She stood shirtless on the hardwood and said that the neck is the prettiest part of a woman. "Cou, in French," she said and I wished I was there. I was busy writing an equation to convert space into feeling and she had to speak alone. "You think too hard about becoming obscure, you can never be a color in the distance," she continued, "and you must stop moving." I knew that I had bought too fully into the image of anxiety, but I didn't realize how difficult it was to find an empty room. "Anything can happen when you have a place," was the mantra I adopted at a young age, and she seemed to understand. She turned to face the only mirror in the room and played with her hair. "If you had the confidence of dreams, your heart wouldn't bother you. Try to forget your youth." All the tired kids tried to ply the day with words, gave up and returned to sleep. They talked about strip malls and houses in fields. They talked about the sky and the roads. "Eventually you'll get it," the brownhaired girl said, retiring to her sheets and pillows in the doorless room.

Conquest wasn't the thing, but it wound up looking like it. The only thing i've wanted without the abandon of boyish greed is a room with hardwood floors. By the next day, you'd never know that someone was able to tread water for seven hours before giving in. The lake doesn't look any different afterwards and you say that life takes too long to start but you started waiting too early and drowned yourself in expectations before anything else. I would offer to wait, but I spent so long shuffling through hours of shopping carts and empty parking lots. I've had it both ways though: I've sat on a porch in the rain and dreamed about space while you told me half-remembered thoughts from weeks previous. If the waves ever die down, we might make it out. If the waves ever die down, we might make it out. I had another dream i thought was real. The buildings of the city drove about on roads and we were together on the wrong side of a four-way intersection. They moved without wheels and obscured our view of the moon and the stars. All the lights were out and we had to feel the buildings inside of us to tell when they would move. Offices and stores sat tense where the two roads met and we had to intuit our way across. We dashed to the other side and I went about my day as if this had been a part of the ill-remembered night before. It wasn't until the afternoon that I realized we were never in such danger. On figuring it out, I stood perfectly still.

I found a girl who would bring me tiger balm and water lilies. The idea of discovering a common language has always fascinated me. You might have been a savant of love, rolling around yelling in the grass and touching me with your feet. But the comedown from a runners high is the fastest thing I've known. In my newfound boldness I abandoned you to geography and put on a better fitting life. I imagined you picking leaves off a tree and calling them sister when I locked up your dreams as a city. My shoulders still fade sometimes from the shame of crushing a crystal with the weight of palpable time. I stopped telling stories, and this is me, failing to apologize like the autumn wind. I know a gaze can't heal the land.

My laptop is dying, and we stopped writing letters too long ago to care. I know that i grew up in jersey and that you're a car that's convinced it's crashed and i know you don't smoke. we're talking in opposite directions, but never have I seen so much flora in an approach. Plants grew up in noir films telling themselves they have to be poison to be pretty. I have learned and forgotten that one needs to build truth in order to keep it six, maybe seven times, but i'm the same as i was when it was six o'clock, and i know that when i wake up, i'll feel better knowing my hands than people. I've been lying again,. i've been couching my failures in the language of uninvited love instead of the semantics of knowledge. Every tumbling phrase is a reversion to a single soothing sentence i heard long enough ago to forget completely. I'm probably getting something here, but i don't know if it's more than i found exploring the southern poles of what i remember from when i was smaller: one move per turn, one motion per moment.

~interview~

Everything is beautiful but I tell myself I can't rub rivers out of my hands alone. And even though I am sure that a true capitalist can have no friends I can squint and see their logic written on the backs of nice napkins and immigrant workers Instead of listening to me you should type them all into Wolfram Alpha and see what you can set to filter out. I have made so many homes in time that I can still feel my bones move from nowhere to nowhere else, all at once. I carry the thought of you like the memory of 8 months of seasickness after one side of my head changed course. I'll never take pain killers again or even laughing gas and even now i can talk myself into a panic attack when I'm not carrying a pack of gum and a bottle of water and i know its a fake addiction but its all i've got now or then. And I've fallen for the idea of making myself vulnerable to you. i've never known such danger as our talks but by getting laid in public parks and you're still just a thought and i'll come to you the day that i can build cubes from smoke and gesture. I've always said you spoke in right angles if you can find a woman of sincere love you'll be a river running through a black and white surrealist film in a darkened bar. the dice will roll but it won't be that you have bet anything. you'll be able to be happy and be able to think yourself into being a cat or a camera on a kite string you will talk to crowds about nature and the feeling of running and you will give five empty syllables to the sky and the rain, boulders will call you by name boulders will call you by name