Once Referred to As A Hymn by Rich Ives

If the world doesn’t really exist, I reasoned, then neither do I. I don’t have to do anything. But if the world is purely energy and thought is energy and receiving thought is more energy, if you’re receiving this, then I have to think about doing something in order to think about not having to do anything, and right at that moment I don’t want to do that.

Which is this moment, now that I’ve created it, and I can see it through the cold light donating its objectivity to the long whisper of wind climbing the hill, warm in the wet departure of breath from the land we had so carefully fingered.

Yes, I’d been attending her festivals. I’d been immersing. I’d entered the territory previously inhabited by tall, dark, handsome, unattainable strangers, and the mysterious wink that had drawn me had not yet grown flabby and predictable as a stop sign.

Of course ideas are kisses too, but there are some bad kisses. It’s something you have experienced, and then you forgot where you put it.

The casual air ribbons smoke up to the hole in the sky where tomorrow is making promises again. Solitude’s gossip. It’s a little street corner with a café inside the river. It makes my stomach sing, but not everybody likes that music. It’s a can’t-find-myself kind of looking around.

I had, at that moment, some fog in my mouth, in relation to the predictable reoccurrence of 1997. I was looking at the jacket, and the jacket wouldn’t answer. Thinking always left me behind this way. It’s not something you can swallow. It climbs back out if you try to make it go there.

I should breathe it, I’m thinking now. I should give it a reason. I might want to go there and find it. It does nothing, however, but make this motion forward in me, this motion that sings predetermined points of reference as if they had just discovered me.


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