A Fingertip on Black Bulb
~ To catch the light blowing before the room darkens.
~ To hear the finger remaining there, in silence, like a lance.
~ To draw a diagram of melancholy.
~ To notice a sleeping, intaglioed arm in the middle of the night.
~ To read a page sopping with ink.
~ To release a burrow from the soil.
~ To disperse pitch with gentle pressure.
~ To sense a landscape clench.
~ To point, unsure of what is visible.
~ To see one burnt sand grain become an eye.
~ Today we will not do so much work.
~ To divide a shadow into areas of risk.
~ To pick up stars with a moistened digit.
~ To face what is left.
~ To be a lake throwing back a jetty.
~ To ponder a fire that eats its smoke.
~ To wait for a painting to speak.
~ To tap bile.
~ To fathom the limits of an exterior.
~ To prod gathered mercury for an answer.
~ To watch a crow fly out from a drain.
~ To consider thought being rehearsed.
~ To make a counterpart of the infinite.
~ To discover a distant star already in ruins.
~ To cradle a dead match.
~ To put forward a lifetime’s magnification.
~ To touch the possibility of release.
~ To press the moon in, finally.
~ To be seen by an animal.
~ To be sieved by the ceiling.
~ To discern a tulip stone inside the head.
~ To weep with the hands.
~ To degenerate in storage.
~ To wait within listening.
~ To blindly follow the folds of space.
~ To forget how darkness starts.
~ To dream a speech bubble aflame.
~ To detach a device from its every function.
~ To brush sound down from the tops of trees.
~ To feel hunger, bewildered in the stomach.
~ To deploy a peppercorn in a furrow.
~ To put forward an index of unknown proportions.
~ To establish a political point of resistance in the cheek.
~ To hold writing at bay with the pen.
~ To orbit a single point ahead of a slingshot.
~ To discern colouration through temperature.
~ To have the feeling that darkness is just beneath daylight.
~ To type, as if from nowhere:
Quite where / in all this / pre-cavernous space / inside the head / you are to set up / your singular / emplacement / is left / undecided / for the moment / as with any / procedure / lacking all but / the formative / qualities of thought’s / imperial traction / it comes / disregarded for its own good / thinking of the sun / as having been pierced / with a pin / right on / the underside / where / you cannot see it / and it leaks / spinning out all / over the land / a great yolk / at the end of which / there will be nothing / left but the thin / bag carcass / an exhausted sac / that mournfully / smiles down / an expression so / utterly godless / that the disastrous vial / is immediately thought / to be threatening / and the masses rise up / in uniform distrust / of that Repta-Sun / all retreating to glass / caverns buried / in the earth from / where all manner / of spheroidal-strategems / coalesce in captions / operated by the fingers / via great banks of workers / not allowing air / to escape into air / ectothermic factories / plotting the removal / of a sagging star / once revered / now a trunk / stripped of its boughs / and soon / vast structures / protrude from the edge / of the atmosphere / the better to support / the great syringe as it / dilates towards its / target over countless / light years / lining / up its barrel / for a single shot / at the sun-skin / that has turned black / over the centuries / one shot that will / sing out as a form / of occupation / pressing a fingertip / into the darkness / to refill that / which was once / fill of light.
~ To couple one thought with the bloated image of another.
~ To attach nothing to anything but further attachments of things.
Published as a limited edition pamphlet as part of a series of realisations of George Brecht’s Water Yam, curated by Compost and Height in 2012.