did I ask you to read this? did you come here because someone sent you?
I don’t pretend to understand
except when I do
there’s not an ounce of joy in these fingers
the stiffness sticks, waiting for movement moment
one thumb down, one thumb up
die
live
context-consciousness creating self-consciousness, as the soul waffles between speaking an utterance that will float away on the breeze and be lost to clouds… and articulating new Canon for The Book
if I write a book, it may out-live me
if I write a book, it may kill me a little
not the hours spent writing it, though they will surely be gone
but the artifact itself, static in a changing world
tens of thousands of copies—hundreds of thousands if I’m lucky
—of words attributable to me, uneditable
they’d better be good!
but, unless I go mad, they can’t be as good as my new understandings months or years or decades hence
and yet I saw a book get a new edition with so many additions its lost its life too
director’s cuts that preview to laughs
the author is dead
the work is alive
the work is not in the words, it’s in the dance
it’s in the remixes, not just the mashups that show up cited but in the tickling of axons and dendrites in each person who reads it
you know what I mean?
who cares if you know what I mean? why do they care?
I ask because I care: it seems to me that in the absence of some specific caring, we can’t even begin to answer the question of whether you know what I mean
the faucet, having sputtered at first, has begun to flow
and so I depart
