auden, Eliot. Some times it's so thick with the sweat of my body and my own idle warmth. Most times it rains before I die, and I can feel the voices and sweat and humidity being pummeled to the soft ground. I am even deaf to those voices that cry out. I thank the liquid bullets that drop from the atmosphere and dissolve upon impact for that. I thank the foundation that supports the storm clouds and purports to bring them here. Thank you, Cherokees. Thank you, Paparuda and Perperuna. Thanks to you, I have only died twice in my life to be reborn as a poet, as this poet. A would-be poet, to be exact. Like our would-be war and our would-be marriages and our would-be families. Thankfully, I was reborn into this as well: a would-be world where threats hold as much if not more weight than actions, where words bear the responsibility of meaning, where language is not just a medium but a message as well.

My body knows all this, too. It realizes it is both an artifice for life and life itself, and the autonomy scares it. It wishes to be an aphorism or a baobab with a little prince to pull it by the roots. I prefer Beckett's response: No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. It's advice some people should take more time to consider: after all, a we only know a thing works when it fails. Like our hearts, like our bodies. Nobody thinks they can love until they can't, when their heart is broken, and then they realize all their lives they've been loving and loving and loving this world and their families and the black night sky like a jeweler's velvet cloth. The seconds before and behind us; the seconds we take after dinner to get seconds. All of it moves through me. I am a temporary interruption of service, a broken phone line that stretches to connect here to there. It's okay. I'm not alone in my indeterminacy. Thankfully the entire twenty-first century is filled with ghosts like me. We move from one place to the next looking for what we don't have and are only faintly aware that our searching is the object of our search. Nobody even needs to leave the comfort of their homes anymore. I can search the globe in a few minutes on my computer; I can find someone to love me through a website. I can find a best friend and presence is irrelevant. I suppose that's the truth of it all along, though. We don't friend bodies.

Every once in a while, I will rise in the morning and catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror, and I won't recognize myself, so maybe we don't even friend our own bodies. [That was actually this morning, after it had stormed all night. I pretended not to notice my slight start at seeing another person in the mirror, and I realized my body is always smaller than I imagine it in my head. Compared to the buildings of the city, the baobabs, the music on the radio, I am almost a sleight of light, a trick of perception. There is no way of perceiving me in the alethosphere—that area between outer space and atmosphere where sound waves and light can still transpire, and things are recorded for someone's viewing pleasure; earthly life, TiVoed by the sky—but that's okay, for the most part. Not being perceived means you are not really reading this, which means I'm not writing this; I'm breathing it. There goes the humidity]. It was actually this morning that I picked up the phone before it ought to ring, which I should have known meant something bad.

If I believed in signs, I wouldn't have answered it. I would have buried my head under pillows and blankets until I couldn't hear it or the voices or the rain. I wouldn't have stumbled in my sleepy stupor to its obnoxious chirping, but eventually, though. Eventually I would have picked up after bracing myself, after preparing myself for the acid of emptiness that would cauterize my stomach. I could have eviscerated myself and made a few bucks on the black market. But I don't believe in signs, and I did answer. As soon as I heard her voice, I knew the words it was carrying. I didn't have to understand every thing she said to hate her. Suddenly, she was not my friend of seven years; her voice was not familiar or loving, but atonal, artificially buoyed by her fatalism for my sake, and insubstantial. It was a thin cover for the raw, animalistic, scathed-by-loss voice people should have. When we hung up, the dialectic switched on me, without my knowing, until I drove my shin into the coffee table. That's what the dialectic was good for: reminding me that I am neither light nor dark but an object in their struggle, a word in a language I don't know.

Maybe if I believed in myself more, I would fling myself less to the moment and concern myself less with untoward activities like dialectics. [What, if anything, did Hegel really accomplish besides provoking two centuries of quibbling gentlemen?]. But I don't have content enough in myself for waiting—not even for idling—as Nietzsche would say. So I move around constantly. Not physically, necessarily, but psychically I shift gears as often as my mind will allow: focusing like this for so long, to say so much and so little, is uncommon. I jump from one place to the next without realizing I've made a leap, and if it seems like a stream of consciousness, it's been polluted by my body. My body which, unlike my mind, is not an amalgam of free associations of particles pushed endlessly towards the salt point—where fresh water becomes salty, where the ocean begins and the river ends, and where neither exist for very long. If my writing (or breathing, as it were) is to liberate itself from the weight of my life and my body, then that liberation can only happen with a reader, to whom the story will attach itself forever. The moments of transference from my body to theirs, when the story is on their screen or in their shopping bag and yet to be read, is when it finally exists by itself. That freedom I rank as a miracle in the order of things.

I wasn't sure what to do afterwards: if I should get my shoes or try returning to sleep. In some sense, I knew before I tried that sleep was no option; it was the way a static charge sat between my mouth and my heart and made my breathing tingle that I should have taken as indicative of my dilemma. But despite that, I curled up against the sheets feeling smaller than before and closed my eyes, which quickly became an arduous task. The weight that had rested upon them before was suddenly gone and holding them down was a miracle in itself. What they sought to see in the darkness of my bedroom, I'll never know. Perhaps they were waiting for him to come through the door, to stumble in and laugh, to signal the incredulity of the whole thing. [Perhaps I should have believed in signs]. It wasn't until I heard the voice of Lorca, or what I imagined Lorca's English voice to be, that I rose from the bed and moved to the living room. It said, "Mother of God, how the street lamp faintly flickered!" and I thought of him. I thought what a strange and exciting thing it must have been to be so genuine and loving as to be a part of the world of light and dark and to understand it, however faint, however flickering. And then I thought of myself, and how without him, I would never see the same again. The world would always be a little darker; my vision would always be a little narrower than before.

While I know there are men and women out there who shine just as much, I also know it wouldn't work. You see, after a certain age, you have to live with the friends you've made. After that age, which might really be the transition to adulthood, you never make friends the same way. Your new friends are your colleagues, and more than any personal affections are your professional ones. You forget that friendship is more resilient than love because friendship also liberates the body and its actions from our persons, whereas love is such a strong current towards the body. A man can drown in love or be carried far from his home. A friend requires only that you keep in touch and, from time to time, send your love.

Reader, you must know that in that pre-dawn twilight there was lightning in my stomach as I stood at the window and listened to the lowing train in the distance, the sound like an old dragon just awaking. Reader, you must know that what follows follows only out of fear. Fear for myself, and fear that I will always be a shade or shadow in someone else's dialectic. I wish to acknowledge my reader for his kind support in setting me free. I wish to acknowledge the blood in the kitchen sink as something greater than depression and loneliness. I wish the events that followed were only a fiction.

2.

I had never truly lost anyone close before. The question of distance which, by necessity, is posited by friendship, by relationship, by communion, is only answered posthumously, and usually in a way which leaves much to be desired. I prefer to leave the loss unnamed; by which I mean, or, rather, I prefer to leave him unnamed—once you die, you should not have a name. Names are the things we assign to those with the living. Nomenclature is a gateway drug to control and communication, translation and its violence. The sonnet is the worst: forget the rhyming and think of just those fourteen lines. Think of fourteen lines which, with your pen, you must fill slowly—can you imagine not disappointing those lines? The form of the sonnet gives way to its function, like the Trojan Horse, like an onomatopoeia, which must eventually crash upon itself and be reabsorbed even before it can be fully articulated. As it were, to articulate it is to unarticulate it. The sonnet is also a loss, though one we've come to appreciate, which is a shame: its violence goes without note because it is a violence of form and not a violence of function. When forms exhibit violence, we ignore them and look to their function. When states engage in war, they make no topography of desire or offense and, in so doing, retain their ability to quit at any time, to concede, to treatize, to conquer. As if any man can control the forms of geography.

This is what I mean when I say that that the three of us were each suffering the violence of form. It was mostly our own, and, like the violence of all forms, it was a violence bred of absence. What was four became three. The violence was thus a specter that exacted its revenge in the brief, hollow space between our words. When asked how many would be sitting with us tonight, we would catch ourselves mid-sentence saying four and correct to three. In the aftermath, I refused to remove him from my phonebook, my email, my picture frames. On occasion, I would call him, but his phone, after a few weeks, was simply a disconnected number. After hearing the message a few times, I wondered what it would be like when I, too, became a disconnected number, and whether that would be very different from being a connected number. When I became depressed from that message, I resorted to emails. Most of the time it was a simple forward—a joke, a political statement, something inessential—but one night I wrote an apology drafted in the form of that which is forgotten in advance: a love letter, as all love letters must be forgotten before they are sent. An apology because anything less seemed a concession that the world was OK; a love letter because there is no other kind a friend can write. Forgotten in advance because to remember is to bear witness to, and I can only bear witness to the manifestations of my own life, which are mostly inessential. As though there were anything else I or any of us could do to change that. I was trapped in a three-line sonnet, but you'd think it were a haiku if the syllables ever came out right.

"Are you OK?" one of them—who I recognized as Tyler several seconds after his voice had died—asked. I broke my stare at the plate in front of me and looked up at him. What I should have done was break the plate. What I should have done was let the plate break me in place of holding food. I didn't need food which would only pass through me like religion.

"Yeah, fine." I pushed my plate away before I'd eaten from it, suddenly repulsed by consumption. There were better things to do than consume: consummate, concatenate, incubate. I looked to the ceiling made of glass—glass which, through the 19th century, developed architecturally as a significant material. Despite this development, it was not until the following century that the social demand for it would meet its ability. Today, it is still considered a material with strong associative ties to utopia, to utopian societies, which is why its primary use is in places like this: as fascia fashioned to the roof of a mall, a restaurant, airports, train stations, skyscrapers. It is always omnipresent in places of a transitory nature where the only thing stationary is the structure itself. I picked up my glass of water and fished the lime from its bowels before taking a sip.

"Are you sure you're OK?" Tyler asks again. His eyes move over my body as though something foreign has inhabited my skin. It isn't non-recognition; it's a recognition of form and only form, not of function. I nodded again, clearing my throat this time as though that explained something significant about my behavior, and noticed Marie's disconcerted, silent expression. She looked away before I could understand her reaction.

Two centuries ago, in Paris, this would have been called an arcade: a series of glass-covered passageways with arches that leap from one store to the next and lights on each post, and in between them all, a dense nightmare of marble flooring and tourist shoppers consuming every space of setting, every inch of placement. It is the fate of each era that it dreams the one to follow; it is the duty of its progeny to resolve that dream and dream another. This is why we are still trapped in the nightmare of the 19th century. If the prose is thicker than the plot, that isn't my fault—this is to bear witness to a society loosed upon the constellation of itself, which can only happen in the present tense. It is an active verb turned passive and for whom the advent of the adverb signaled the revolution of the grammatariat. The author acknowledges Marx, since all language is bound to rise up against its oppressors and exploiters. It is only the fate of mankind that this revolution would be the cause of his own doing [or is that how it always is?]. No matter. Try again. Fail again.

"I think love is THE abstract emotion. It's the one that abstracts everything the most," Marie was saying quietly. It fascinated me that in a place filled with such noise, being quiet actually made you louder than the others. Perhaps it was the difference in the form of the sound: on the one hand, static, and on the other, a voice, an articulation, which could thus cut through the white noise in the same way an electronic voice phenomena device could pick up the voice of a ghost. In the same way a dog can be trained to find a small child by smell—the eyes are unnecessary, what must be trusted is the invisible. On the other other hand, which also holds my Bible, perhaps I heard her because her voice was forever scratched into my eardrum. Perhaps, if I were to stand outside on a still night, I could hear her laughing.

"No. Love cements everything. When you love someone, you also love their body which they can never replace"—until the day they can—"barring some accident." Is that what plastic surgery is? An accident of needles, razors anesthesia? Needles, razors and an aesthete? Perhaps it would be better if we could keep our architects and our decorators separate a while longer. By "it," I mean society. I mean looking in the mirror, or at a photograph. When decorator becomes architect, we have a transmutable substance like the voice which forever wavers between body and spirit and once fused together become—become what? Become nonessential. Become undesirable.

"We have shapes but no power," John Ashberry says in my ear.

I look up at Tyler and Marie who are finishing eating. Tyler looks quietly to Marie before standing up and grabbing my shoulder. "Hey," his voice is unsteady, "can you come with me for a moment?"

I fold the napkin in my lap and toss it on the table before standing up and following him through the corridors of Le Petit Ange. We are deposited in the heart of a dreamscape with little children and the elderly. He rubs his fist across his nose and looks around us several times before taking a deep breath and staring at me intently. It's a technique which I suspect is used to plumb the depths of another person and to force them to expose their inner demons, but it doesn't work. He blinks and swallows before running his hand through his hair, feet dancing on the ground, spinning him around once before he puts his hand on my shoulder.

"Look," he says, sniffling. "You're not OK. All night you've been sitting there quietly. We want you to come back." He is still talking, but my mind gets hooked to the last sentence: We want you to come back. To come back, yes, to return. To turn. Turning is a kind of transformation: you are propped from the world you exist into some other kind of experience, and while there, your experiences may and most likely are different than what they are before. The question is whether, in the process of re-turning, the transformation restores you to your original form with new functions, or a new form with the same functions. People prefer the former, for the most part, and even though I was aware of a transformation on my behalf, I was not sure that returning would bring me back. Even a return can fail delivery. "Do you understand what I'm saying? Hello?"

I nod. This is the worst part: becoming ensconced in something irrelevant, something inconsiderate of the people you love. How many lives had been lost to the irrelevant? The great many of them, for sure.

"Hey!" Tyler shakes my body, but I almost don't notice. It's his voice that brings me back, not the shaking. "Tell me what's going on."

I push one of his hands from my shoulder—his left one—and look around us. "I'm sorry," I say. "I don't mean to be distant. It's just that sometimes the prose gets thicker than the plot, and then I'm drowning, but I keep trying to fill things in, to bring this together because I know somebody is watching me. I feel them reading this and whether they acknowledge it or not, I'm them, too." My voice is growing higher, less even. It is a frailty delicately tiered inside my mouth, on top of my tongue. "I don't think there's anything I can do to stop them from reading, you know? I think they want to know what happened and I've warned them to stop, but they can't. I keep seeing myself in the third person, and then I get confused by my tenses, which I—"

"Hey," Tyler shakes his head, eyes full of bewilderment before he clasps me against his body. "It's okay. Calm down."

"—which I can't keep straight. Sometimes things are happening in the past and the present all at once, and my doctor doesn't prescribe anything for it. He thinks it's just grief which takes everything away from you: time and place and setting. I don't want to mourn like this anymore. I want the mourning to stop. I want the morning to stop. I want the sun to stop rising unless it brings someone else with it. I want to stop living in the third-person like an aerial photograph which feeds us our own images. Is that so much to ask? I want to wake up someday. I want to—"

"Hey!" Tyler pulls himself away from me; the action of which causes me to stop speaking. He narrows his eyes, waiting for more, but sufficed that I'll let him speak, he does. "Come home with me tonight, OK? Do you feel like driving? I don't think you should, so just come back in with me, let me pay the bill and then we'll go, OK?"

I nod. Something inside of my body is moving, and whether it's the lentil from the dinner—yes, the dinner which I didn't eat—or a fetus, I can't tell. I'm not pregnant, though. I'm not female. Right? No. I'm not.

"Stop crying," Tyler smirks at me sadly.

I reach up to my face and feel water against my skin, which I hadn't noticed before. When had I started to cry? "I should have gone up there," I say, shaking my head. "It wasn't right. I should have said—I should have, I just, I mean, is it—do you think—"

"Stop stop stop stop, stop." He grabs my arm forcefully, sternly.

"—do you think any sin is original in the age of mechanical reproduction?"

3.

The first frost from winter was breathing through the city like disease. The cold stillness made the asphalt glitter black, forced the homeless into churches. Whatever refuge they could find from the sky's heartbreaking infinitives—to sleet, to snow, to weep—they took. The homeless are an interesting proposition. Victims or perpetrators? Diaspora or displacement? They are an embodiment of collectivized living at its finest: a collection lacking demarcation of any kind, a body without bodies. And clearly to be homeless one need not be without a house or a job. To be homeless is not the same as to be unemployed, to be houseless, and it's a distinction I think more people should notice. When a politician speaks of the homeless, he means victims of unemployment; he means a diaspora of people who are unable to find shelter within the city. But to truly be homeless is a displacement: it's the ordinary ordering of things which one day you wake to find unsatisfying and strange. It's an interstitial sieve and every hole produces parallax, but you are unable to perform subtraction on the different positions arranged by the different angles of yaw. Then every picture becomes a portal to a life you might have lived but don't remember, and, slowly, once this loss has been effected, you begin to change the people you love into forms you don't recognize. Nothing stops at nothing to take residence in the margins of your poems. Your poems which, in the harsh winter light, barely look like scratches on the page.

Tyler's cell phone claps shut in his hand before he rests it inside the cup holder. His car—an extension of our bodies—rolls up to the stop sign before pausing, moving on. I glance down the streets as we pass them. Cars are lined in the alleys, dead, unflinching in the cold, like the homeless, and the interlocking grid of streets and buildings littered with a lattice framework of baroque lampposts makes the city a lighted network of arcade, desire, and skyscraper. It is a monolithic enterprise with its various districts and arbitrary divisions; its streets are named after important places in the world: Hollywood and New York City, Houston and Orlando, D.C. and Boston, Tokyo and Beijing, Sri Lanka and Beirut, and they are arranged in their relative positions on the globe, so that one who visits New Paris would learn the geography of the earth and vice-versa. Take a moment to consider such a feat, and then realize that, aerially, it makes no difference. The earth and all its artifacts contract into nothing at a certain distance: at the moon, you can only see the Great Wall, but further out? Which means if God is still alive, he doesn't see our toils. And if God is dead, well, that would explain our modern nomenclature, which changed around Nietzsche's proclamation, since it turns out that mostly before the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, streets were not "streets" but "ways." A way, with all its connotations to our nomadic ancestry and belief in divine intervention, as opposed to a street, a directed vector along the valance of our vision and balanced between our idea of where we are and where we're going. Where we're going is Tyler's house, which is on Berlin Way—every street is called a way in New Paris. Where we think we're going is his home. What our bodies know and our minds don't is that the going always ends with another body.

That's the crime of postmodernity: time and space have been reflected against each other, and the victim is also the perpetrator. Where space was once important, as in the medieval ages and before with its empires to broaden and provinces to expand, the modern age became encased in time. No longer the person who held the largest acreage was most powerful; rather, the person whose technologies could communicate fastest to orchestrate precise strikes and maneuvers took the throne. Time, and with it, speed, became important. With the invention of the news channel—a development our language is unprepared for—events were reported as they happened, instantaneously. Whereas before, a war across the seas took days and weeks to correspond to us, and thus its importance was gauged by how swift or how slow the message was delivered, in our society of immediate gratification, all events are reduced to a null space, to their ground zero status, and we are left with a dizzying display of events deprived of their meaning. This was the victory of New Paris: it wasn't a city which never slept; it was a city which always moved. The construction of the arcade was only the start of an elaborate architecture to consume the city: above each street and building, an arch of one-way glass held in place by iron spires twisting skyward and bent to touch at the middle, so that while we could look up to see the sky, the sky could not see us. Aerial photographs would be a mirror of the atmosphere. Every street, then, would become a hall, an enclosure, a glass menagerie, a prison. The project had only just begun, and was proposed and accepted on the basis of the homeless, on the basis of the children—for whom the city was responsible—and was slowly radiating away from the arcade.

What this means is that if God could see us before, he can't anymore. New Paris, then, is a dream city: an act of seduction. It seduces because it sublates the city into sky, the city into arcade, the city into anything but a city. It is a dream, but it is one we have dreamed before. We have railroads, gasworks and bridges. The trains do not sit on their tracks but have lifted, by magnetic centrifuge, into the air and, free of their concretion, can be propelled faster and farther than before. More than a century before it was fully manifest, the colossal acceleration of the tempo of living was heralded in the tempo of production established by the industrial revolution. Simultaneity, the basis of modern lifestyle, likewise comes from mechanical production. It is against these things which New Paris leans upon; it is as much a city as a temple because it is the inception of a fantasy: the fantasy to repeat the world and, thus, to undo it. It is a dream city, an architecture and archeology of the future. It is both remembrance and amnesia. A monstrosity of human innovation which, in the harsh winter night, barely looks like a scratch on the earth.