I was often guilty of library theft. I stole books to save them the way other people read. What's said in English appears quite small and can be smuggled out easily. Books with big titles speak of pleasures which crack at the end of a rope. Blind windows in between the shelves. Photos of a mind recalling a word. I learned to slash hours off my reading time by pronouncing words faster than they could pronounce themselves. Faraway and foreign. I sound better when you write me here, instead of when I'm being written there.

This was serious zoology. Memory loading skimming underneath the sunroof and all of us keen to avoid any talk of nervous systems, as if they could be flown out of the phonelines like paper planes. What's newer, he asked, than the telescope but older than television? Everyone ducked when the transit cops cruised by. He had played a magic spell, or something almost magic.

The blanker the dream, the fewer impurities there are in the narcissism of sleep. She couldn't bring herself to untie the know tied by a now dead friend. Once, she broke camp by wearing a doubling device. That is, it could telegraph two dreams at once. A mystic in the popular mode, she could move around the laboratory conversations, no spills, no caustic fumes. Some sweet disorder in her dress. Her pilgrimage tilted us toward ignition. A curtain later came between our wishes.

Some day they will write about the guidebooks. The ones that got us here. Our world rolls out, a bruise of passions ringing round dead thoughts. I wanted to talk about the way you seem to see me. My errand in your wilderness, this metaphor of god knows how many parts. Do something else to me. There is a Niagara-sized fire in my living room wall. The smoke recalls our sexual lathe. I had this hallucination installed in my home to save me from a Jonestown style basement life.

Study this audio portion of my loveless ground. A topographic souvenir of mass conversions held in a parking lot behind the Sears. It weathered repeated discovery by grassland people. But no one allows word of this cauterized zone to be printed or sung about. During planting time, a lone messenger appears poolside, his spirit worn down from listening to unmodulated guitar music. He begins with words of air to heal our brokeness and drag us from these chapters of flesh.