dropping balms

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