As I step into the future I descend into a sea foamed with glass shards. In truth, I know, I am already present in the coming. I am cut all over, I am bled. With my teeth I I strain this sea, eating the present's slivers to nourish knowledge of what will be. Between each canid the blood font and froth, this the source of this feeling, the unease descending from the lip of the becoming.

I stood upon the wreak of broken shoals. From spray of time and brine I discerned your voice, rough, cancerous dark spew. You asked me why I came here, to the draining bowl of finite sea. My silence was not my time equivocate, but my answer full.

They made my course, they made my way, before I could walk, before in dimness I discerned this bridge of handbone hewn. This, they said, you will follow without remark, one, your single way, they said. Your hope passed along this day hence. But even I could see with my white not yet eyes shapes tangled in the dark, pale white legs of deer trembling chopped in pile slough.

Time, I knew, contained me like a womb. Surrounded by unborn dark I floated in moment not formed, velvet amnion of hidden act. Within the bloodfroth meal of lives past, I dreamt suspensed and with my lips drunk last breaths.

Within mechanic order of dream there is the reason for why being this abstract hold pulses in companion bond with blood and organ so broken: reason for union of many I ams, wordless persuaded into single hum. Reason I saw but could only faintly discern, for within each shape, a deeper well. Time, I saw, closing a fist.

I turned and saw again a black pool fed by white stream torrent from wet lips of dark stone. I know that before it contained your body white, light and loosed from bonds of time. Naked of moment you stood, become always so, passing itself clad in mortal visible. Warm stone, the first warm stone I knew that truly reached, bridged beneath the body water to hold the cup, the palm, to where your naked body dipped and brushed, where naked we love.

Time, I knew, is that which falsely imbues moment with singular heft. Time does not unite me but parcels and sunders marrow my voice, breaking truth of all life one instant stride. Where, I asked this particular dark, do I go to seek time embodied, unimbibed by experience or mind? It spoke: go within and seek the seams between moments, breaths, and beats, seek the scars that tell where time’s hand has been and open them, plunge in.

I sped toward wake knowing what they would say:

They would say be unlike but what they meant was be not be. They said stray from the conform, the mold that before your birth was cast for you, but what they meant was come, come lay in the lie that was made for you. See that mouth that would chew you into form most like? Chew first, through the womb that would contain.




But another came through a passage low and perched on the edge of wake. It said: Fear not that they will conform you, fear how they will unform you. You are all asked to be less than yourselves, to be passionless and clinical in the mark you leave, the craft or impression you create. Mark but not touch. Be handless, nameless, usless.

Answer, it said. Be not un, I said. Usless is Useless.

I could see the pain of light. I twisted through the dark like a screw, harried and blinded. The sun burned, yet still I turned, faster, toward wake this pain. Brilliance, my daily becoming.