mmmmdccxx

Elaborate Condensation

diane, thank you again for the long text message. i 

know i gave you the brief skinny with what’s going 

on with me, but spend too little time on our corres

pondence, so in an effort to put a small but hopefully 

significant time more, i’m writing you this.  what i have

turned into a poem-text. i’ll start where you started,

how ‘time has evaporated this month’ – by which do 

you mean the month has been vaporized by time? or 

this month, compared with other months, has seen 

time evaporate? i like the idea of time evaporating – 

i want to connect that to memory (or my lack thereof) 

in some way. i could say my memory evaporates, unless 

i take the evaporating time to write things down or 

photograph stuff. there are large swaths of time

that simply have not existed for me (they must surely
have existed, though?), due to the fact that i could not
afford a camera at the time (they weren’t ubiquitously
inside of our phones back then, right?) while, simultan

eously, I’d be going through a duration without notating 

a thing in writing, in what i called a journal – i had a couple 

dozen of these journals before losing them, along with every

thing i had physically kept over the years, sometime shortly 

after i turned fifty, about two-thirds of a year after i was 

evicted from my pine street apartment, became ‘homeless’ – 

as they say. i used those journals to make the bulk of the 

pieces in this project, which are even still accumulating, 

even after losing all of the original notebooks and binders 

in which i’d written what seemed important at the time to 

record in such a way. so that i might recall. not for the

memory alone, of course. and much of what i recorded in

those journals surely sounded as if it came directly from the 

dark lake of a tortured soul. typical, right? so, time. a lot of 

which has now passed since i began writing this note. and i’ve 

yet to even ask but a couple of questions (did the month evaporate 

or was it time that evaporated? – and how was this significant

or different from normal?). directly after this first thought,
you mention how you feel as if you’ve been ‘going and going’
without having ‘much to show for it.’ boy, do i ever know that
feeling. which is maybe another reason i make these little
hodge-podges, have turned them into a decades-long ‘project’ 

(a word i used to hate), the publication of which is something
i can do myself, fairly easily, and have added to these the
photographs and also, now, the videos of me reading each

of the, thus far, four thousand seven hundred poems. but i

can at any time point to one or to the project and say (to my

self) i did this. this is mine, something of me. which i leave for
whomever, but, it could be just for me. i feel a need for such 

accomplishments, things i can say i did. this, to me, broadens 

life (extends time, even – or i’d like to say that; because i do 

believe it!), allowing me to recapture many moments i’ve 

experienced. it reminds me that i’ve done things, am doing 

things. in order to assess and imagine how i might do better. 

so, doing things, remembering, keeping time as stretched out as 

possible. that covers i think the first two lines of your long text. 

and now i must run to a meeting, so i shall end this long text in 

response to perhaps the least substantive part of your lovely 

long text to me of, what, several days ago. see?  sigh. i just 

did this. more soon? -del