hello, i'd like to sleep in a little puddle
during the hot season in the year
of the suspension bridge, a crumbling

song to spring from the flight plan
of the cedar box, the silly ruse
of a morning strewn with straw

to establish hunger once and for all. i'd like
a savage birth and other new grasses in fields
of swimmers lost on islands that unfold

into ordinary, useful archetypes making
a cameo appearance and precious
little else. even as colors parade emptily

through my durable eyes, i'd like please
flaming patterns to stir nothingness
in my smiling brain, bones aglow

to break the game of granite mist, a candle
at the outward edge of prison to illuminate
the extreme accuracy of destruction in the per-

forated moments of my pretended liberty.
if in any way my attention wanders from
my book of backward indexes whose pale ideals

of clarified continuity would cause
to exist a wretched gruel for the mockery
of being in the approaching episode authorizing

the distancing of the character in which i
illicitly affix to my rock-hard collective life form
a winning mimic of positions, if as I say

my attention wanders, i'd like to be acted superbly
by extras, resolute if deluded that i should copiously
dwell in countless earlier stages. and even though all

is busted up, bluntly mimetic of a derivative
interior, dislocated from the temperate midpoint
of my stockpiled personal activity, i'd like

to protect my inevitability if not
my threadbare belief in the precision
of the psychoanalysis of jumble. in the end,

it's hard to find an i to cheer up, but i'd like
to encourage the obvious, then split
so as to be uneven, if true.

____

"EX-I" is part of a series entitled letter letters, inspired in part by readings in cognitive science.