his name was Woodstock

he was a small white goldfish

i had when I was a small white child

he had a red cap shape on his head

and when I was siphoning

part of his water from the tank

i siphoned too close to him

and sucked him up into the hose

where he got stuck headfirst

a few inches from the end

i blew back into the hose

and he popped back out into the tank

swimming straight into his castle

that was just a small clear plastic butter dish

with a square cut out for the door

his pectoral fins gently fanning

to keep himself centered

in shock and in place

i worried about him unmoving

that way for an hour

then reached into the tank and pulled out his castle

after which he swam around

like a normal fish again

i think about Woodstock today

when I find our big black dog behind his crate

in the bedroom at the foot of our bed

lying on the rug with his head down

on crossed front paws

when we have both been up

and in the other rooms for hours

i think about Woodstock today

as my wife lies on the couch

watching and then turning off

a TV show about texting while driving

a handmade wedding quilt pulled up to her chin

as she curls deeper into another nap

i think about Woodstock today

as my eyes and brain turn endlessly

to distraction after distraction

hopefully to hyperlinked weathermaps

documents applications and emails

and i try to imagine the sensation

of being pushed backwards

out from this compression

against the grain of our skin and fur and scales

and swimming back to the shelter

of our little improvised plastic castles

then i try to imagine the sensation

of a giant hand reaching in

and lifting them away 

out of context and without permission

(i recommend trying the audio version first, since this is meant to be heard more than read)

audio version - soundcloud link

I have this vision of my eyes scattering about
huntering and gathering among all of
your Facebook status updates and shares and likes and tags
and all of the amalgamated mental excavations
and throat clearing and yammering
and discombobulating it and then putting it back together
with the posting and reposting and replying of others
Others you may or may not be connected to
by anything greater than both of your words ending up
in the about an hour ago like comment share
post follow unfollow threaded undertow
we have all signed up for and friended for
and only partially filtered
and only so rarely unsubscribed from
and in my vision it makes perfect poetry

I see all of your words broken up
and recombining as if on their own
after being bitten by a radioactive meme
and the genetic mutation is occurring in full CGI
long lensed zooming special effects in my imagination
the DNA unzipping and new words flying in
from the far reaches of your worldscattered connections
and being inserted at the exactly correct location
clicking into place with sounds like mousebuttons
effortlessly building up into this sublime genetextual ladder
that twists off into the reaches of the interwebs

I know that when you find out I am taking your precious words
out of context and without permission
simply because I want them
you will take it as the highest kind of compliment
along with the ego stroke that I value your brief interjections
and smatterings of non sequiturs enough
to cut them and to paste them
and to consider them even for the fleetingest of moments
and it will pique at you enough to get you to follow them
around the corner and down the alley of another page
trailing them towards the everscrolling away downwardly bottom

I’ll tease you along with the candied promise
of what I did with some tiny subsection
of something you felt worth typing
and hope you navigate unthinkingly
to this completely separate and more intimate domain
where visiting it is in itself an admission
that you can’t help but acknowledge that you place
some infinitesimal value on what I have done
but not so small a value as to be unmentionable
because after all it is because of you
that you are following the trail I have created
because it is the trail of you
the scent of you
the promise of some small bit
of the fading contrails of your day
that is what started your small single click journey
and by this point of course it has gone beyond that gesture
to involve a swipe or two on your touchpad
perhaps a rabbit tip tapping on your down arrow key
or mousehand pointer hovering
over a position on the side scroll bar

I select from the top and then again
where the Facebook-inserted word “yesterday”
appears for the first time
and I take it to the top of my page
because it bracketizes this quixotic tilting at Facebook
with glimmering amnesiac nostalgia

With the title settled neatly into position
I sift for the keystroke-worthy chunks of your life
harvesting the words “this speaks for itself”
since self-referentiality pivots nicely
into the meta meta meta of voided context
but then I am oddly compelled by
“In the distant future, two superpowers control Earth
and fight each other for all the solar system”
and the line “They're always in the mood for love”
is a natural follow-on to create some dramatic tension

I am sure I could somehow segue
into this the talk of “cooking it in bacon grease”
and “like a lunatic” seemed to butt up against it
so nicely that they stick there together
and a Beckish inspired splicing places
“now I'm walking around saying”
next to “Sleep well, anonymous child. Sleep well.”
and one line below“Maybe you couldn't hear me”
and I see the ending eventual hopeful note
struggling to poke its head through it all
with “My daffodils are still coming up”
and “My crocuses are up”
the punchy “Our daffs are up an' at 'em!”
the terse urbanity of “chicago blooms”
and then the line that I see as wrapping it all together
“I can't wait to see what else comes up...”

I hold that thought as my mantra
as I sift and resift and group and regroup
“I can't wait to see what else comes up...”
as I look for the metaphorical connection
between battling superpowers and bacon grease
and saying things to no sleeping child in particular
and not being heard and not paying attention
and being a zillion times more efficient
and the whole time a small child is shouting in the background
about voting for Doris the chicken

At the same moment that it all starts to congregate
and congeal into something intensely manageable
where I find the ability to perceive both the whitespaces
and the blanks and the form among the formlessness
I see beyond this first finished masterpiece
to the timeline in the righthand margin
refreshing and updating off endlessly into the future
and as I follow it out the endgame is crystallizingly clear

I see the self-referentialty of the forced feedback loop
the peculiar entropic mobius twist we have gestated
I see the evolving subtlety of slight semantic shifts
in the words you choose as you become more aware
of their possible destination
I sense an elevated stature and generosity in your words
as if you are precompensating for the gaps
that might remain to be filled between those words
and those of someone else who also
without reference context or demarcation
is adjusting themselves accordingly
like the blind men with the elephant
when there isn’t even an elephant to touch
and they are all just talking about what it will be like
when someday they have an elephant to describe
in their fractured handscrabbling tinyworlded way

And it gets to the point where you are now posting
and reposting with this OCD ADD ADHD fueled focus
and fully randomized and refreshed reward schedule
to see what new amazing creation
had been forged from your excretions
you are posting horrifically tender metaphors
with garnishes of colloquial idiomastic simile
your comments are multi-layered densely unpackable images
and it is all meant to be so incredibly helpful
and I am so flattered by your contributions
to our convoluted conglomeration

But the things you are all post share commenting
have now become these perfectly wrapped vignettic lines
that self-sufficiently contain everything needed
for fully self-aware explication and revelation 
without the semantic company of others
and if I were to slice and dice and Julienne Fry it all
It would be like slapping a stencil of the triangular-tongued
Guernican screaming horse head over a starry starry night
and then stretching the canvas thinner at the margins
to make room to thread Magritte’s steamtrain
through the fireplace of Whistler’s Mother’s mouth

It would become a hack with no release for the attack
and no nuance to the yammering and jib-jabbering
it would get so fractalated pixilated and muddy
that it would reduce itself into absurd solipsistic fibrosis
and it would collapse white dwarfedly inward on itself
under the weight of all the tiny eyeballs and expectations
and the growth of our gravity would distort all nearby orbits
until we had to admit that we are no longer
traveling in a gentle circle together anymore
scratching each others imaginations along the way

And it is my fault
I have invited you along on this ride
I have buckled you in
and I have showed you 
how to use your oxygen masks as musical instruments
I have handed out peanuts and Cokes to all of you
and walked up and down the aisles
collecting all of your plastic cups and napkins
and now we are in a flat spiral dive

And one moment later inside the admission
of our non-circularity
is the realization that each orbit
is only reducing the inward distance
by one single zero one bit each revolution
and the g forces are exponentializing with the speed
until the only thought I can keep in my mind
without it getting flung off
like toddlers on a redlining merry go round
is that soon we will arrive
at a linguistic singularity
that must be avoided
at all costs
my apologies
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an antiquarian history

in the beginning was the shell
and my feet were moving over the face of the waters
and somewhere between the beginning and my feet
there was the ehlers-danlos
and after that the softness of my feet
and you my god always you
unable to be begotten away from you
from thousands of miles away
there was you suggesting i walk the shoreline
with your wordless askingless asking
and then the doing the no pausing just the doing
the doing without the thinking or the waiting
because of the sweetness of your wordlessness

and then there were the steps upon the sand
and the bruised clouds roiling in over the bay
and after the roiling of the clouds there was the shell 
the shell that was there in the beginning
when it begat the waiting for the finding 
and then there was all of mankind 
and all of those creatures who moved along the ground
right beside it without ever seeing it
and all of the birds in the sky that flew over it
without ever swooping down to look at it
and the evening and the morning were the days

and then there was the finding of the shell
that was there in the beginning
then there was the looking 
and at the very same time of the looking 
was the seeing 
and then there was the knowing
and the knowing was begotten by the cleaving
the halving of that which was there in the beginning
and the convolutions of the hollow cavity in the shell
spoke of the knowing with its half tunneled half pattern
that was created there after the beginning
and then there was the the seed within itself
the half hidden homunculus nesting in its outer ear
its own tiny spiral opened to its host

and then the knowing was you
once again always you
looking down from the firmament
into the broken tightening half spiral 
that i had created of myself in my own image
the knowing was you
seeing the pattern and the form of the cavity

and then it was you finding the curve
at the heart of that cavity
that could hold you so perfectly
while you rested

it was you beholding it
it was you
seeing that it was good