Tally
There were cups and cards, small black boxes with rounded corners, sand and pencils, naturally a lot of cables, bread, dust mites and specks, blue knitted bags to bear your books and books about bees and other topics, and eyes and mirrors making it all larger and larger, there were rubber bands, cars and cows just doing as they pleased, blades of grass individually packaged and earwax retained from a different time, feudal retainers, window shoppers, carpet cleaners, nurses and janitors, day traders, taxpayers and evadors, garbage collectors, project managers, sailors and sisters, singers, songwriters, seven kinds of warriors, stripes, lacquer, paint peeling, dried tomatoes, stories, poems, shards of pottery ancient and otherwise, large airplanes and money, coins, and bills, and checks, and cards, and gold bars, and bards, and games, and hats, and barges and other kinds of ships, like schooners, where sailors regularly gathered to drink the many liqueurs, with creams, or berries, or chocolate, or peppermint, or almonds, or orange, or others, and there were cars and their drivers, challengers, film makers, three-bar carbon containers, wifebeaters and polos and skirts, and the law was there, and the pigs and sheep and alpacas for later, and arks, and bows, and swords, for the fighters, and mutual funds, and bodies, and other kinds of errors, and bribes, for lawmakers, there were thinkers, and thoughts, and pictures, figures and comics and cushions and recliners, there were notepads filled with the scribbled drawings of diseased authors, and beds, where they sat upright, and there were bags, with blood, or saline, and wires, running, and there were arms, and veins, and sterile things, there were yellow floors and windows for the blue sunset, and there were a few more people and they were looking over, and there were whispers, and there were children, and elders, and nurses and doctors, and letters, of rejection, from the publishers, and standardized light fixtures, and odors, now smelling much stronger, and coughs, and breathers, and other kinds of pauses and silences and angels flying all over, there were sheets with wrinkles, outlining your fingers, there were cracks, and bones, and there were fewer and fewer people together, and there was some sort of remainder, some words and manners, and hands clasped into one another, and skulls, barren lands, and fires, and deserts, and songs heard only inside, and caves, and curtains, and shadows making a little theater, there were teachers, and films, and rocks and things, and there were large amounts of pleasure, and there were traces of erasure, all over the counter, there were hours wasted to get her, and there were branches and words typed in the computer, and games, and pieces of paper, forgotten in drawers, bowls and experiments with water, with power, with leather, with or without her, there were cropped corners, out of circular viewers, particular positions of shapes and lines in a world of black squares and lines over a green and brown background, and there were chuggers, scammers, prank callers, there were spinning balls of different angular diameters, convicts and lawyers, givers, movers, shadows in the corners, floaters, translucent strange boys, novembers, winters, foxes, hunters and gatherers, continental philosophers, there were guys who ran for hours and hours, there were scabs and scree and creepers and crusty leftovers, day-old drinks sitting in cupholders, in cars you'd never learned to enter, there were roads looping over and over, and tunnels and traffic, and long flat yellow planes where crawled the combine harvesters, and still over, there were fences, and wire, and shrubs and conifers, and beams and scale models, and toy car collectors, and fathers and mothers, dogs and birds with names like Bill, cockers, hunters, shooters, writers, watchers, anarchist hustlers, balsa leaning on the closed door in the shed of the worker, shelters, bunkers, beaches without water, there were clients and desks and drives and larger pieces of paper with lines and numbers and friends and weather, and roots and holes or rather, craters, filled with rainwater, gas lines and sewers, tunnels running under, pieces of copper, bars, cheeses, newspapers, false facts, typos, more numbers, fears and mongers, of war, of scandal, luxury goods and their silken peddlers, creams, programs, graphic designers, fans, jets and comets and popular newscasters, stars, trackers and handlers, public flight numbers, stalkers, baiters, selfie takers, air conditioners, cities and frames, stalks and bulbs and pots and bottles, tar, feathers, messengers, benders, drugs, layovers, public gropers, cultures, receivers, resellers, principles, loud thuds and bangs and clangs, drummers, construction workers, links, screeners, gaffer, plenty of vinyl records, snappers, there were clasps, clipboards, two TVs in corner, a door, ajar forever, more and more wires, a button to call her, a tube in the kisser, spontaneous dancers, california dreamers and thumps and twangs and hair and fingers and vans carrying products of the country, and small streets and bits of dialogues between strangers, screaming toddlers, kids and teenagers and youths and college goers, and screaming elders, and pain running through you bright and sharp and well-meaning, friendly bakers, delivery drivers, needs and holes, lacks, massages and long slow movies and tallies, tokens, words, lines going higher and higher, roams and canals, green courtyards and parks, stairs in cobble, early risers, ducks and dirty green rivers with bridges all over, itches, scratches, wounds, blood, and epiphanies of pain and cramps and forgiven fathers, cramps and sad sidewalks and borehole covers, nuclear reactors, solar reflectors, landscape operators, tasks, promises, excuses, messages left unanswered and soreness and beds ever so small and sounds ever so faint of trickling showers, sentences in the ether, there were riots and gases, something wrong with the dead center, there were talks and lectures, permanent placeholders, there were pangs and prods in your legs so that you asked for them to be removed, deadened, blackened toes, monitors and toasters, subway encounters, readers, questions with no answers, pills and sprays, getting better and better, daughters going through your dresser, stories shared unasked of dead dogs in forlorn houses in unkempt gardens when you were a lot younger and getting your first hours, days spent at the binder's until the late late light, until your eyes hurt through the magnifier, long unspent times inspecting individual characters, there were benches and burgers, chapters and lurkers, observed parishioners, very very small instances that you now remember, the bygone, instant desires, the hunger, the perils of pedestrian navigators, the raptures at cuts, at pictures, at sounds, there were feathers, and bars and beers, and all this time reading, there were long sensuous silences with others, there were padded backs drilling into your shoulders, trains, networks of energy and yours, now spent, there were husks, men sitting in corners, unsuccessful illusions and hairlines and yourself there now lying leftover fakely whining like an ungrateful ancestor, not a show but an act of surrender, something she can take home with her and think on over and over, remember, forget, remember later, visit you, leaving flowers with her own daughter, really thinking of her daughter's daughter, there was liquid dripped, when your whole head, that is all that remained, stretched endlessly upwards through the many rooms above filled with sons and daughters and cleaners and pastors and many, many others, five hundred feet tall when you saw across the whole town, the linecutters and eyerollers and frowners and wincers and pacers and smokers and shruggers and smilers and whistlers and those who were so busy listening to others, those who tripped, those who fell, those who opened their shutters, the crying teenagers, the strollers and bikers, passengers, the tourists, the trappers, the cars and their plastic covers, the tramway conductors, podcast listeners, the readers, chess players, bird feeders, kite flyers, drone steerers, cloud gazers, the babies and their disasters, the men who sat together, tree climbers, pole leaners, wall huggers, the stragglers, the subs and their masters, and the dogs and their owners, the tongue clickers, the hat throwers and spinners, and yourself just crossing the Kármán line, finally dissolving into the weather -