n jewell

Draft(s), 1.1

In the beginning I had wanted to start with words

In the infinitive: to praise, to ask, to repent, to thank, to part, to refrain

But I won’t skip the ads, and now here I am, as several girls

Knees publicly bent, bellies flat and tan as steaks

Above the white sand—an image that says

“We are full of somethingness”

Now i am here, directing my speech out the window to the camera

Before dressing in the too-late light— i am trying on your sleep—

I don’t know how we got here, but i can’t be the only person

To have skipped the party to find the other bed.

It may be something i slipped under conversation

It may have been as simple as waving

To someone, and someone else waving back, that got me here.

I’ve gotten particle confused

For a moment, i believe the word cathode is

What catheter means, or rather what Cathedral means, but like a geode.

I’m trying on an image and sound In an attempt to simulate

A perceived and perceptive body.

I’m writing this through a burnt index

I’m writing this through a going-away party

I’m paying the meter when no one is looking

I’m mistaking unions for centricity

I’m getting a table facing the doors

The vacancy was already articulated in all its variations

Here, the arbitrary has met a moment Here, the flesh has been enough

The form is pulling against the sensation Let’s not distill this

Don’t be so direct

Let this become unspeakable

Oh, let’s only stop when we run out of copy paper.

Oh, language that seeks its own clarity, and resists illumination

Oh, the answer as an oscillation appearing so quickly it appears to be whole.

Oh, now light reflected by a mob of spiderwebs

Oh, now a candied codex, then a manuscript in drywall

A steeple lined with flour.

A road in which the shoe feels acutely The stones beneath it

A road that turns its back on itself

This rock, or that rock?

Gold like this, or rock like that?

I’m walking a road,

And now here am i,

A peach in one hand Pouring water from another.

I’m following a quiet fall down

Until leaves of paper

Are frozen in a river—

But any river, any binding

Would do just fine

How can i be in between two simultaneous

States without sacrificing light?

I’m washing the landscape, in any case.

I’m pushing rocks into generalizing perceptions

And the subject is fading away,

The rock is surviving the collapse

Of the theory on which it was based.

I’m stringing prepositions along

To drag up some dust into the air

To measure out silence, to gag any

Potential interlocutors.

What else to hope for but a lyric beyond sound?

—Breath is becoming so firm

It is a folded page

—Breath is realizing itself as fruit

To put breath on the table

A first and last with only

The appearance of content:

Air on air//air on air.

Air is coagulating on air

Coating the same breaths

In plaque over and over

But what of the water?

If the water has a memory

What does it dream of?

An emulsion of water

Into water, a dissolution

Which becomes itself.