Amnesiac recoveries

Part One:

"and thus affectation spreads its asphalt across the comedies"

I get away
from the academy
and ........after breakfast
........dip in the green harbour
..................under sprinkling rain.

I know the war continues.
........on tv
............in the background of the frame
the investigator yawns.

that empty-to-the-stomach feeling
........as I enter the buildng
...............to begin
my twelfth year of toil.

I know how to fix everything
....but, obstinate in my resolve,
...........................................withdraw.

Rink Rage

The female witnesses were hysterical. You're going to kill him! not as thought but as eruption. A man in Goma carries a stuffed chair, black with lava. Do not trust memory; it fixes nothing. Elides, glides, glisters like television ice. Losing his football team was like giving a child up for adoption: who can estimate the pain? His life before us is not forgotten, more than implied. Developed and written by an active writer, The Author's Assistant offers features for all writers. Detailed character sketches help bring life to your characters. She knows how to fix everything, except this. Broken airplane, broken airplane! Boy in the fighter's cockpit tells his mother he wants to blow glass for a living. Who writes these scripts by which we render ourselves not on paper but through the flow that sounds like flaw, knight errants wandering limbless in the barenecked forest? Old manuals become literature, toasters museum pieces. I don't like where his work has moved. The Feds came to ask about missing computers. One agent had a warrant to ferret out over-looked literary movements, those scripted for the screen. If not of memory then of where it should have been. Affectation, withdrawn.

.............................rink malfunction

Sugar Land, where the old mill was. The Mercedes offered up a suicide and his note. When I asked what the dinosaur was doing in our tub, Sangha answered, he's eating cheese. Its holes are markets governed by fraud; they look you in the eye and they lie. Analysis in the post-analytical (and apocalyptic) age. Stock quotations are tautology. The question is not what you remember, but the conditions that make your memory possible. Ask the witness from what angle she saw the suspect smash his victim's head against the floor. Was she behind the vending machine or in front of the locker room, inside or outside the alcove where two men grappled? To what does she ascribe her inability to recollect? I can't talk about September 11 without alluding to American imperialism, but the subject just didn't fly for a while. Locate white privilege on Proust's questionnaire. Questions of agency will be returned to their sender for more postage. We share? he asks, employing a new word. Not a pension (those were stolen) but a pension. According to the Times, the university's reputation is as flabby as a Waikiki tourist. Where metaphor is act, a vehicle stalled in the median, awaiting word. She took photos of the killing fields, but they came back as shadows, or they do not come back at all

The investment banker sewed his lips shut. He'd arrived in a leaky ship, having paid dues to the dark haired man who answered to no name he could pronounce. Pronunciation is over-rated, he muttered to himself as he eased into the hold, arms bound in fetal position. His middle passage was punctuated (never leave metaphors of language behind, he added, pensively) by hunger pangs. No-name man told him nothing of the end, though his origin had been clear (he remembered, at least, his hard-earned MBA). He wanted to escape big words, like globalization, like fraud. Crusoe's accountant had nothing on his, member of the magic club in high school, artist of the extraordinary bottomless line.

In the end, it was hard to collect his story, through teeth clenched like broken-jawed Ali's. One had to assume consonants, or were they vowels, emerging as from some Afghan cave into the abortive syntax of a bombing run. What we heard had something to do with sea, and ground, and sickness. The south sea island that welcomed him (sic) has only years left before the flood (lawsuits are pending). On its coral, the banker sits, quiet as monk, though not so tranquil. He knows his days are numbered, so he counts them in his throat. If he were a poet, one might say he'd found his voice.