The red core knows less than it should. Each day unspools a violent unpronounceable stuttering-
forth. Death is easy to think of. Embrace marrow—bonecenter self stuck with its dividing cells.
Disconnected from the pith. I’ve been a raw ghostly weight lately. Shhhh, I say.
Tiny fossilized tracks in the crusty layers. Passages millions of years old recorded without feeling by
the earth marked without known consequence. The little three-pronged print can be a dirt clot in
my hand, rubbed softly into dust with thumb. Diurnal cycles rip by in the blink of none, species
here and gone. The wide night followed by the unremitting sun. I go walking in the desert down a
sandy wash. I was not here for any of the perennial rainfall I see had flooded through. At the
clifftops above me joshua trees bend over the edge. Is it called “the edge”? It is something.
The land terraces down to the deeper reaches of an ancient riverbed widening into the recent
reservoir. When water becomes actionable, it culls from the whole, erases days and traces. To the
west the glossy prefab houses, metallic roofs mirroring the noon. Is there time here?
Whispy puffs, barely clouds, unmoving in the binary blue. What else to do with scenery, with
scene-language? Can’t keep using it, building it as the infinitude of the self— as self-help. The
speckled jackrabbits are still, ears tuning. Never a lapse in receiving, they come in the evening to
lick from the little pool from the drip system.
Scene tells nothing. Being is not scenery. The density of the tongue in the mouth is bigger than the
cave of the mouth. Everything in the foreground with me. I’m a nameless footprint from a hot foot
in an unnatural shoe.
I become readable. If I read myself aloud, am I allowed? I can’t infringe on it—it has no retort. It
neither wants nor rejects.
Rouse, someone says. See the ends out here. No more source.