64

well, it’s true, I’m from North
Carolina where there’s precious little

ice skating, but we do get brittle
little crusts of ice on puddles and

stuff, you can crack it, pane thin,
and eat it like a wafer: slips in

your hands and freezes your fingertips
but so cold and good to your teeth:

I know why I write in this method:
if I don’t write what I’m thinking

right then, it slips my mind: yep:
gone for good: sometimes, the next

day, or several weeks later, I have
a thought that has an air of

remembrance about it, and I think,
gee, this may not be déjà vu exactly

but I think I’ve been down this
street before: I remember now that

yesterday morning or this morning
when I was coming back from the

campus store with a mocha chip muffin
I was thinking of the word cramp and

I was thinking how this tape cramps
my style: it breaks down my extended

gestures: it doesn’t give your
asshole time to reconfigure after a

dump: everything happens before its
time, interrupted, turned back, cracked

up: but yesterday or today when I
thought of cramp, I thought of so

many mots juste to go with it, but
now I’m trying to remember a memory,

the words juste neither to this morning
nor to now: anyhow, I am brittlized,

run like a cow through a cow dip, my
flourishes stripped down, my feathers

deflowered: so cramped, my words
lose letters on the right-hand edge or

I start typing too early on the left-
hand side and slice words up: I

keep thinking, oh, I’ll remember what
that word was supposed to be, but

I’ve already told you about my memory
but I figure when I xerox the strip

onto regular paper, I’ll fill out the
words in pencil, so a typist can get

it right: what, though, is right:
wouldn’t it be better to let the words

come out of and go into breakage in
the usual way we, too, come and go:

wouldn’t it be truer: wouldn’t
accidence be bodied forth into

revelation: have you ever heard a
whore moan (hormone?).…