like paint in the rain

i keep looking for a direction. i don't have to lift a finger to begin: which is to say i don't have anything to say. i've run out of words, of muse, of heart, rah rah and all synonyms akin to. sporadically, obscure panic settles in, an inexpressible bitterness rolling in my mouth as i stubbornly insist on sitting here, staring at the blank screen, my cautious smile reflected back at me. i am reminded that there is plenty of time. or no time left. that's the pretext i need: no time left. i am unimpeded from making anything happen, lacking only in a distinction between doing this and things that really happen every day; drawing on the aspects of routine. creating temporary connections between illusion, error, forgetting and recovery. unconcerned with the little secret things verging on the sterile. those elements of slippage and ignorance, catching up on the necessary. no longer sanguine, i have to have it all my own way.

how i feel about direction: for the last months. now i know why i have been so restless, leaving some distance from establishing a form complete. left with this empty box. a row of daffodils, dilly. putting off academic readings and writings. i realise i may have been depending too heavily upon arguments; about whether or not to begin or start over or take up or let go or let live. whatever it might be.

i am never alone when i write. i realised, by doing this over and over again i will start to see a pattern emerge. or maybe not. nothing is really changing as i go from here to there, traversing each word, beckoning days i have missed. here i will do all sorts of things to divert your attention. i will defect into fiction, into silences too many to number. i will capture days in other ways: photographs... dreaming...? i will not use the diary to clarify. i will gloss over, distort, lie if necessary, reveal little by little. the best way to get close to me is to see this hunger as your own. i'm thinking about not stopping at all.

how can this all be contained. how long is it, where does it start; there is a definite place of beginning but no foreseeable end. i am working against the end, fighting the impulse to keep track, though the immediacy of daily practice makes control inevitable. what gets lost if i don't leave this as it is, at the moment of conception. what did i really say; how can i translate my languid into language; how can i be cautious without collapsing from the effort involved...