but avast

there is no day but days on days on days, stacked like triceratops or cigarettes, roaring like dissertations, and each day like cotton candy spun around a star.

language is no goal.  if language is one’s business – even if one be but a bankrupt merchant (and who among language traders is not bankrupt?) – time becomes goalless, strips to nothing, what is written is written from grounds of empty time.

the gods are dead.  the gods are not dead.  both are true.  not from any spike or collapse of religious fervour or ideological speculation or cultural necessity and force or proclamations of vigour and freedom but from timbres in which they always are.  who can distinguish the sound of their being equally true in athens, baghdad, new york, shanghai?  who can attune one’s body to the polymorphous timbre of today?

when all is lost nothing is lost, so life assumes itself by losing its assumptions.

i walk through the city like a skeleton made of eyes.  all this flesh around me.  all this eyeless flesh.  for flesh that only sees itself is blind.

i am a cannibal for all members of my species are cannibals.  i do not eat other mammals for my highest hunger is to eat according to my kind, to have the limbs of history, the viscera of time as morsel shrapnel of halitosis between my teeth.  we reek.  i abstain from other meat to dine on what was born above all else to be eaten.

waking, being wakeful, going to sleep, sleeping, dreaming, thinking.  aren’t these now just different avenues i wander along, munching on myself, crossing intersections, hungry, rounding corners as if no street were named?

the city, i have said (though saying now says i), is the cannibalistic kabbalistic union of humanity’s schizophrenia in visible form.  so we wander through ourselves and this is our love affair with the city.

the art – if it be an art, if art be art – of translating movement in the city to shards of language is an apprenticeship of centuries and putrid boots, the only master death, the master silent, our craft unknown.  so we voyage out to and from, on and under voids.