hope_from_absence ClairE It's the lack that draws you forward. 040304 ... werewolf draws you forward into many things. 040304 ... ClairE Into everything; all possibilities dart forward into the dark, and the world huddles on the other side, unseen. 040304 ... werewolf we've barely grown from children, seeing the world by rolling it like film around our soft, tasting, infection prone mouth. 040304 ... ClairE Life only comes in brief flashes now, and her body always limping behind. She dreams of hands, a smile, one afternoon walking down the sidewalk. She neither feels compassion nor outrage, unless you cared to term her bewilderment. Emotion comes in laughter and silence. Waves against a boat. Memories lined up one in a row. Day by day, was she dragged or did she reach out and pull herself along? 040304 ... werewolf if you've seen too many of them, cathedrals start to look like factories, and vice versa. so you hold on to one or the other, and it pulls you into certain days like a wedding ring. barbeques, swimming pools, casual fridays. happy birthdays, a peaceful death with blankets. all because one screaming day, a day you almost asked a homeless man for the purity you were sure he was hiding in his slot machine eyes behind the quarters and the begging, all because one screaming day, you chose certainty over understanding. you refused to tear down the cathedral. you refused to tear down the factory. you refused certain distinctions and accepted others, because you knew they were poison. without ever knowing what you would've even lost. without ever knowing, what you could've built in their stead. 040304 ... ClairE Today you were walking the long way around pine trees and soggy ground, and you said, "We are saved by a lack of comprehension." We were never told what lay ahead. Could this be grace after all? A kind of deliverance, to place expectation on the shelf, quite out of the way, all in order to blaze a new trail. Brambles in your wrist, you think of your throat torn out, of how dragging nails down your arm matches the plummet in your stomach. 040304 ... werewolf it's not so much unwittingly that matters, but unwittingly good or bad. we live to accept certain offerings: fresh fruit in halves in the morning, receptacles made of sugar covered in sugar her hair twisted around my hand like reins, i'm good enough by accident or a plan. a child with our eyes, a chance to see it go better. and we greedily accept it all, sedating the question of how or why. if there is a god, perhaps we are in its image, questioning, trying to see further than it can, trying to see what people expect of it, or secretly hope for. our range smaller, but so too our days. and for the certainties beyond us one way or another what to do? should i say something? was this the job to take, isn't it a blessing to be a character, to put our heads down and drone on, like the twisting of a corn stalk in the wind. to sigh, and say my ending is my personality, it's my beginning as well. we don't know why we are bursting with life, why we can create and destroy. we don't know if at the end of time, there is forgiveness for judas or kissinger as one forgives the shaking in their hands that made them pick up the bottle, or the instant reaction of fear that let a child die or a co-worker be chastized or whatever failing there is to know. if we were just a moment of god. we could forgive ourselves. we are not the intent, just the graceful arching of the fingers as it touches a face it should never have touched. just that moment of kinetic purity. to feel the pulling pressure of nails down our arms mirrored in our stomach and hope for infinite regress is not enough. to earn it, to know the sensation is yours, is to carry it. is to threaten your yesterday and tomorrow with its erasure or stability. is to have to carry it with you on both sides of eternity, and to know what it is to be blamed or praised, the expectation, that you had at some moment, the power to stop god. to be the very hand of god, falling flat or rising, in disaccord with the blurring mass of pleasure and pain on all sides of you, outcast from eden either way, but free too from the hell it needs certain of its inhabitants to endure. 040304 ... ClairE There is knowledge without conviction. The point is that only people make me cry. What was once my standard is wilted and crushed on the carpet. Not only will they not believe, they don't even understand my loss. The flat sound of consolation does not require patience. To have stolen off not only with my loss, but its memory besides, was a blessing, and the bottle sanctifies. If you ask the why of this location, know that we are at a remove from history, agency, geography, and almost barely, forward motion. For every act you'd still be able to say everything's all right. And for the closing rhyme? Good_night. 040304 ... werewolf yes, no matter what happens, everything will be all right. how could it be otherwise? 040304 what's it to you? who go blather from