i was reading lisa jarnot last night (ring of fire) and had one of those damn how did i read this and not see how f-ing good it was moments.

ring of fire sports a midsection of madness -- the i, just like my i, morphs and twists and suddenly someone is on a phone and then is daylight tattooed and just like that where was the i ten poems ago?

(i) identify with the problem, as with her solution (it doesn't exist, so don't pretend). the i is fascinating. ask descartes, heidegger, ashbery, broks. ask them all. we should be bored by now with all this me me me (only not object, direct or indirect, but subject, i i i). but we're not. because though we may know the source (neural networks, the great grey mass) there is still a mystery of translation. grey mass then thought/feeling/action, then the memory of thought/feeling/action, then self or conglomeration of thought/feeling/action with retrospect. (i)

that the i is imagination is the mystery, what keeps us going back to it, as an intellectual exercise yes but also as an obsession, an addiction that greets us in the morning (what was that dream? i'm hungry. etc., etc.) as we are reminded (could we forget) that we are alone with our voice, even if we wake up next to another person. even if we roll over and tell them our dream and that we are, in fact, hungry. even if they had the same dream. even if they have the same hunger. we're still moving outside of ourselves, meaning we had to first acknowledge that we are inside of ourselves. that's the natural state. shanti shanti. that, i think, is what makes us fear death, the silencing of our i voice, of the fanasy closest to us (that we exist, followed shortly by, that we exist and we love or we exist to love, i'm not sure which).

and then i think it's funny that miss jarnot wrote her book in the same city, on the same streets, as i find myself writing my own poems. i wonder if our respective imaginations meet each other, out of time, on brooke or hope or over the river, and if they do, do they pass by each other, invisible, wordless. if they open their mouths to speak and then remember they have no mouths, that they escaped the great grey mass and have been floating, insubstantial, ever since.