Thomas Lowe Taylor -- PROSE

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I

This was a decision without permits, another locale you ascertained at self or other, and holding for seclusion you were admitted and labeled or made a move on your own behalf which was without precedent or repetition. "The mind has enslaved you," he wrote. And sure enough, it had, and in the solitude of your own presence, it was not so much an admission as a doubt. What held in the summer afternoons was mere reminiscence, not anything solid or palpable. How you were let in on the secret was no poisoning of the waters, but a skull dragged into the room. How you fledged and scammered in the hours before knowing, that the movies were rigged, the games made passionate in their own distances from the profound. It was no longer stalled, but hammered and jiggered and split into its own infinitives. Or had you stopped altogether? He won't permit me to say "I don't know", since it is a scapegoat for pressure, unexpurgated by doubt and unreleased by subsequent action. It is no other in the mists of change, but a blot or spur, a particle of latent scores. I had word choice down there on the platform, resistant and cordial, but you evaded what choices had been made in favor of something newer, something released or flowery, and something held by the answering voices as if you'd never parted at all, but cleaned out the open air from what it had been inside you, an opening or a shuttered plain.

II

This was an evening in repose, and where you welt or stammer, here'd to flux to spin, shaders, detoxed from mental events, but set apart from the slums by door and spoon. I pretended to be and opener, and held aside this and that from the towering justice which did me no harm as long as I was real. Its own face. What removed against them was no outer, but repel and slam. Here you were, delivering force at its other farms and distances, and held away in fear from the other you would assume as your own. But without recall. Spare me that, you shuddered, but looked into the box again and again, heaving and swelling toward them in the mornings, again and again. It was private, or special, and so related to nothing again, but a repeater at your sirens was the pulse of day and night, absolving anterior formulae where they stood to gain nothing and assumed to larger and more formal destinations that you were slammed here into the present without pity from whom you'd said would not again release the sentries from their own special prisons in the skies without from those whom you'd said wouldn't repeat them one at the other newer now than not.

March 9, 1995