Member-only story
The deeper possibilities are all there: that I could quit what I’m doing, get off the train, change platforms, go back home, surprise X, make love, forget about everything, cancel my employment, lose my apartment, wander across the country, age prematurely, lose my name, my status — everything — die happy, or at least, forgotten, utterly forgotten; inside The System is the latent thought that the system can be forgone, ignored, abandoned, denied, transcended. When I first moved to New York someone told me: be under, or over the radar — but never be on the radar. This was literally the best advice I’ve ever been given: don’t let The System get a clean shot at you, don’t let it know that you’re there, in Joyce’s words, employ: “silence, exile, cunning.” All of it.
images pile up
like proteins in a
fold of a brain
which sleep erases and
puts away
like junk
in a junk drawer
