silk-spun, on the sly

Eyes leave the head after a few hours of lying in bed trying to sleep, covering and uncovering bare feet with white sheets. The effort in between, empty attempts to refine the body and its temperature in perfect climate and sanctified habitat, struggles for a stillness so forced and contrived it expels all calm. Muscles tense in increments and eventually expire, exhausted and agitated, offering nothing except submission: eyes float back above while another uncovering of a foot, sometimes an arm, a few fingers, poke and prod the inelastic removal of winks. Those fingernails, chewed and pyknic, nudge with rubber skin the recurring images of thoughts remade as tangible blocks keeping the body here and there, compliant and unwilling. Around this time, it’s impossible to resist interrogating those blocks, but there is a strategy: in the precise moment of switching from one position to another, there is a reset, a window of time, when the slight opportunity to fabricate a blankness, the color of transparency, can be sustained for no more than a few minutes, though it is strenuous and distressing. If you can manage to hold it in place long enough, resisting the slow creep of even a single block, tracing with your fingers the outline of each one, the drawer which contains those blocks might appear. It’s accessible too; you can touch it; you can even pour yourself into it like molasses sifting through a wire-mesh sieve, a slow trickle; if you seep long enough, you can rematerialize in that drawer and see each block individually, organized, stacked, and touchable—the opposite of a dream—alongside something else. That other thing; it’s another type of extremity. You can speak to it, but not in any recorded language.

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