Squall

I’m lost in a hanging garden.
Dark hollows.
Death in June songs.
Someone humming:
she said destroy in black New York…
Is she humming it correctly?
Get off that—
What is correct?
Who decides?
Haven’t we been here before?
Recently.
So.
I don’t detach from myself—but I am tethered to myself:
A floating shadow on a string.
Hovering six feet above and three feet behind myself, by the thinnest and blackest string you’ve ever seen.
Have you ever imagined such a thing?
Wind buffets me about—
behind my corporeal self:
The daily dwindling sack of meat, blood and bone, aplomb walking—some sort of somber put-on—
coiled for anything.
My consciousness resides more in that ethereal floating self—
jostling about like a dollar balloon
in a squall.
Who’s in charge here?

What I’m Reading:

“I’m leery of planning stories out ahead of time. Almost without exception they’ll start from an idea or a phrase, which I then plunge right into and explore. If I stop to think, This ought to be in the first person plural, or, This ought to be one unbroken paragraph, or whatever, I think it would stop me. They are intuitive.”

— Lydia Davis / “The Art of Fiction No. 227” / The Paris Review