Be looking for your black holes.

Aa is sick today. He was maybe sick yesterday, and the day before, but tomorrow will be better. An old anthropologist grandmother gave him herbs from the bush, a long time ago. He boiled them to juice and made his sister drink. She crashed the car.

Smoking herbs from the driveway totally drives the eye of me crazy. Crazy is right, and why I’m fresh out of work, scraping exhaustion off the road.

Aa lies wrapped in his fever bed, on a straw mat outside the hut. His forehead shines and sweat darkens his pillow. Mold grows on his mind as he sighs into being a thing, into forming a word. Everyone hates writing, they say. Flicking at flies, shooting curious children, obsessing about a book, the anthropologist grandmother guards him.

At midday tomorrow he will light the fire. Not everyone in the village will eat. Fearing a neighbour’s jealous magic, I take care not to fall asleep.

The women ask, ‘What’s wrong with Aa?’ I say, ‘He’s tired from the journey. Resting. Tomorrow he’ll get up and tell us about everything: his job and wife and house. Do not worry.’

His body parts being measured, sure, enough to fend for that mind’s need to make shapes on more than one level and so, anyone’s. Ph.D.

Ingenuity comes in small packages beneath the staircase of forgetting. Words have gone cornering my mind, I think in order to break free of their meanings. The most minimum reminder keeps inner blindness away, anyway. As the sweat comes, Aa sees his sister’s altered face in the troubled surface.

I walk in the empty streets of Florence. Passing along forms is surviving. Bodies don’t always need to be present.

Yesterday I found a cell phone on the bus seat. Put it in my bag, next to my own.
Mr. or Mrs. “Ain’t Nobody,” know that your phone is going on a trip.

I was laying in bed delirious, sort of hallucinating for about 24 hours. I had this one vision in my mind of a place that was like the ark of buildings, like a modern hotel, with all these rooms made of concrete. There was an electronic eye which scanned everything. In one room you and what have you. In another room there was somebody just looking at himself in the mirror, just obsessed with himself. In another room there was a musician with a bank of synthesisers, wearing headphones, and there was no sound.