Concerning Action

1. To avoid self-destruction, hop. To hop, bend your legs at the knees and then push off. Take care not to bend too far, or too shallow, or you will not find the next stone. You are traversing a void interspersed with floating rocks. What are these rocks, ask. Use your imagination. (You are my dream, my absolute dream.)
2. A good action is not necessarily meaningful. It is also not sufficient. It is not the same as kindness. Sufficient for what? (I am good enough for you. I am good enough.)
3. I take you. In my mind. In my eye I take you with every mobile part of me, especially my brain, which has many folds. Nothing is as interesting to me as death, so I take it and give it to you. You and me, my love, two finite flagella in a sea of love. Remember Sada? She was the real Lady Lazarus. I want to kill too. I want to take you and carry your softness around in newspaper. You are the soup that fills my skull. You are a criminal, no better than I. You will be hanged because the word we’re guessing at doesn’t exist. Vladamir will tell you about the excitement, what is swift and violent. (All the better to take you with, my little red riding hood.)
4. Dreams are the perfect act. In dreams, anything can be taken back. Infinite roads bend back into themselves, rings within rings like a tree. Yesterday, I amputated my heart. If only there were a new word for it. It was pale, small, and the color of blanched skin with a little bit of pink and blue. It felt like something from a man, bunched and helpless and full of seeds. I put it in a Ziploc bag and like many before me wanted to return it, but I was weak from the surgery and there was nobody behind the desk. So I planted it somewhere. (I did.)
5. Don’t eat before you sleep! Don’t think before you leap! I eat feasts before bed because that makes my dreams more real. And I do think before each leap. I think about my quadriceps, the space between my legs, my appendages flopping. Then I think about conditionals. What if I make it to the other side? Then I jump and turn into a speck of dust. If and only if. If and only if. The words scroll in my brain. You can tell anyone anything if it happened in a dream. (But what if you are a dream. What do I tell myself.)

PROSE WINDOW

He met a girl in diving class with transparent flippers. She owned a camera and a mirror and brought both with her when she dived. Actually, she carried both around with her everywhere. Wukong wondered if she even kept the camera around her neck when she bathed or changed. He became fascinated with the way grammar did things to people. When she put different clothes on or took them off, she changed. It isn’t supposed to say anything about her essence, but Wukong knew it did. He had conch shell from when Bodhi vacationed in Australia and brought it back with him along with some mother of pearl paper weights. He turned the conch and put it to his ear once, but all subsequent experiences with the conch consisted of looking at its underside, the withered yet wet mouth. When he looked at the girl with transparent flippers, he knew that if he looked at her underneath side, he would be able to hear a sound of the wind leaving, or water falling. It would be salty. It would be alive. It would contain a creature with a heart that used no arteries or veins but whose blood bathed its organs in a single cavity. He thought of doors as smacking, windows as puckering. Every opening meant access to the sea now, or the wind on the sea.