Digging a Hole –
Language is an awkward instrument for digging. Language finds not buried cities and circumstance, but silt. It is soil itself. What is required is the spade. And I am exhuming. The hole I’ve hollowed is deep and its dim depth narrows. Conversely, it widens as it empties. Looking down one sees concentric circles seemingly undulate the funnel, this worried loam. Like an archaeologist or a naturalist, it is the excavation’s walls, its unsophisticated and strafed grace notes; its strata verses impasto like Giotto’s frescoes, which sustain my attention. In the earth my treasures are buried. Still this isn’t straightforward spade work, but also gloss of location and rapport; a yawning geography not purely of what is found there, but the dirt and muck through which my fingers and hands cull, sift and pluck. The spade: the spade is memory, handle worn to a downy shine, blade caked in stubborn clay, dubiously intended in striking this fine mysterious core.

Ashes –
Kevin The Body smokes its last cigarette, smoke rising thin elegiac, adagio aria crimped. Taps the ash into my open hand; the slag looks akin to pallid skin. These ashes to ashes; this dust to dust, this persistent caesura; this peace, this dignity, this life. And I look up and the corpse is gone – again. In its place, an inkling in my spine and I see anew he’s there, flickering & pointing. Not away, as if fingering me accusatorily, but turned on himself – latens dietas – at the center of his chest afire. The word burns there for me, it burns there for you.

And I’m on my way – from misery to happiness today. Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh…

Simulacrum –
Box of filament and light. Electrical charge, a telephone line. And there you are. The missing, those that I thought I'd long ago forgotten. Each portal, each Web site a black hole for us to get lost in, for nothing escapes physics and memory. Everything goes out. Yet everything remains inside us. Waiting. A part of us always and when the time is right the faces and names come to us. Transmission, information theory; through the static of noise and dross, over the transom the lines are forever open and we only need to open them to ourselves. Pixeled, floating dots, fuzzy one moment and then turning slowly through space and time gelling together into a body, a person, a memory. An event, we are told, not so much as constancy, but possible. An event of space and time bending and singing, vibrating in front of us for God knows what purpose, other than to remind us we too are music and missing in the midst of memory and desire. At the end of lines, on screens, hidden until searched for in databases, in our selves, in the words uttered by those surprised by joy. Dasein always comes late, says Heidegger. It comes too late. For in so far as it does this presupposing as an entity it is, as an entity, already in the world. And so into your life I fall, into your world I crawl...into your life and into your life I go as I must go into yours as a late being already there a noise at the end of a line, the tip of a light found on a screen when you turn it on and seek me out...We are events. Falling, vibrating, sweetness...