Thursday, August 30, 2018

30 August 2018


I want to write an honest sentence, and then I want to revise it. Not to put it in a vise and clamp it down, but place it in a different light. I saw a sea urchin shell on a rock wall, spines spilling around it. Each a black wand, at one end a white plug that sat in the skeleton's ball and socket. The philosopher saw an octopus dying, her body parts dissolving in sea water. Death is one such revision. So is breath as it runs its tunnel. Describe the feeling in your chest, the brightness in your spine, and I will say it back. “We're all going to die,” Marthe said, “and no one will remember us. That's ok.” The urchin is a lantern: its top is anus, and its bottom mouth. The entire body might make a compound eye. I see it through a chain link fence, and the mechanical waterfall beyond. A blaze of purple shows in my photograph.

--30 August 2018

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