An experimental transcript: q, n, t, j, e, u, p, b, h
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q
I've been running with a word in my mouth, running with this burning untitled shape, and I just can't spit it out. Spit it with phlegm from a balcony, kiss it in a mirror, brush it away one morning. I've been running with a word in my mouth, running...
… it must have been only last month that I began half-chanting-half-mumbling this looped sequence of sentences on the staircase I regularly take down to work and back up to dream, yet it feels as if it were half a century ago. Tunneling through my memory, my tongue begins burning again and so I recollect that the subject matter was an agonizing, unutterable obsession I needed to sort out most urgently. Back then I knew no better way than to keep bringing it up obliquely until it would chemically dissolve itself into my blood or evaporate through the pores of my skin. To whisper the obsession away, I thought not entirely so naïvely, following a peculiar kind of vengeful logic, by emptying words of their pocket contents on a spiraling staircase. An anti-incantation, a verbal overdose, a semantic dilution or reduction – for the first time, I was ready to inflict harm on words! [And I am sure, the thought has crossed other lucid minds, too.]
n
During the first several days, as I was rushing up and down the stairs like a Tasmanian devil, swirling those same sentences in my expunction ritual, I hardly noticed that the brown marbled staircase had a ravenous appetite for all my sound making and fuss: it cushioned the clump of my footsteps, it absorbed the vibrations of my vocal chords and of my fingers drumming on the handrail. All this unusual business must have carried on untroubled for some time until that Wed. [?] morning when I tried approaching the employee at the reception desk in the hideously large building where I live with a question about elevator safety. I may take the elevator once in a blue moon, but I could not ignore the new disquieting note I had been reading on all elevator doors that week:
m a k e / s u r e / t h e / e l e v a t o r / c a r / i s / s t a t i o n e d / o n / y o u r / f l o o r / b e f o r e / s t e p p i n g / i n