51

When the poem says: "nothing can go wrong, do you understand / nothing can ever go wrong," is this an affirmation or a threat? These days I notice the small circle that follows me across town, minor weight of an attempt at trusting the body in its own way beyond grasp or understanding. It’s not that I’m trying to stay confused, it’s that I’m trying to hold some other space for what is not yet here. Or, to come at it from another angle: I’m trying to chart some small history of the desire to annihilate the self in the name of Objectivity, the overdetermined turn to remake the world as image, to look out there. Within this anxious checking every desk drawer, anxious searching as many carpet fibers as can fit in a hand, anxious car keys, anxious meanings of unread messages, I am trying to write toward the leaky problem that spills into every day when the door inside a word opens up and meaning evacuates. Do you understand what could go wrong? Nothing can ever go wrong.