“Thirty-three of me form a circle, speaking to each other without connection.”
I severed a road and grafted it onto my post-trauma vessels. Its daily throbbing is like a drunken pulse.
When I fell from the windowsill, Shinjuku lost power, and then the echo of sirens flung me into a night sky full of moons. I want to answer your questions about me with a sentence covered in paintings.
You ask whether or not I should move into the eye on the light bulb.
I walked steadily down the stairs, and as I watched the steps inexplicably circling back, extending downward without end, the bell rang. It was the bell of a maid cleaning a room. I was completely lost.
García Márquez smiled discreetly, and a magical hurricane swept above the rooftops. The market had its mast overturned by a spectacular juggler.
At the mouth of the sewer sat a warrior whose skin had faded. His canteen at his waist tipped over, washing the past and the grime into the abyss of rainwater.
Street scene, grain, smoke. Table talk and wind playing. Lament spread across brick walls. A king walks over in a swaying short-sleeve that smells of iron; behind him a water-sprinkler truck appears.
The summary column of the notebook is blooming with wisteria.
I only know how to write the program of insomnia when the machine cries out.
10
Protruding from the boundary—dividing the space, filtering out color, a solitary safety sign hides in the gap. Dust covers it the way personality covers me.
I am a chaotic person. So are you. Show me your chaos.
A garbage truck dragged me from the vastness of the universe into the nightmare of daylight. At the coveting edge of my eyelids, I see a storm of coffee grounds swallowing the night sky.
Tremble! Music inside the keyhole!
Dead, my dear—the echo of verses with no attachment.
Sunlight passes through my body’s shadow; I’ve merged with the scaffolding’s rail. This doesn’t make the rules spare my tendons, but for the water pipes, the wheel they live by evaporates in the devil’s peace.
Scraps of paper surge up from the water, like swans, like white sand. They dance into a resolution gladiator that makes paper jealous.
A newsboy in Boston got lost; it was his God that was swallowed up by the long gray fog. In the sound of wind chimes playing through a winter night, all his stories were wiped clean by the cold wind and the turning pages of elm trees.
Shimmering light, bridge, 休む, 途, 右, regimen, afternoon, reversing, trash, a wisp of cloud, mockery, overload, erosion, dark time, urban district, sampling, problem-fitting, smoke, grain, balcony, 無理矢理, 爪, grave, oil, elephant, stone, role-play.
The night sky once more records everything—film, blank space, light, and time—into a glass cassette.
I sink into the water, reflecting on the connection between fate and language. Under the sky’s melancholy glance, it seems as if every net has been sucked into a vacuum cleaner.
The antenna ghost drives its anvil-heavy foot into the ground. The cat on the phone puzzles over the missing digit in the number. From a hole in the corner of a building, I and a monster are engaged in the activity of picking up scattered nonsense.
Harbor. A fish eye staring straight up at the crescent moon. A lamp swaying. The one reciting poetry has already fallen asleep; the funeral boat moves toward the torch on the door. Can you understand their folk songs? I keep walking, into the midst of flowers. I feel that many things have disappeared. Yesterday’s things. Today’s things. I scatter a few maple leaves into the stream below the mountain. Today’s mountain is no different from yesterday’s.
I imagine the passing of some days, imagine a promenade, imagine an innocent lawn. It goes into the depths of my viscera just like certain meals, like the blankness before sleep.
Mom. It’s broken. I can’t get out.
On an ordinary day, let’s sing a fool’s song. A saxophone lives in the ribs of a thundercloud; feeling and silence drip down. How happy—a storm breathing on every one of my cells. I think I could probably rise beyond the atmosphere.
The clock face is fused with the ground. I climb up and keep moving the pointer of words. It isn’t connected to anything. I’m wondering what it is that can connect people to one another. I circle to the back of the clock, wanting to see what comes after, but all I can see is a series of gears turning along paths unknown to me. Today I prayed to the clock—tomorrow, to whom? When the clock is beheaded by God with a sneer, will I be displayed in a cabinet alongside it?
“One, two, three, click.” The photographer handed me the photo; I saw diluted buildings. In the stuttering of loading, I made out a few things that should never have been said. Those secrets became known to me. Through the semi-transparent film I concealed the exchange between blue and guitar. I guessed the guesses that shouldn’t be guessed, and suddenly guess and guess were guessing the guessing relationship between guess’s guess and guess and guess’s guess between guesses.
I, standing in the center of the open, am tilting. I know my lack of logic and my inability to command my body. Have you drifted away from me, floating lines of poetry? I reach out my hand and touch nothing, except rain running from my forehead—its performance of being my tears is a pitiable failure. I feel sympathy for the drama it stages for itself, which no one cares about. Should I take it to an aesthetic edge? I try to open a side door into lovejoy, but the everyday suddenly shuts me out; I’m locked in a cage of doubt and dread. Hello? Is anyone there? White replies with a pharmaceutical calm; everything bears the quality of a joke that cuts. One summer, a meeting with a dark-blue school uniform, a dying breath, an abandonment that makes the world shudder. From then on that summer was bled dry by a filthy mechanical beat, the innocent one was swallowed by the merry-go-round of desire, the summer downpour was still falling, I hadn’t been touched by a drop, but the rain vomited up layers of noise, and I slammed my head into the piano—the piano shattered into delete-key butterflies.
今、そして友達を大切にせよ。
The construction remains visible in the subway system harmonize with the system’s own incompleteness and ruin. They seem to mock the failure of industry and the opacity of the transit network. Like a tangled ribbon appearing in a knotted mess, a rusted pipe, weakly, peels open a mouth toward a new possibility outside the window. But when the flowing people pass over the mottled, uneven tunnel floor—do they also see the colors on the ground, the markings on the ground, the pebbles on the ground that seem to be calling out, and—underfoot, pauses and transfers, countless successive near-misses, and that faraway curved fold in the constellation?
Like me! Like me! Like me! Like me! Please! Like me! Like me… Please… Save me…
Sorry? Sorry. Sorry? Sorry. Sorry? Sorry. Sorry? Sorry. Sorry? Sorry. Sorry? Sorry. Sorry? Sorry. Sorry? Sorry. Sorry? Sorry. Sorry? Sorry. Sorry? Sorry. Sorry? Sorry. Sorry? Sorry. Sorry? Sorry. Sorry? Sorry. Sorry? Sorry. Sorry?
美しいものになりたい。
不思議.
I wrote these thirty-three inexplicable passages in chronological order. When I finished, I looked back at what I’d written, and honestly they’re the kind of draft-like things that should just be thrown in the trash. I doubted whether anyone could actually read through them, since I wrote them without thinking—what maid’s bell cleaning a room, what García Márquez. I kind of wanted to delete them right then. But to preserve the sequence of thirty-three, I’d have to write more if I cut anything. Did I need to do that? I kept flipping back, staring at each strangely shaped thing I’d written.
In the end I gave up—I didn’t even rearrange the order. What I’d written was really just a little odd inner mapping. Of course I intended for them to be seen, and I desperately wanted them to be seen—but I thought what would be seen was thirty-three versions of me, and the me writing this passage right now is equally incapable of representing all of me. This isn’t thirty-three splits of personality. It’s thirty-three knots of different shapes tied along the flowing ribbon of time, and through the splicing of texts, I’ve cinematically released the images of those thirty-three mes. I can rewind and watch what past versions of me looked like; I can stand at a different angle and appreciate, or examine, everything at the moment I wrote those lines—mood, state, relationships, weather, events, what I knew at the time. I know you have some impression of me—any kind of impression. I hope you don’t anchor me to the shell of any one of them. What I mean is: I hope that every time you see me appear, it makes you happy.
Finally, thank you to those who made it this far—thank you for watching, for tolerating the thirty-three faces of me. I love you. If you can really see this, please say something, or I won’t know who to love.
These thirty-three mes have gradually receded. The next time you meet me, it might be the thirty-fourth.