Joshua Bird
​

[Enter throughout tautology]
​
Enter throughout tautology. You and your likeness return to iteration, confusing rain
for stillness and landscapes for repetition. Mispronunciation is enough. You want to
be misread before occupying the cartesian theater with empty empty hands.

There is no detective to enter; the introspectionist has an exIt sign. A good question
comes for the somnambulist. There are bemusing sexual acts in lieu of historical
shortcomings. Take three sci-fi filled nights and call in the meridian.

The man with no hands took the painting seriously apart.

And now this is addressed to you, poem, persona, the second person to walk
through this sentence, if that isn’t too ill-fitting, having hijacked the elsewhere,
having shot the imagery through the rube-goldberg translation hour, having glued
you to you on the monochrome instance, having made your way to the surface,
having nothing to do but exist, the referents will take their rightful place among
consideration.
​
You are no longer in theory this time, this time around a few broken propositions.

---

[Enter the redaction]

 

Enter the redaction, an hour of mistranslation. It was never easy. The continual
referents to AporIa are the point. Footnotes, slantwise, the navel-gazing knows no
bounds. There is no return. An afterthought eats its own tail. Syntax is in stock and
vogue. Given enough space-time, abstractions can untether the self from the I. The
art was hung too high. This can turn into a name. You spent too long looking up at
the self and now. Craquelure dances like a bastard across your face in conceptual
ways. A slight moth perching on a hint of moon, estranging imagery. The tv flickers
an alibi. We engage the ink without context. The etceteras matter less. We become
stuck in a page of our own I. You will need a year to complete an afterthought.
Here’s the thing, on the surface, with the rest of you ninnies. Here’s another,
unopened. The syntax, once again, the deadpan. Their ilk will return, re-volta. If
redactions reach uroboric;— a needless repetition in mistranslation and errata, the
reaction of the hour is turned into a name. I have the zeugma, the zeitgeist of a
good time, asking how much of this self is performative, anachronistic, versus.

---

--
Joshua Bird continues to saturate the I of his I with a salvaged IBM Selectric II typewriter. His ontological speaking voice will misfire before our very eyes. He once was a mild-mannered birth certificate, apocryphal or otherwise. When not writing, he can be found sleeping in a simulacrum.