the matter

already i can't see. i came back after looking into the secret cave where reflections ask you what is the matter, and then make you matter by speaking you back into being. i came back after having a thousand things done to the insides, small adjustments that would make sense somewhere down the road when i was speaking with dogs about the things that the dead might teach us. i came back after fighting every impulse to avoid thinking about the things that i could lose, after losing my attachment to all of them, and after deciding which ones i wanted to keep, and which ones might keep me. these things became like spiders, weaving images of each other over the back of my eyelids, until i woke up and could not see any more. this is the weaker eye that is there for minor adjustments, things that cannot make sense when i see them, but will make themselves matter down the road.
this is a speaking subject dog, this dog says that it is time for the dead to enter into the realm of the living, this dog says that after a certain point, we cease to matter, and become spirits that occasionally haunt our own bodies. i would haunt my own body if it gave me license to haunt other bodies, but there is no license for that, it only comes with a desire for flight, for an escape out of the present through the holes in the body that mark a present that matters, and gives birth to other matters. i can't see, and i wonder what i have become, buying wine at 7 in the morning when i don't drink, and hoping these eye drops take the sting out of the things i did see, things that won't make sense until further down the road, and things that already matter. i already see that already there are things that matter, and making them matter is only a question of touching them in the dark to make sure there are not phantoms. i have no idea if the iroko scratches up and down my arm are the maps of a time when a real tree touched real skin, but i know that when i smell the leaf of something that is always already alive, i remember things i could not possibly know from empirical experience. in this new empire, there is nothing to fall, and no one to fiddle, because there are no leaders, and on my best days, there are no agendas in my pocket, and i.m not looking to uncover things from people who's intentions might not be honest.
this is the sight of an honest dog, cut to half, white and red to feed an obsession, and a command to stop looking forward and look down at the feet, because the future is told through our bones, on our bodies, in a moment that matters, that passes too quickly, that's too far to arrange with any swiss precision, but entirely possible, and it matters that it has started to matter to me.