Paul Foster Johnson

I did something I could never discuss made an acquaintance and embraced him in a phone booth. While interested parties lurked among free newspaper boxes he removed his domino. What to construe from leather bracelets? The impossibility of translation from a phone booth to a churchyard a gate painted white a belfry with no bell some culture with haceks the sense of lolling in a park from a churchyard to a community garden heckling the rooster as it crowed. We left the part we liked jeering the rooster from a sward. We reentered the garden with a script but refused to expand on the vestiges of happiness. A girl took responsibility for the garden and plied us with background information until her nervous guardian sent us back to the church with a coat of arms where we were going anyway as though under the influence of boreal fluid. The songbirds of the yard were about to be contaminated by a new age concert. With so little at stake they praised positive thinking.

Their singer suffered breakdowns. In their work there was a sense of what it was to live there at that time. One song described the dark around the military vehicles between them and the cocaine waiting in Gramercy. It was about the sepsis that followed love or love repeated as farce, the neck neck neck damaged by an anonymous hand unstringing guitars. They got away with it and worked to abolish youth by knitting and paying half-attention. I thought I was in love because my sentiments were matched by a generic, abiding sense of unfreedom. Nothing survives lovers descrying the red flags of old flames. Nothing is more relatable than an unreasonable person operating subtractively, indulgently, out of exasperation.

P. entered a third space from which he could watch time pass instead of walking to the monastery in the middle of the night. His opaque sexuality derived from the absence of a guarantee that his person would remain intact. He recognized this in himself and we stared at the pylons regressing into the lackluster northeastern woods. The monastery was a display before which he claimed sangfroid a picturesque ruin to which he was conveyed as though by boreal fluid. Everyone loved occasional works like this their allusions to complementary and absent events. Weaving around proliferating drywall I despaired over this desire. P. joined the migrant workforce and grew more disconsolate and distant and drunk in our presence. Our presence was only possible because of advances in technology in a dialectical relationship with their debasement: servers in cold rooms and a recursive void of woodblock chat sounds.