i bought a boat from old man hughes for five bucks/ it was really only worth three/ the boat leaks/ i can’t afford to fix it but who wants a boat anyway/ i do/ i take the boat out to the middle of the lake and sit there with a pickle jar of corn whiskey that i brew in my secret place out in the woods/ i have convinced myself that the whiskey, clear as an appalachian falls, should not be anywhere near so much as a spark/ the real reason i sit in the middle of lake lure is because from time to time i become desperate for silence, for ghosts, and this is where i find it/ usually, the boat is pulled up onto the beach/ when the leak begins to sink the boat, i know it’s time to leave the lake/ i have so many artificial joints now, i can no longer swim/

i sit in the middle of the lake and ponder all my various regrets/ regret is a phantom thing, like male lovers and female lovers and tattered little books/ photographs are time machines as well that take you back, but I try to not take photography with me out to the middle of the lake, it’s bad luck/ i might take a cane pole and a can of worms/ what are cans of worms about/ cans of worms are about relationships and making trouble/ making trouble is a beggar in his rags who staggers around the beach singing songs in tongues no one knows/ foreign languages are kept upstairs in the attic/

and in that dramatic pulse or throb of the jugular, we are as always suspended, life is held like an arrested gesture in photographic abeyance moving deathward/ all of us are moving deathward yet no one asks the question: why are you here/ most people are simply postcards no one sends purchased in a dime store from a revolving rack/ the dead themselves, much in the same way the male and the female lovers i have had, the ones who i can find little regret for having known the taste of all their tongues and languages, death and sex, sex and death, what else are we, resolved, a cunt here or there to suck on, a bald asshole for a home, remembering themselves in that dead instant before the boats sink downward, look beyond the blue borders of what was there, much as photographs do in their whispering, like veterans of wars who ride upon a lame and exhausted horse/