Of course the people still move as if on tracks, negotiating the incredible cloverleaf of intersecting streets, looping through and under each other, a mesmerising network of relative trajectories, multiply constituted subjects moving along determinate routes occupied in determinate thoughts all the while unaware of the mental constraints they are under, their minds concocted by the complex practices of society, no real free will. Free will itself the product of discourse, but nobody realises. Even those who have dropped out of society and mutter irrelevantly in their tramp rags into cheap portable radios sprawled amid the papers on park benches as if the radio were a telephone, as if the radio might somehow reply… are they too participating in this system of lived relations, definite paths, invisible links and relationships? The law that watches over the concrete landscape like an eight-eyed octopod gargoyle on a black bank façade—does it watch them? Yes, it acknowledges these underlings, if only to the extent that it turns a blind eye to them, creates a space around them… moats around aliens, contain contamination.

The train-station is the eye of this storm of brisk walkers. It is the point through which all threads pass, a huge logical knot. Like the people on the streets, its vehicles have many tracks on which to move, many circuits and directions to pursue, but they are just that… circuitous, pre-determined, defined, like stepping into factory-made shoes, wear the shoes and walk around in them and be the one who wears such shoes. No, the trains cannot take you away. The trains tie it all together, they are part of the terrifying intricate network of difference that is only ever unity, the ineluctable web of apparent contradictions and diverse minutae that are in fact merely the parti-coloured pixels of the leviathan totality. No, no, no… is there no escape?

Because the tight grey coils of their minds are pressed into the service of shared ideas and norms and values and sins and dreams, because these things are stamped onto their minds, cuboid… they do not realise that it is in fact actually possible to veer off the courses set, to walk to the edge of the platform and cross over the yellow line and drop onto the tracks whether or not the platform-warning-light-signifier says a train is coming. They do not realise that it is possible to walk onto the beach, and instead of tanning, body hang-ups, swimming between the flags, that it is possible to walk to the flags and pull the flags up out of the ground, toss them aside, and then run backwards into the sea. Of course, some hope to rebel, and in doing so, pour themselves into secretly sanctioned activities, surfing near the rocks… there are checks and balances for such things.

None of these walkers realise any of this, and that is why, when someone suddenly sees and rejects the logic which is imposed on them and through which they themselves have been formulated—for example, when a child decides not to speak, or when one turns the car off the road and drives lawlessly singing in quarter-tones through the trees, spitting from the lips—we have no name for it, although sometimes it is called suicide, and sometimes, "vanishing."

Yesterday:

I see that with the way things are tending, the days and years passing faster and faster, eventually life will become like a flipbook, the days flitting and flashing past at such speed that nothing can be gathered from them but a vague sense of blurred motion.

Today:

I have to read. If I am to taste the food I’m eating, I literally have to cover up all the words that are in sight—close the books, turn papers upside down, place objects over any remaining visible text—lest my eyes be distracted, pulled into the currents of the letters and language, its sentences, its channels of meaning that lead on and on. But its no use—I chew, but my eyes move down and start to read the keyboard, the configurations of its letters and symbols with their endless possibilities of further words and meanings, further combinations of words and meanings—until eventually I give up, and start to type this paragraph, drawn into written language again. It is a habit of mind, I have trained myself through years of close study. I am compelled to read.

i feel full - like ideas have crowded out thoughts.
my old formative central preoccupations have been dispalced.
the epistemological and cosmological. it feels academic.

deathbed lovesong

Oh oh oh
I thought of something so horrible.
All our watches ticking when we are dead.
Not just one lone, dead old woman’s watch
Striking off the seconds as she lies cold pale in her death bed
But all the clocks and watches, post apocalypse
All the watches of the world
All running, battery-powered, wound, digital and analogue,
Drawing circles with their arms that can no longer be interpreted
For those other round planes—our human eyes
Are shut and sightless.
Tick tick tick,
There would not be a milli-milli-second
That wasn’t full of ticking out
The time that sheds its meaning
And somewhere out in space
That probe would float, with Adam and Eve
Painted naked on its naked empty body.

And so my love, I think of you:
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day
All up, 24 hours (twice around the clock)
No, thou art by far more mortal—and more temporal.