A small black flag attached to a stick, planted in some rocks atop a mountain.

What is it called when a dream or a nightmare feels more real than the waking world? A biopsy? A tourniquet? A way out? What do we do at the end of everything—there are ashes falling from the sky and we all behave as if we’ve never inhabited a body, and yet we can’t put it (the body) down. I feel at home online, like a data sponge. Like a wave of information cresting over pinnacles of hardware. Like a wall of static on a detuned television set. Like we even have television sets anymore. When I’m sleeping you’re beautiful. I pick up words and move them around in my hands, between my fingers like clay. I roll them around in my mouth like a hard candy with a soft center and then I spit them out. I’ve been crying most all my life. I bet you wish it was harder. I bet you wish you were harder. I bet the night has never seen you scream or fuck. It’s easier to be angry sometimes. When I dream, I see people I haven’t seen in days or weeks or months and we talk about banal things, like work or a movie we both saw separately recently, or how we’d like to die. There are things that language can do that bend the world anew.