Titrations

Residual heat comes from the western wall of a masonry building long after the sun is slunk below the furthest twig of pavement you see. Lean against it; feel it creep around under your shirt like a microscopic domesticated mammal. Pick a star and start there counting. Lose track as clouds.

Wile the way down steps toward your door and put on anything. Sounds of some kind. Turn off all light and then turn back pretend or hope the dark smoke clears with the switch. Strip. Sit at your desk on cold metal. Pimple at the pricks of your follicles and their cells and their nerves. Put on layers of the nicest thing you own. Fill with smoke. Sweat.

Figure the ocean has answers. Ask the questions. Get only waves in reply.

Figure the sidewalk talks. Go five miles and take the bus back. Diesel.

Figure a bottle sings. Play the flute of it; the jaw harp of it.

Palpitate your corners, joints, joists, abutments.

Focus your myopia on grid and dictionary. Compose yourself; look straight.

Moment passes. She leaves without so much as asking you to call tomorrow or suggesting that she will. And so you lean against the still, hot bricks. Your high school chemistry would crystallize a laundry blue liquid into flakes of silver with the addition of something in equal proportions mole and catalyst. Now the precipitate is words but they walk towards cabs and buses opposite where you are sitting subterranean or suborbital: windowed in.

To crystallize these things. The microscopic sensations off the bricks, the appearance of a footprint drying on the sidewalk, the light reflecting on and off of the acrylic lines on the road as cars pass. Where ordinarily your solipsism would permit your reticence there is found a glowing wad of extroversion.

Scour surface for answer. The Internet and it’s Whitmanic lists and shopping malls and those malls’ lists. Part and parcel enigma of emotion to satisfy character count. Slowly slowly dissolve the usefulness of pixel and bandwidth axle.

Question arises moonwise as while you sit next to the speakers on loud and want to crawl into them and walk in circles around the grooves of the record with the guitars and synths following you like ivy and sunlight.

The artifice of intention realizes itself in a heap of fur at the foot of your bed and the motion of moment is the liquid your brain and the hot room and the condensation of alcohol and the tap of  beat and bass in your subterranean or suborbital room.

Photographs do not have wind, paintings do not have dust, a song does not have temperature. Artifice of artifice all things are artifice.

Swimming pool deep end of room by the drain hover. Calculate and extrapolate formula upon panic attack worth of figures to cram this into a bottle that you can hurl out into the hot street to break and splash and dry and break again in the thunder of the storm you see out over New Jersey.