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Eight seconds after the flash a bird leans down,
taking it upon himself to bear witness like some kind of professional witness-bearer
I’m finishing my tea and I smell you on my fingers -- are you going to be pissed that I’m still bleeding?
The prison across the street has been melting for a hundred years. One day it will just be a puddle of wax. We’re going to roll around in it -- get absolutely covered, even our eyeballs --
and then where will we be? (Madame Tussaud’s, of course)
It’s a trick, the way the light or the air (either way, particles), is like this. Hazy and warm and quiet, like the happiest nothingness: goldenrod = stillness, or some such, but what it is is flux: counting the cash in the drawer, changing the linens for the dinner shift, buying the flowers yourself, the whole howling lot of paraffin prisoners rattling towards their bunks
When this bird, whose foot is stuck in wet concrete, either frees himself or doesn’t, and when the moon rises or doesn’t, it’ll be a different light, different particles,
and time will tighten again, like a sphincter