A memory card on belonging

Belong. Long for, long with, long-necked. To be and to long as. The sorrow there is in teaching. He said it overcame him like a shroud when he walked to the post office. Tomorrow is all forgetting, for now. It's the street that will get crossed. Double-crossed if only you trespass the date line. Stitch in time saves none. “Are you still obsessed with time?” my mother asked. That was before we switched sides. She in sorrow kept forgetting, lost her time. We must account for history, a colleague says. But the more I count, the more the onion sheds to thin skin on a wood board. I cannot count because I do not belong. I do not belong because she says so, who does not belong either. Cause with two many effects, ideas counted as cudgels not crow bars. Bar none: morning sheds skin to skittering birds and fugue states. The state is a lie, my student says, but it's not, even if its origins were. Origins are what is not--is were, was, always already gone, not to be found. My father pulled me into the trees across the road from a man and the police. In case the man has a gun, he said. Prions affix memory, or they destroy it.

                                                                    --29 May 2014


PS "Long-necked" came from my computer's memory.