working the knife around the neck like to peel an orange

god it's so nice to come home from work. The bones are really

tired, and the home is where you're allowed to not-work absolutely, even if it's just sleep. That time before Thanksgiving, when the cousins are piling into this original city of all our common experience, this location shines its gleam of being root, and that easy social laughter in loudness, in life, over the wide dinner table. I was thinking yesterday, being disturbed while munching down spoonfuls of raisin oat cereal puddled in milk, the significance of cutting off the heads of humans in an act of war horror--and being disturbed that I was munching on spoonfuls of milk cereal, and continued doing so. Why is that so repulsive, so terrorful as observers, conscious of the terror as perpetrators, and singularly most everything of all, as victim--to have the mind-body so literally and in figuratively, so immediately severed--what must it be like: and doesn't that verbalizing, more than any other way of death, explain so directy the wonder and mystery of dying & the leaving of life? Is there more violence today than ever? Terror, for that matter? From whom am I speaking of: soldier or civilian--or is there distinction, or reason for it? How does this world strive toward becoming resolved (which it has without a pause always done) without us collapsing it into one big explosion? And then are the individual works and seconds of an individual artist's lifetime, that don't affect anything on the grand scale of things except that individual's life and its surroundings--which is without exception always the case--significant and with meaning?

Solutions to these things, are the working through/against of these things; the way the canvas becomes not a likeness to the apple but the apple itself through the artist.