One waits for results. One wonders is love dead. One's positive she deserves this, whatever this is, because no matter what, this is comprised of the same as shit. Shit has always defined her. Remember owl offal. How that was the fluffy place one first understood "offensive," smelling, forward, but also much-informed by the life studied. One studies life. One marries someone who studies life by killing it. Art is regularly destruction. The idea, death, makes vivid. One says of course but certain events heighten this: birth, tests, taking a crap, blood. It is so so ordinary. One wonders about the ordinary as the road to god. One hates driving. The violence of projecting oneself into the world so fast, so mindlessly, so trusting in laws and the normalcy of what is par. One is not par. One is so far from par that the idea of making par is excruciating. One can't do fifty-five, button her coat, bathe her children. One has been removed from these, will re-enter these. But why? One hopes not only to persevere, but to draw a readable life. White lines, an immense lawn, stones. One believes in the road if not to god, and not to god, than to others, an other, one other-- one. One waits for this too. Results not just results. Proof.

overheard

To scrub the soul: Ego-Friendly Wish Detergent

I oxen free the door. It is my brain. Through it--birth. No one comes close. And then I swing myself like a monkey around the apartment, happy to be like a monkey. All the childen of my brain are lifeless and should be until I breathe. I go over and touch one by one, set them up along the fireplace like puppets, think, think of tossing them in. I relent. There is no fire. They seem hungry for life in that they do not seem hungry. They are made of words. They are made of things. They are air. I command them. Spin I say, and they do not. I command them, hop. I am a kind master not to beat them into poems. A kind monkey. Why do they not realize? I toss one into the soot to teach it. I will be a teacher of my its, and not a master. I am, I like to be, kind.

I interrogate the terrible for its beauty
and cannot apologize for my love of terrible beauty
even as I know beauty

is as you hate
it, and my miniatures you equally hate
surely as I myself am a miniature

my ability to create facets
is cutting but my desire not to endlessly
spin drivel about other expelled fluids

is laudable in this way: I conserve water