I ate it.

“Slowness is a formidable power;

It has the passion of immobility

With which it will someday fuse.”

Number one – and

Two:

That to study philosophy

Is to learn how to

Die.

Two

I like it when we give the world to itself

Folding it to it

Like a soft-shelled taco. Hi, God.

I said in the photo’s caption.

It’s Aisha.

I volunteer.

I do.

I did it.

I did.

I had to.

I have to.

I have to live.

Ruth taught me M.G.’s dance in which one imagines herself held by a giant blue woman named Eureka

The performance of which

Begets the knowledge that I’d been dancing as if

Alone

An axial dance

Rotating on a centre inside myself (like a stick or a stalk) but with

Eureka behind me

The axis was everywhere

Which made me think of my mom

So I b-lazed

And then shaking upward from the floor to my crown felt

Generations of pain.

And then an image of my mother laughing hard and bright

Quizzed me

And from my feet again

To, this time, my halo

Generations-of-joy waves

Pulsed

And a door swung open in the centre of my chest

Revealing a giant passage

For of

Love

I can

Could now

Take it.

That was June.

I can’t believe I agreed to go to work today.

That was so dumb of me.

I hate money.

And I hate sitting down.

I fold in half

Documents destined for the shredder.

I leave flat the ones to be scanned into patient charts.

I consider how long stickers have rested on the glass

Protecting me from potential

Disease and violence

Of the people.

The first time I came here I was late, I was scolded

I was bleeding.

I barely even cared

Fuck, look:

When I start to bleed

I have to eat.

One headline said 5 minutes early is on time;

On time is late; late

Is unacceptable.

The other headline said optimists are usually late.

The last said cultural differences

Around time something-something.

I took a screenshot.

I wonder what the point is though when I can

Merely live.

I am an angel but I respire.

I drink a cold red juice.

It’s Sunday in the truth study centre remember when I was sleeping, freezing

And so put my cashmere coat on upside down?

And reached down and from the floor of your room

There black and soft inside my grip was a jacket made of rabbit and I made my

Face and shoulders smooth in it?

“The Bay Area”

The hallway.

It was a good hallway – light. It had air.

I said to her our destiny

Is beyond this hallway – and

What did we see outside?

A man.

I climbed to his stoop and I sat beside him.

I rubbed his back. He was old

And small.

He was telling me something important

That I don’t remember

But I remember that then he said something that made me stop