We spend all afternoon reading impenetrable texts like mystical objects, and when we look up the sun is ailing. It has been given too much meaning and it burns through us, so lazy and retrofitted with memory. To be open when we wish to survey and to be surveyed, that is the best case scenario. A best case scenario is a tactical move, analyzing the situation for its strengths and weaknesses. A stream of consciousness winds its way through the volley of selves below in the street sprung with gardens at the edges. Hydro-powered turbines start up, initiated by a single mouse click, a roving self-formation. To humanize it, we encounter a sprig of rhythm, jutting out of the wall we thought solid, undermining it. We implies a tour through lands of delight as well as suffering, and a distance from that morning. From the birds eye view, out the roving window, a study in grey and faded tones. An absolute grid or relative grids are suggested but not definite, as we can step away from the shutters on our route to the kitchen for a cup of tea with purple antioxidants. Carving the notice onto a playful scrim, a trade off, and then erasing it, we rebound from intimacy into a bone enclosure.
Progress is overrated, if by progress we recall a lonely cyclist on a road dreaming of a mid-life crisis Aston Martin. Hello, cyclist. Hello, direct swathe of imperiled sky. Temp workers glide by the destabilized progress report of confidence, immanent sense. From where I stood by the endless bar, I could tell the rest of the war-pack there I was in pain. We stood by in pain at the frondless air. To be meek, to sight under the tamped-down light, lunging toward a treat. Don’t shake hands with your landlord, shake your multicolored arms, bound chests, bound bodies in trouble which did that to themselves. To take pride in a barracuda well done, we’re falling into lyceum greens. Oh grass, handle our denial responsibly, with a soft hand just inches above cables, I-beams, circuits in the meat. With a soft hand that doesn’t float around the room, but lands astray. I’m stumbling into the doorway of my residence, pushing out the air.
Tim Peterson lives in Brooklyn and edits EOAGH: A Journal of the Arts. New work is forthcoming in Aufgabe and Sonora Review. Peterson's book Since I Moved In received the Gil Ott Award from Chax Press. Additional chapbooks have been published by Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs and Faux Press(e).