Serial Library passage, May 15

Sometimes, when you have nothing to do, you actually just do nothing. It doesn’t happen often. Often, when you find yourself with nothing to do, you try to find yourself something to do. You try to do something with the nothing that the day has once again presented you with. But you can’t turn nothing into something, and every day is full of the possibility of nothing. One day you will need to welcome this nothing, but for now, there is nothing you can do about the something swirling about in your life like hair caught in the drain of the shower.

Serial Library passage May 13

I’d peek at myself sometimes, look down and try to see who I was, but there was almost no way of doing this. I tried to be the other, the one who looked upon me with utter disinterest, the godlike other who loved me the way a predator loves its prey. I tried to love myself carnally in a way that separated me from the moments I lived and gave me something like a super eight movie, with the frames too slow to simulate realistic motion. I felt famished all the time, and held myself aloft in the slow sinking depths of my underlying structure.

Serial Library passage May 11

If Femur called to you, Cloud, in the blue blue summer of your native love, would you run to her? Would you hug her when she hungered? Would you help her feel her life arrive again in the lap of her wanton need? Would you spin on the axle of your love? Would you rend yourself for Femur’s love? Would you harpoon the stupid silence, like silence were a thickness to be halved, then halved again, sullied with words, then washed clean by the death of another moment. The monumental silence rides the death of the moment like a knight rides his stead. The lance is the hook upon which the words accumulate till they push over the handle of the lance and force themselves into the bloodstream of the knight, poisoning him to the brink of death. Sit by the fire, now, and wait to see if death will step over the brink, or draw back again today and wait again today for another opportunity.

Serial Library passage May 5

It was a puzzlement, that was for sure. She stood, cap on her head, ponytail falling behind her like a lost bird in the rain, the train pulling out of the station, and she felt the tears rise up beneath her eyeballs, like waves beneath beach balls, but she bit her lip and went out to the parking lot and got into the car. She started the engine. Something warm rose inside her like too much pee she was trying to hold onto, but soon enough she didn’t care anymore. She didn’t care about the departing train, or the road rising under her car wheels, or the space she was entering, even though she knew there was no turning back, ever, and this space was passing away beneath her the way every space in her life had passed away beneath her before.

I get to where I can’t think about these things anymore; to where I feel like a carbon copy of the things I thought about yesterday. The carbon forms I see floating all around me lose their corporality and the arms floating at my side, the loathed arms flailing at my sides, belong to another being, a subterranean creature I’ve never encountered before, a creature of such unprecedented stature and poise that its flailing seems nothing less than a watery poem about the love God keeps from me every day of my life.

There is a wall, Femur said, where reason stops and the soul carries forward alone. Septum was crying. Femur was holding her hand. Septum felt as though Femur were reaching through this wall she talked about, pulling Septum toward a place she didn’t deserve to inhabit, even as she desperately longed to go there.

I don’t try to get what they are telling me anymore. They aren’t telling me anything anymore. I sit on the end of the dock and look down. The pilings are rotting and green with moss and the water is white on the surface and black underneath. The water boils, like something trying to escape itself, something tossing itself up to see how high it can reach, then falling back uselessly into itself like life falling back into itself, like something colder than the fires of hell. It makes a plonking noise that I can feel in my chest when I sit with my legs dangling over the edge of the dock. There is no sun, only dark clouds, threatening, but never managing to actually rain.

I don’t get what they are telling me anymore. But I listen. And I try also to look like I am listening. Even when I am not listening, even when I can listen no more, I try to look like I am listening. I listen to the sound of stars falling from their voices like oysters opening on giant pearls of puddled white goo gone hard. I go hard. I try not to falter. But we are the leaping falls of water thundering in the ears of gods gone deaf in sullen reproof of all we attempt to prove. They hear us, these gods, but they care not. They care not to listen.

She was tied to the bed. She couldn’t see anything around her. She was awake. She was American. She was going to try this all over again. If she could just somehow get herself untied from this bed.