ToC

And Through

And down, and on, an onomatopoeia.

All of my links have begun to point to expired eBay listings, terminated personal ads, the depression of abandoned pointers on the Internet. Even on my own machine another thing has changed so that my list of redirects and glossy duplicates resolve to nothing, system error, darkness, a dozen periods, nothing that allows continuation.

If what I had wanted was all everything, to parse a thing by way of saying everything, to be an inclusionist, to list and list until it terminates, is that so wrong? Is it not enough to list, to juxtapose? Isn't question after question a way of answering, each ring a concentric circle of echo in the air. These proceed out until they attenuate. All signals do. The heartbeat on the monitor. The radio station from Wisconsin under winter. The bent pornography we hoped for in the television set.

These things go on even as they cease. Because ear cannot make sense of it or loses the line it doesn't mean it exists less than it did before.

These are mysteries. I have said they're elegies. They are the mouths of murdered girls.

They are the Froot Loops left half-eaten and exploding in the bowl. They are disintegrating chalk semicircles on the playground after the girls have left and the wind has begun its work. They are stoneskip rings proceeding in the pond beyond the limits of our vision.

The stories I tell myself about my ability to skitter a stone across the surface of a pond in front of friends are not the same as those I know alone.

These stories are rings of lamplight on the ceiling, a function of the function of the incendiary.

They are the pair of os that open up the space into the brain on my replica ceramic skull.

When you look at it for long enough it starts to yield meaning. My brother playing Hamlet in the fifteen-minute Hamlet, Yorick aloft over the shoulder and him moving on across the stage.

They are the spaces left by the successes of those far better than us at anything, of those to whom it comes most naturally.

They are half-afternoons spent in rings around the only pond for a hundred miles with girls.

They are the peed-on, plastic balls at the bottom of the McDonalds' playland flattened beneath the weight of what many of us perceive as fun.

Yes, Emma Ramey, they are vaginal.

Yes, Neal Bowers, they are forever twinning with each other.

Yes, Bruce Smith, they resemble diamond rings stamped all across my workshopped poem.

Yes, Olympians. Just yes.

Yes, Special Olympians, we know you can do it or you think you can, your mouths outfitted in o in slow motion.

These are apertures. They are openings. They exist in the thousands on our shoulders, in our mirrors, in the servos that click in our outdated floppy disc drives and send up puffs of smoke that mean the loss of data.

Yes, farmers with your irrigated circles seen from thirty thousand feet, I am talking to you.

Yes, preacher I see on television with the John Lennon glasses, you hippie you. Yes, lead singer of XTC, drummer for Yes with your thousand rings of sound.

Yes, my brother in sixth grade.

Yes the end of things it always comes in yes in dreams. It is the best, you dreams, when you give it to me that way, uncomplicated and pliant and unconcerned.

Yes, makers of the American version of The Ring who watched Depeche Mode videos until you had ideas.

Yes, Poets & Writers retarded article, "Nerd Alert: Where Are All the Badly Behaved Writers?"

Yes, cats who skitter the plastic rings across the floor.

Yes, gymnasts with your bars and rings and your dolphin moves through hoops afire with expectation.

Yes to all of this and all of you. I am talking about something here.

Yes to orts for Sandy, and yes to my many lonelinesses, each nestled inside each other.

Yes to Gerry and your clown baby poems that, let's admit it now, they more than blow. Each one a zero, a shaken etch-a-sketch, a handful of smoke, but more laughable than that.

Yes, you in that Goo Goo Dolls t-shirt, yes, that's you, Patricia Clark.

Yes, that's me with that Goo Goo Dolls album back in 1992 and the first inkling of my regret.

Yes to Sean, a thousand mouths surround you. A thousand miles and in each one an opening.

Yes to the Kreepy Krawly's circumnavigation of the pool.

Yes to the kittens on the Roomba.

Yes a thousand Roombas in a circular room, colliding and colliding.

Yes to discs in air and moving, backlit by the sun, individual eclipses, each one better than the better than the better than the last..

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