[text ID: But
you are my nomad and I love you sideways daily. Sideways because I have to beam
my love in all directions, hoping it bounces off something and eventually finds
you. /end ID]
[text ID: Let me tell you what I do know:
I am more than one thing, and not all of those things are good. The truth is
complicated. It’s two-toned, multi-vocal, bittersweet. I used to think that if
I dug deep enough to discover something sad and ugly, I’d know it was something
true. Now I’m trying to dig deeper. /end ID]
[text ID: How
you say it is how you think it. And, more dramatically: if you can’t say it,
you can’t think it. /end ID]
[text ID: Is there a problem you just can’t get your head around? And, if you can’t think it, how can you solve it? /end ID]
[text ID: People, they make it up as they
go along. They find connections between things where there aren’t any. They get
moody, they refuse things, they take it deep inside themselves and fold it into
something unrecognizable and then they set it down on the table. /end ID]
from Black Telephone by Richard Siken
[text ID: The phone rings and you pick it
up and it’s bad news. Now what do you do? / The phone rings and I pick it up
and I really wanted to do something else with my hands. /end ID]
[text ID: You
realize you’re a thing—taking up space and casting a shadow—you’re a dot, a
blip on the screen, something graphable hurtling irreversibly through
space-time on a trajectory set in motion by events that happened long before
you were born. /end ID]
[text ID: Just
because a thing’s invisible doesn’t mean it don’t exist, you think to yourself,
but still, there is no valid way to test it. /end ID]
[text ID: Sometimes you get so close to someone
you end up on the other side of them. /end ID]
[text ID: The
constant development of thing after thing, cause and effect, the inevitable
always waiting for you, up ahead, in the distance, as you inch reluctantly
forward. /end ID]
[text ID: I’m a romantic, an absurdist. I am bad with facts and I get
confused. I’m a hostile witness. I didn’t want to see this, talk about this. /end ID]