Set theory and Emerson teach us there can always be a wider circle, there is always a set that does not include every other set.

At what point does the new generalization become God? At what point of generalization does God become useless to us?

To purify words is to steal them, to claim a proprietary interest in blossom, in signs, in soul. To steal the fire of language and pay the penalty for it. What is the liver? An organ in unequal lobes to metabolize and purify. Without the liver there is no high. Chained to the rock tearing at the soft flesh with the beak-like needle, the needle-like beak delivering the possibility of ecstatic poison. The actor on his bathroom floor, fleshy no longer flesh. Look at me. The eye is the first circle. The eye travels over organs unseen by any save pathologists, medicos, rats. Praying on his knees in a dirty tent, clutching a few words for deliverance.

So Joyce wrote Dublin as a body twice, first in discrete sexed organs and again as sleeping Everybody snowing out a snoring storm of Shem and Shaun. You won’t out-book the Book. Dreams like dramas are not texts. Stage your dream over there: the actors, like shades in Hades, milling about with pages in their hands, waiting for the blood to run.

Over there, call it life but it’s not life. A newer Sevres pleases - / Old Ones crack. Stirred white sustenance. Draw a circle around comedy, around tragedy. I is immune to genre. Spill your guts.

For One must wait / To shut the Other’s Gaze down - / You - could not -

That torso, chipped cup brimming —

But these are all lies: men have died from time to time and worms have eaten them, but not for love. What stake in denying this?

Hooks, eyes —

Words and images implant desires that are not mine. That are mine, they are so close to the heart. A made place, the names. Repeatingly.