Tag: language

Now, and so on: an addendum

On By NW FilbertIn communication, Embodiment, Experience, Language, love, memory, relation, time, Writing1 Comment

I do not doubt that we are all capable of learning to freeze.  Or starve to death, for that matter.  Death will not be a stranger for any, for long.

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There are reasons we are constituted in uncertainty.

We are able to learn.

Everyone will.

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It’s why I told her how much I trusted her.  To change.  And therefore never knew anything, asking so many questions, again and then again, about plans.  Who knew when?  or then?  or now?  I said.  Things fluctuate as they die.

Or I never knew.  Having so little to do with facts or truth, beliefs or trust.  IS is always something else.  Or here is always different.  NOW has never been, in other words.  Even if the words are the same.

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And. So. On.

Apparently.

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There is music.  And recognition – recognizability – (memory?) – a passion for pattern, a shine to similar, a longing for location, locatability.  For what it’s worth – a pronounced inaccuracy and pro-found nostalgia.  As the ‘similar’ is founded on what’s been experienced before (pro-found), and at least less than (or more?) than present.  Pre-sent?  NOW was given / sent before?  I doubt that… but feel wary that that’s all we’ll ever know, never quite catching up to being.

In another sense: the inherent lag of perception.  How old (again, pre-supposedly) are the stars we ‘see’?  Or the squirrel on yonder branch; your eyes across the table; our held hands… by the time they register?

What happens, “now”?  And why are we occupied with what we call “next” when we can’t even exist at once’s occurring?  Seeking a head start?  A virtual or imagined pre-sent?

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Yes I heard what you said…after you’d said it.

There’s our “now.”

The cut from stepping on glass… and then the pain… later.

The bite of food, licks of flesh, kisses… and then the tasting.

The breeze and then the leaf, light and then its outline.  Mostly shadow.

“Hello,” I reply in turn, but your head already bowed and path resumed, on the far sidewalk.

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I fall behind.

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Suppose this is why, in conversation, ever losing our way in delay, we ask “where were we?” rather than “where are we?”  What is it we wish to know?  Where do we hope to be with one another?

As I was saying – with requisite gap between whatever may have been transpiring in my ‘mind’ (or whereverywhere thinking occurs) and the sludgy musculature, instruments, and carefully crafted formulation of alphabetic symbols to display attempts of communication or composures…

…now I’ve forgotten…

Measures of Life

On By NW FilbertIn human, Language, meaning, Media, Writing1 Comment

“‘Word work,’ Toni Morrison said in Stockholm, ‘is sublime because it is generative,’ its felicity in its reach toward the ineffable. ‘We die,’ she said.  ‘That may be the meaning of life.  But we do language.  That may be the measure of our lives.'”

Lewis Lapham, Word Order

Lapham Word Order

Read full text here: Word Order, Lewis Lapham

Letter to a Lover – March 2018

On By NW FilbertIn awareness, being, desire, Experience, Language, love, Perception, relation, Writing5 Comments

The month of March, in Kansas, can be almost anything, like most of the other months of the year, almost.  Tonight it is moisty, breezy, there is wetness hovering like a redolent air, nearly a fog.  I am killing myself.  You are feeding me.  I sharpen your knives in the kitchen.  From the top of my throat toward deep in my belly is an acidic ruin caused by far too many liters of hard alcohol in far too much volume, too often, for too many hours of too many days over too many years to not be transforming my internal landscape into a ravaged terrain of destruction.  So though I’m unable to breathe, speak, lie down, or work without unignorable hurt, I am still useful.  I am sharpening your knives in your modest kitchen.  I am reading and writing sentences.  I am trying to keep myself from you.  You are preparing a meal for us, and I find it so difficult to stay away from you – to not breathe at your ear, kiss or nibble your neck, grasp at your bottom, finger your elbows, hover, caress, overwhelm.

Boundaries are reduced in mist and wind.  In motion it can be hard to tell where the lines that mark objects begin or end.  In cloaks of obscurity finding shapes or sounds, edges or entries, can be, well, con-fusing (over-mixed, blended, woven)… as perhaps any “thing” we try to think apart ‘in fact’ always is… “inscrutable,” “indivisible,” “unclear.”

If you extricate the ginger from the garlic from the cabbage from the chicken from the oil, the rice, the salt, the pepper, the lime and ancho, the butter, the liquids and oxygens, thicknesses and scents… where is the meal?  If you separate “me” out from “world,” relations, surround (like a theory, a concept, a logic…) how might I then live, or “be” what you presume me to be?  I will not, cannot, am not (removed from my surround) and so it goes… limbs and flesh and organs… dissect… to cells and fluids, molecules and motions, viscosity and energy… to atoms… to subatomic ‘particles’ and/or ‘waves’ – and at each dismantle you will have lost the entity you proposed or pursued.

Division does not equal.

You’ve quoted out of context – neither copied, reproduced, nor plagiarized.  Simply failed.  Missed.  Lost.

The burning rot, corrosive erosion of my body by the maladies of my preferences, pleasures, and habits…

…erasure of letters, terms, phrases, meanings…

…excision and surgery, atopic autopsying of…

…are things already dead, deceased once de-cised, as ‘identifiable portions or pieces, ‘things'”?

These written marks with definable shapes and spaces… yet if disjoined… no sense can be had…

What might “it,” “I,” be… apart-from?

I lay on a ground I cannot stand up without, cannot jump, move, fly or float away without…

I address you – impossibly – unless we’re inseparable… otherwise address and interaction cannot…

The gesture recognizes the necessary collusion as a dream of a fictive repartee, a figurative gap which – if there really were a break or breach – would have no effect or recognition – no reach, no contact…

Relation is repetition of conjoinment, actions without function if connectedness is not always already…

…as if drawing attention toward redundancy.

And so we kiss, we eat, we call out, we listen, as repercussions of contact… reassurances of inseparability.  You reach for your phone, I fall to sleep, unable to be undone or we would not be able to know

 

Deranger

On By NW FilbertIn communication, Complexity, creative writing, desire, Experience, Language, love, meaning, Writing2 Comments

Someday maybe, someone will say of me that I “tore up language,” made it useless.

Maybe, someday, someone will “feel” that.  That I destroyed something precious.  Something necessary.  Like oxygen, or water: something we could not live without.  And I ruined it.  Like meaning.

That would be something.  Something I could do, with nothing.

Simple undoing.  To sequester and burn.  Try or experiment.  Atomic bombing atoms.  Untangle into knots – vacuum emptiness, so to (un)speak.  Rather ask than say.  Rather ponder or wonder than postulate or state.  To query, not question.  Change, not challenge.

Disorder and dismember as an alternative to reordering and remembering.  Dissolute versus dissolve.  “Me.”

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How significant that would be!  How real and present I might become!  How impossible to ignore!  Then ‘I’ might come, be-come, cum-cum… be undone, finally.

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De-ranger opposing A-rRanger.  The chaos, disturbance, tremor and volatility… the tension pulling on the only bottom we can conceive… the bottomless.  Topless.  Beautiful that way.  Exposed.  Denuded.  Open.  Available.  A fresh take.  Lake.  Like.  Lack.  Unknowable.  Perhaps deep or infinite.  Perhaps uncontained.

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Let’s say “language.”  Let’s say molecules, atoms, cells.  Let’s say “space” or “time.”  Let’s say “let us say.”  (i.e. let’s assume something).

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Like hallucinogenetic drugs without purpose.  Instrumentalization.  Meaning.  Like feeling too cold or too warm.  Like grief or ecstasy – any of these experiences we don’t understand.

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Disjunctive dysfunction.  The uncanny.  Morphology.  K would call it (maybe) “infinite possibilities of infinities without numeration – perhaps most of which are empty” – and how would we know (or be able to know) what that means?  Like this here = that.

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Suppose you could “see” it (imagine – image-in) – I use language.  I’d use language.  I would.  To “see” it.  To image-in, to imagine the impossible…compossible.

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To love.  To be.  To live.  To try.

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Apparently (according to K) that doesn’t “do” anything – doesn’t instrumentalize or operationalize the unknown potential, even though I compare it with sound or dance or computers or nuclear war – as physical.

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Whatever.  (Exactly!).  The vague potential of supposed infinite possibilities we cannot possibly comprehend, uncover, dis-cover, realize (as far as we know, at our scale of experiencing) – but how is it not part of these possibilities?  Actualized, instrumented (pen / paper / sign), operated-in or upon or with or for…

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Whatever.

Exactly.

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Here is your possible result: an 100th Monkey.

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Water moved all over me – a bath, a shower, the rain… I broke my skin stumbling on a curb, and bled… a knife, a table… Ha!  I have a body.  Yes, there it is.  Maybe I’ll make love – what will be discovered then?  Yes, “we.”  I have a porous body.

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Another reason writing is an instrumentalized “reason.”  Eat this.  Peace among worlds.  Going on a manhunt for a woman.  A particular ‘one.’  Watch me (if you want).

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I can pull at the hair on my face.  I just gathered my child in an embrace (a ‘hug’ we called it).  Ha!  I have a body, it is porous.  Operationalized by “desire” (we call it).

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Part II: Language (we call it).

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Floor (feet feel).  Hair (hands hold, harry, hank).  Skin (sentences slit, suckle, sense, susurrate, sing).  Grass (gander, gaze, grab, grackle).  Oh the things you can do!  Meaningless, morbid possibilities.

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To prove – ? What? – “I” hear?  “I” touch?  “I” see?  Taste?  Feel?  Encounter?  Interrupt?  Intrude?  Act with and upon?  To what purpose?

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Proof of possibility?  Infinite (unknown) potentials?  What do “I,” am “I,” wanting?

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“Desire” I wrote (instrumentalized) earlier.  Ha.  A word.  An action.  [I have a porous body].  “I” (what I call) “love.”

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In other words, this was the day K hobbled away.  You wouldn’t understand.  [meanings].

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I’ve written other words, even what might be called “assemblages” (markings in accord with other ‘possibilities’…infinitely (?) variable).

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In other words… the spread of the tree.  This one sends its branches this way into the world… (porous)… this one yearns vertically… these at certain angles… sentences… reactions…

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I am thankful for Kansas… for sex… for her… for elsewhere…

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For Pakistan.  Where she first appeared… from California… I “love.”

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It’s, she’s, notable.  Noteworthy.  I mark them.

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The refrain: I love.  I have loved.  I will.  [“desire”]

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“I” say “yes”

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Yes, M.  Yes D.  Yes A, T, H, H, J, M, T, J, M, J, S, R, R, R… yes almost anyone almost anywhere… yes.

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Yes.

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Let us try this out: language.  Touch.  “Yesterday.”

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And something becomes.  The unknown (unknkowable?) – K’s infinities paralleled and interwoven.  What is liminal.

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The liquid between every book on my shelves, every line, the air and its waves, the light and hard matter.  [porous].

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G, D, K, M, Lispector… what do we see?  Le spectre.  The specter.  What we see.  What can (not) be seen.

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The visible and the touchable – “the Prose of this World.”

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“You.”

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Trees sprout branches slantwise.

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Language.

Silence.

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Whatever.

Exactly.

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And there… the name “Steiner.”  A Viking.  A Spartan.  A Cherokee.  And there is “rain” (we call it).  And I: love.  And that can be its own end.  The German.  The Thai.  The Nubian.  Each native as The World Goes On in The Physics of Sorrow… selected, selected, selected…

.

Selah.

You. There. You. Here.

On By NW FilbertIn creative writing, identity, Image, Language, longing, love, meaning, Poetry, relation, WritingLeave a comment

A gold, glaring like sunlight, like foil paper,

glints out of the hands, gathered to plead,

like tears with their measure of salt, gleaming

an eye, like the viscous reflecting residue

of pleasure – piss, blood, the living sweats

and leaks, we run, we water the dying.

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You there.  You.  There.

Far cries (moans, wails, echoes) from here.

You here.  You.  Here.

Murmurs, whispers, gasps, and laughter.

Breath upon an ear.

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Blue radiance from the heart, red running out the vein.

The wheeze that squelches exhale.

Stuttered stumble – each mistake…the trial being

to sketch, to trace, erase.

Once we waved at one another.

Each goodbye a beckon.

And all digress.

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Too often, once more… for Thucydides…

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Feathers, flowers, for Filbert,

little donkey he must be,

ass-braying poems – silt and muck of muddle,

collecting stones and eyes and sunsets,

almost any gaze.  Almost an acknowledgment.

To be.  For.  Anyonething.  Anywhere.

Once necessary.  Once.

.

And then more…

FlowerFilbertAssImage

for LMK: Living Mitigates Knowing: the Sirens’ Song

On By NW FilbertIn being, desire, ecstasy, eros, Joy, Living, love, meaning, Other, Poetry, relation, Writing2 Comments

Birdcall.

Morning.

Activity-signal.

 

Somewhere day arrives.

 

We are in bed.

Day neither comes nor goes.

Neither night.

 

We inhabit a single chair.

A reciprocal rebellion.

Atemporal, atopos.

 

The other.

The relation.

The kiss

 

that undoes the you, the me,

joining any separation

as touch

 

along with bodies of skin,

skinned together,

indeterminable

 

without one, another

within, without each –

a combinatory beast

 

where components are absent,

extended, present-ly,

be-coming

 

birdcalls and signals

dependent on immanent surrounds;

nothing undone,

 

anything in their crafty work

and wrestling,

Eriegnis, evental –

 

a pleasure and desire

formulating forms

without priors –

 

echoed and originary;

unpredictable, unknown;

tandem happenings

 

we sometimes describe

 

as love.

Light, as a feather

On By NW FilbertIn Art, creative writing, friendship, Image, Perception, Photography, Traces, Writing5 Comments
Lee_Light Feather 2018
unfixed photographic print of a feather – gift from Summer Lee

How seeing depends… opacity, clarity… foggy horizons between tumultuous sea and sky…

Light, as a feather – the dawn in darkness, or the hoping carrying despair.

What is seen, then?  What fore- or back- grounds an image?  How?  In mist, in motion.  In a dream that waking brings.

In which direction, grounding?  And wherefore?  Lightness limning itself again, again, in midst of darker swells and slighter traces.

How seeing depends… on light, the eye, the stimmung – the stemming of mood – and graver swirls… beg-ins and sets-out from.  Within.  Without.  Finding curious concord.  Even when there’s barely there.  Either.

Deepens, depends, opens out, away, in deep ends, hollow holing, turbulent tunnels, seeing unseen, a groping for/in light where none.  Peering is something, as the closing of the eyes – telescopic blindfold.

Perhaps dawn is down, where despair is rising.  Hope precipitating beyond eithers, or… differences imperceptible save the seeing…

How seeing depends… and deepens with what is searched for, what wants, who opens,  what feels, within each where-when, becoming there-thens, seeing how.

It begins, then, all seeing, between.  Bounding back-forth in light and light and any weighted things, ever shifting seeing-sea and emptied sky, re-membering differences to seamlessness, with opaque clarity, as such your “I.”

Lee Letter 2018
Text included with photograph – Summer Lee 2018

Ways of Naysaying

On By NW FilbertIn absence, communication, desire, Experimenctes, Language, love, Negativity, relation, Uncertainty, WritingLeave a comment

It was funny how she, how I, refused, declining enticing invitations of love.  Once.

Then again.  Or not.

Still, it happens, rejected or otherwise.  Naysaying, that is.

Negotiations.

Strange relations.  Using yes for no, and their returns and variations.

She says no though.  I did.

It eventuates, seemingly regardless of our answers.

Check boxes.  Lists.  Identities.  Likert-scales of experiencing.

Mouths inclining.  Decline.  A trajectory of eyes.  Reclining seduction.

I decided not to go along.  (Where do we go instead?  Who goes?  When?).  Each denial an assent.

What did the trees refuse?  What was the grass fighting, then?  The clouds?  I watched… she observed birds.

The dancers’ bodies.  A dismissal of space.  The removal of sound.  Absent silences.

Where was she?  I?

We said no.

Do words incline or recline for us?  What of the ear, the eye?

Still I smelled her.

“I love,” I thought, “I cannot love.  I can not.”  She declines.

These are the ways of naysaying, all our doubled negatives, equaling… what, exactly?

I love her.  I can not.  She won’t.  Will not.  Negativity in a vacuum.  Apparatus.

The squirrel upside down, above the lawn, on the long tree limb.  What is it denying?  And where is the use of speech?

We cried out, decrying.  (What could that mean?  That seems always in question).

I asked Beckett and Blanchot.  They each said that she said “no.”

Apparently, she says “no.”  “I’d really like to, but can not, must not,” i.e. “no.”

It rings out, like bells – so radiant, so silent, such dissipation.  Such temporal hazard and warning.

Something refuses the air.

I remember.  She traces back.  What means “over”?

Sound refusing silence.  The first.  The second.  The next.

What is “last”?

She says no.

I recall dreams from time to time.  Unable.

Something may have been said.

The Incompletion of Words

On By NW FilbertIn Aging, awareness, creative writing, death, desire, Loss, Poetry, relation, Writing3 Comments

We tried, once.

Attempted an adjoining.

No one cared or cares.

It’s not a point.

THE point.

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I never wanted it to mean anything.

It never has.

(I never wanted it to).

Never really thought it could.

It might.

It doesn’t.

It won’t.

Hasn’t.

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The only point I perceive

Is our dismissal.

Evolution.

Another term we use for mortality.

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Something hopeful.

Never helpful.

Just is.

The way of things.

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I’m not here.

I’m not anywhere.

There are birds.

Guilty: or, How Things End Beginning

On By NW FilbertIn Aging, being, death, eros, Experimenctes, grief, meaning, Melancholy, nature, paradox, Unknown, Writing2 Comments

(this is the last thing I find I’ve had time to attempt in writing for many weeks…)

after Bataille, Of Montreal

It began.  It begins.

Damage.

What opens what humans call ‘the heart.’

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Who is the author?

Where?

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In the loss.  Lessness.

What is…always expressed / exposed by what

CAN be taken…

What is stripped back, laid bare, stolen,

raped…

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Then you know.

Both ‘you’ and a very strange sort of ‘knowing.’

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THAT POINT:

[the werewolf]

that place, space, moment, experience:

HATE.

LOVE.

(=)

(equals)

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The expansion.

Additive.

Infinite.

A mad undoing.

A ‘one’ coupled by LOVE-HATE (possible ferocities)

– angry peace –

– gentle tearing –

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Avarice.  Grace.  Hunger.  Gifts.

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We get born.

We most certainly die.

(even if we never learn what ‘being born’ or ‘to die’ might be / mean)

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Damage: how we…die with/it

: how we…end in it

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We most certainly die.

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This we know [somehow] without experiencing it.

Or even being able…

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Death.

Always next.

Always next.

Always next.

(Regardless – truly regard-less)

of anything IN-between

I AM ALL WAYS DYING MY DEATH

(what might ‘living one’s life’ seem?)

I happen to be singing imagined limits

(All I do not know)

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Questions and conundrums

NOTHING.

Ends and means:

DEATH.

-easily a kind of glory…

…inevitable

…insatiable

DECAY.

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Guilty.

BIRTH (whatever could be meant by that) = DEATH. DECAY.

(It began.  It begins).

-What opens, happens, what humans call ‘the heart.’

We most certainly die.

  • Hello cancer
  • Hello age
  • Hello war and disease
  • Welcome other
  • ‘Time’
  • Fact, fiction
  • Truth, theory
  • “Hello, human!”

DEATH.

(Most certain)

(The wonder : : : : something is born)

always

                                                      all ways

                                                                 in order to…

…DIE.

Irascible, inevitable, indivisible, ineradicable ends.

Cheers Death

‘you’ (nothing)

always win.

If ‘winning’ could ever look like that, this…

…end(s).

once its begun, it began, it begins…

…endings, ends, the end.

– always already there –

always                                                 already                                                here

“between appear and disappear”