I’m also working on a prose poem book called Abode, which is a kind of mystery or riddle. This piece began with an obsession with Beckett’s The Lost Ones, whose opening line is “Abode where lost bodies roam each searching for its lost one.”

And Augustine wrote: “Where you turn, your body will follow.” For many years I’ve had a dream where I wander lost in a house, constantly looking for a way out, or in, I’m not sure. Well, what follows are three random excerpts from the book in progress.

Mama, he said, how do I get into the Abode?

A diagram falls from the air

describing a method for implementing the transformation of a diagram from a state of falling to a state of existing, perfectly, in the air.

A bus falls from the air

describing a method for implementing the transformation of a bus from a bus to a state of falling, perfectly from the air.

The air falls in small pieces and large pieces

from the air, describing a method and a truth and an untruth, implementing the negation of the diagram of the teacher on the blackboard in a class implementing the interface of self-correction and perfection. There will be no school tomorrow! said one of the boys, leaping into the air although

for natures such as Parmenides’ perhaps

all leaping constitutes a kind of falling, as Nietzsche said.

My friend. Having made it this far, you must not tell anyone you’re here.

If you obey this rule, you will never be alone. If you do not, you’ll be cast out like a dead man

cast out

like a lot

is cast out.

Let me explain.

You cannot have a secret unless there is someone to keep the secret from. But everyone has a secret. It follows therefore that for every one there is an other, some one.

What are you doing here? said the gatekeeper.

The gatekeeper speaks.

The gatekeeper keeps in practice by so speaking.

The practice keeps time.

It’s about time you got here, we were worried sick about you. We were sick and then we got better and then we got sick again.

It was horrible! There was fever, and headaches, and this pain all over here, like little animals, the sickness ate away at us, bore tunnels through our insides.

What is inside must always find a way out. This is how the dead leave the living behind. Their lists of what to take in case of emergency. Their notebooks describing what happened to them. The things they took, with them, in an emergency. Their video recordings.

And stayed in the sun until somebody would come and collect them.