today at the home when we came in there were four women singing together in a room full of older people sleeping. they were singing words without music, "oh i want to go home now, but the water is too high, oh i want to go home now." their voices were old and out of tune and strange in the room following my mother to wake my dad who almost never looks up these days from the ground.

later my mom told me that the song was a song one of the women had written and begun singing to herself around the home for weeks. at church sermons in the home on sunday she would sing it instead of hymnals, though on the days outside of church she would steal the tune. in this way others began to pick the song up. now they sing it often in long loops.

later in his own room my father recognized the first thing i've seen him recognize without prodding in the last few times i've seen him, the brief prechorus of an old 60s soul song that goes "oh oh oh." he sang it as if he had been cued to join in, then went back to trying to put the cookie on the floor.

there must be 8 more replicants of 7 to complete the 7 sets of 7 sets of 7 comprising the fourth section of the text which has no beginning and no end

nobody really actually believes anybody else or often listens
many of the things i have loved best i have never even seen
tonight the light coming through the red curtains has it apple-shaded enough to want to bite through, i think of someone's skin, i think of my skin
any hour i don't talk to my mother i am growing very old
though often when i am actually around my mother my skin makes such loud noise i can hardly think
another house
i should probably bite the skin and eat it and digest it, it would birth a set of clothes
i would wear the clothes and go near people, it would stink loud
today at the glass door to the backyard the blue bird from yesterday appeared again he seemed to knock twice i was looking for food
two bananas and various forms of pretzel dipped into wettish substance i read your instructions for how to not want to eat, the worm of slight repetitions under long mind, something stretched in big sound of fire at an asp
in the bathroom i read john cage saying in so many words because there is no message there need not ever be response
the buttons on this machine could find a way to type a message to someone larger than this home i'm sure but i don't have the sight inside me any more this year or i am too smushed or stupid or there is the color of my bones
i don't think i need to be any body ever over numbers, there could exist a perfect mall, another one and i could buy a machine that stitched itself against this one here and sent itself into the center of the lock
the rhyming machine the color machine the ten boxes of brownie mix
my father's ring somewhere hidden in the house unless mom found it, i can't not remember which, i can't not remember if i actually can not remember or if i am willfully allowing disambiguation in the name of saying something more indirectly in the hope that something like a hole or god could find its way into the stupid typing these days do not even demand but more likely give me something i can bend, something worth laughing at in public and ignoring every night now that i have been remaindered now that everyone is grease
can't even remember the last time i saw an insect other than the one i crushed the other night under a soft book
i had not read the book and likely never will

the machine in my house won't stop beeping, someone is there
around 4 am i climbed onto the bathroom again and tried to hoist
black shit on my arms, found pieces of the swiffer under my pillow
sometimes there is this weird dark dust on the seat of the toilet
i think i talked to the two men in the guardroom for 15 minutes about god
but they were talking about ladders and i kept trying to close the door
"Here he moved, to and fro, from the door to the window, from the window
to the door; from the window to the door, from the door to the window;
from the fire to the bed, from the bed to the fire; from the bed to the fire,
from the fire to the bed; from the door to the fire, from the fire to the door..."
i need to begin again at something, no food, no light, no speech, no persons outside
get a little longer in your mind's bitch before i come back and there's a darker knob
make a sandwich have a baby bring me the plastic doll i asked for age three to have something to beat the shit from and did not get until it was too late

"what we were then each for himself and for the other

glued together like a single body in the dark the mud

how at each instant each ceased and was there no more either for himself or for the other vast tracts of time"

I had microsoft word summarize the sections I have deleted so far from my nonfiction ms about sleep into 100 words or less, here's what it said:

In my head the light went white. I lay face-up in my bed, the room full of a soft light. The color of all sound. The light contained infinite terror, growing slick up my insides. The light continued. A gone light.
The circuit woke.

The horror of bodies, speech. If the sleepwalker walks through unknown cities then there must also be a language for the people there lit inside the tunnels of the head.

Dern shoots again. The same light. Piano sound. Dern shoots again. Exits.

i have changed my name to joey, please only refer to me as joey from now on if you refer to me which isn't required

pretty much on the desk here there are a few things including a letter from my mother about why her computer does not work and a red marker and a black marker and a chip clip but no chips

i can't stop saying the phrase 'they were eating it up like dowgs' which is something that a now dead person said in one of his several hundred recorded songs. the phrase has learned to override the words coming out of other people too

the other day my mother put her hands on both my sides and said that i looked very thin

i have already this year read more books than i read last year because of the bike machine which by the time i am finished with each session has two huge pools of sweat beneath the parts where my arms are above it during the time i ride on the bike that does not move. many of the people who bike or lift or run will come and wipe down the machines they've touched when they are finish but i don't do that. the other night there was a corner of a piece of velveeta cheese on the concrete it made me sad

i don't like the guard guy who won't ever raise his hand or speak to me no matter how directly i say hello or wave at him, i think he talks to other people fine

i think big boi was grillin out with some of his dudes by our pool the other day, he was turning meat with a large silver thingie

there are games you can make up it is fun when you make up games it is like there was something waiting to be played all this time and you found it just like that

i am conie the sellfish punk but i would rather be conie at the stroke of midnight like my sister is

have you read prunebomb

have you eaten anything great

things are pretty nice if you like them

"there is also disappearance, contagion, military murder, telekinetic fire, hurricane, catastrophic subsidence, infant death, mutation, being eaten by animals, oceanic evaporation, suicide, glutinous rain, quicksand topographies made of mud, sky lesions, a massive wall overtaking the earth and total flooding of the landscape... Far from an escape into some sort of monumentalism of destruction, this anti-realistic concentration of ruin perfectly zeroes in on our inveterate inability to actually picture the end, to consider its lobster. It’s in this act then that the true momentous dismay and oppressive compulsion to want to avoid disaster that the inevitability of apocalypse should spirit into us (but doesn’t) is recuperated in the form of an apocalypse of such total immensity it could never come telling us that we risk facing not the impossible but the all too possible."

--- David Rylance, from an essay on my body of work, The Darkest Fits of Light: on dwelling in Blake Butler's de-compositions

Massive thanks to David for this beautiful, generous, and transcendent (beyond myself) text.

this house is getting smolderer

the emotional monologue about speed eating in Taxidermia is the big light

"Will you forget when I forget / that we are come to that"

coming up out of the pool water opening my eyes at the same time today i saw my father in a fraction half-deleted standing halfway between me and the house turned profile and much younger with his head down he was wearing all white the gray of the house in partial shade matched exactly the shade of the concrete of the deck and in the instant of his pixel damaged body disappearing again in the shaking off the water from my face skin and my hair it was as if i had become living in a version of the house left otherwise somewhere else which in the lapping level of the water at my chest was the year my mother found me facedown in the deep end and the gray was also on the air

"A girl who's riding with neither spurs nor stirrups is trying to make her white mare go into the ocean; the mare is shying water is spurting out from all sides under its shaking hoofs among the clear laughs of the Amazon whose body is as sharp and bright as metal, suddenly, what I see, in this shifting light this."

i gave blood to the red cross eleven times today
i drew up a bunch of badges with different names and costumes
the one lady with the cookies recognized me after the 6th giving and wouldn't let me have any more cookies
she winked about the blood part, she had diamond grillz
now i'm emptied out pretty good
i hired a mexican woman to drive me home, her name was portcullis, i shit you not
i'm going to have a baby