I lost my name and I stepped onto this corner, this half frame, the axis. It was empty in that moment. White space, cousin to the black hole. I had my face, my feet, my duration in time.

One small step onto vertical Y and horizontal X, at the crossroads between familiarity and human likeness. I could keep walking into this space, eating this time, and drawing it into me like thread through the hole of a needle. I could stitch it to me.

The positive rising into infinity—an arrow on which familiarity travels without limits. Rope to heaven. Fraying, frayed.

The negative descending not into infinity but into dusk, oblivion, the nihilism of Freud’s unheimlich. We have always known, we humans, about holes.

“Although the term [black hole] was not coined until 1967 by Princeton physicist John Wheeler, the idea of an object in space so massive and dense that light could not escape it has been around for centuries.”

The opposite of what is familiar is infinite possibilities of startling encounters.

One after another, after another.

How much of one’s life can one spend on the approach?

There is not always a name for what is [unheimlich].

Two lines, each like one train track, travel through space—to plunge into the valley.

Moving _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

still ______________________________

My performance of childhood rode both rails. This machine of love. This language machine. This hole made for survival. The hole was like a shadow that changed at will. The spaces between moving and still widened and narrowed and rushed and plunged and lazed like a river.

Act natural, act natural.

My father built a robot,

a creature of industry,

a tool with a perfect face and perfect thoughts.

A memory made of magnets.

I crawled into its inner space.

My memories, now holes,

pooling above each temple.

My mother gave me a creature,

a toy, a “stuffed animal,”

one without a motor but with a string I could pull

to hear its voice

over and over again.

It was not difference, but repetition.

It could not dance or sing, but it could travel.

It could fall lightly into holes.

Others who pass too close to me may be subject to certain processes.

“If a black hole passes through a cloud of interstellar matter, for example, it will draw matter inward in a process known as accretion. A similar process can occur if a normal star passes close to a black hole. In this case, the black hole can tear the star apart as it pulls it toward itself.”

Two gorgeous words:        toward        itself

My dreams are the ivory gates, the bone gates, the accordion, a mouth, a mind, that same floret splitting away from its hard, dark face. Some bulbs are good for eating, some are good for sleeping, repairing, emitting time like a bomb. Radium.