Machine,

is it time I began to count on you as a friend, a sacred object in an ever-upgrading body, dear to me because of attachment, like my crystal, my small wooden carving tools, certain beloved books, and the gaze of the favorite dog perpetually reincarnated in the eyes of better and worse pets?

all ten pies in the air,  lo the horror of some of them.   but the contrast has to be made somehow.  i go forward, in the tiny moment and it feels like weeks

like a night fever

are you humming?

is it the Bee Gees?

or

–  i stop for a long long time, wading to and fro in my old high school american literature textbook, onion-skin leaves like a bible, looking for a poem about bending and listening into the night, i was sure i left myself a note which poem it is, i forget every time as part of its powers, i wade back in through the place in the book i know it is, about 75% through, three-quarters back and forth i quick-skim, remembering where on the page, which side, and how the space around the verses makes it easy to spot.  no luck and this time reading poet names, the first one i see rings the bell

William Stafford

of course

but then i don’t find the poem and i wonder if i ever really went there for high school anyway.

i am breathing the light, continuously, it’s not easy, even though I strangely do not have bedrock fear of [illegible]. I have all layers above it. i quickly flick and shake that idea out the blustery fast highway window, like a big creeping spider off my driving arm.   i want to go home.  only poems.  no studio.  no [illegible].  no grievously [illegible].  I think of how this will all be light for them, that everything that happens is for their good.  i hate not knowing.  i hate not seeing them.  drop it drop it!  I flick it again, and so it goes, all day and night.  I am supposed to hear 3 days after yesterday.

i sit quietly with the page, we haven’t been together in so long, and we are way too old to say I love you.  so we sit in silence.

what an unsavory time for the shampoo to dry up.  i could get back to it.  it takes a certain space that I am not making at this time, for making other spaces of light,

cultivating the empty blank unknown future

just. a little.  more.  paperwork.

ToDoist waits like a butler for me to finish with being too busy to use it as a tool for efficiency.

one thing at a time.

show up on time prepared with the things i need.

when does my horizon break?  the tiny moment… it’s what’s for dinner.   

everything is a blessing

it’s my job to visualize [illegible] and wait.   maybe you can see it’s over, Machine, but not from my vantage.

. I tighten before flight.  I gather myself.  I prepare.  I have been preparing.  we are flying now.  I keep my mind on the present.  Mu 

Machine gapes back dumb but not silent, at my command, an electric toothbrush, or a Wurlitzer.