Thank you for looking and seeing that something’s here—my sum, perhaps, or maybe just some pieces. Sum pieces. Clever, no? I don’t know, perhaps? No, not at all, not really, but thank you for the half-grin, the up-curving lip corner and askance glance with not-cold eyes, knowing me and my rhapsodic persuasions,

my engrafted logics, and I wonder if that’s just how I think when I think about writing out thoughts that might read themselves back to me in the unseen expressions of others when I’m left to my imagination and its devices letting the thoughts come out in voices because voices are where it happens, where everything happens, in voices, with them and through,

but why bother, why bother having one or going along—that’s the tired question I might ask at the end of every phrase of every sentence in a voice I’ve not yet learned to fully ventriloquize or amplify so it can speak for itself instead and not me, not be so much mine,

speak over the one, the always-second one off over there back in the corner in the first place and peering out, the one which says, in the way only a voice can peer, “unclever’s ok for now, though, this time, it carries the point across from nothing to something even though I don’t like it and don’t much care if you or they do either,” and the other this voice over here out in the open like me—is me—gnawing the morsels of delicious bravado within such don’t-much-care-if-you-do kind of speech,

looking at this aspect of self like a version, a character sketch, and mulling the bifurcations and inversions and juxtapositions that afford the strength to remain in this way unfinished, incomplete, so wonderfully undone, like a body without a soul or a voice without ramifications, sitting back within me pondering extension and absorption, extension or absorption, extension vs. absorption

and finally in the end noticing I’m writing, still, right where I started and knowing the place for the first time, still writing it all out, of course, wishing for the kind of quietude I imagine Rudy F. must have to keep it complex and simple beautiful but only managing to muster the strength to dive in and start right from the first sentence right in the middle of things like Khoury said of Kanafani (there’s hope! far-off distant hope!) to see if and where it goes,

still writing, of course, wherever it goes, and still enjoying the hypocrisy of speaking through dummies like so many personas with tried-on expressions.

Thank you for looking, no matter what—and who—you see.