an exercise

Take the first book you encounter (Thalia Field's Incarnate: Story Material; I pick it up from the top of one pile as I was across the room...)

Choose 10 words (randomly, flipping pages back and forth... a variety of nouns and other things...)

Write something

Spell
Slug
Sewers
Concrete
Salt or fog
Circuit
Violet
Warehouse
Cell
Chronic

Notice: the s and c words…. Happenstance


chronic infatuation in a space of salt and fog,
violet: a circuit relays individual blades
confined to the safety measures
of unrequited electricity.

a warehouse, a cell, a concrete passage
of misinformation,
containing only walls (painted violet), sewers
for what finds its way out
into the words into the world,

the otherwise chronic
stare from afar, lingering,
shielding eyes that burn too close,

from behind walls a slug moves through causes a stain
on the floor,
imagine,
when the light appears,
what color it will be.

an activity

The hanging folder of time carried through contents filled

No that’s too wordy

There is a lot of crap in that folder

Green cover

Sage is my new color

A list of nouns…hat, icicle, (lost) acquaintance, (on a) day (like) today, (pink) mold, scissors

Cover to cover and between the sheets

I want to tell you also that the contemporary condition in which I find myself nameless

A difference of (seeming) together but veiling parts, my fragment

On the shelf, next to ________’s brilliant __________

Take the list of words

Sentences

Step 3 of the paragraph completion process

Just the facts

And the nouns

Tomorrow another part

Adverbs

Help to make the sentence

whole

these hard economic times or this house is very large

Well the summer’s come to an end and now rain and the local animal shelters are filled to capacity.

I only had a cat once when I was young. It wandered onto the porch. Then wandered into the house. We fed it. I loved it. I think one day my mom found it dead in the basement. I shouldn’t say “it.” This cat had identity. He. We called him Benny for some reason, some particular reason now unknown to me. She told us he was hit by a car. Buried him in the backyard under the tire swing under the big walnut tree in the very back corner.

Before that, years before, I had a dog. It my mind he looks like one of those long-haired, black and white sheep-herding dogs of some kind. But I think he was really all mixed up. He was good, we were friends. But he liked to escape the yard and bite people. After my mom had to pick him up from the pound a couple of times, she took him in to stay. I don’t think she made up any stories about this. Maybe I was too young to argue.

My mom’s youngest sister, the youngest of 5 girls had a dog as a child. The dog died. They told her he was sent off to be a seeing-eyed dog for blind kids. She believed this until she was well into her adult years.

The Dearborn animal shelter is housing cats in trailers out back because it is overfilled. A cat you can leave home alone. But I wonder, how would I like a cat, and how would the cat like me?

the end of something, or

to start again

or

the circularity of

this