“Let heaven exist, though my own place be in hell. Let me be tortured and battered and annihilated, but let there be one instant, one creature, wherein thy enormous Library may find its justification.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, The Library of Babel
To an untrained ear the term may sound
...
You cannot be but what you are
and everything you've ever hard
is but the surf formed by a wave
unfolding to the beach.
...
The long and the short of it is we were caught in that trick of a space, your foot hard on the brake, as we plunged into that impossible gap and almost made it to safety.
I can't stop seeing the time on your watch as we smashed the Polo in the back of his Porsche with such damn great force he flew straight out onto the pavement.
...
Losing Face
Round the houses we go,
first one, then two, then three pints
spread on the bar like a hand of brag.
He downs each drink with a flick of the wrist;
a boxer landing fists on his shadow.
He goes out the door, picks a fight
with the bouncer, measures his steps
before he slips and hits the wall
of an arm in his face. Blood peeling
from his grimace, bloody tears.
He feels the mushrooming pain
of concussion and the long beep,
in one ear, of a hospital machine.
Soon he sleeps fast as a dog in the car,
dead to the sirens, certain to regret
nothing in the morning except
seeing his face in the mirror:
that caricature he can't bare.