Ken Baumann - Solip

Come back.

Come back to me, baby.

Feed me when I'm mewling.

Take down your estimate.

Here we go.

I feel it.

Grate change.

Grate change.

No change. No speaking. No speaking in the living room. Keep that shit to yourself. Keep that shit to yourself. A draft of palm leaf. Get the FUCK—

No. No, now I am sure of the intercepted and decoded rays. How else to know not to come? Listening! It's listening. They are realizing: Take me and wait and do the opposite. Do the opposite, let me in.

Cut my support. I am unstable and rotten. I am a debt. Toxic. I am spilled, a hazard. A premature extinction. A death toll. Subprime. I am ill-handled. I am a fee.

There was unbuttoning, and his chest. Nothing more.

I need to make you feel better.

how? how how how how how?

A diamond.

It began in a river. Boys and girls played in the water at dusk, when the mothers were cooking and mashing together beans and germs. One little boy, a bright little boy, and handsome, was ankled by the river which was now just as much a stream. He was looking at himself in the water. He was looking at his eyes. He was looking at his hair. He was thinking about his mother and her mouth saying You are Handsome. He was thinking about the moon because he felt it over his shoulder. The children around him didn't pay much attention. Handsome Boy was also Quiet Boy. Handsome Boy was quiet for no reason. This is what they, the other mothers, whispered about him. They were jealous of his good looks. He was bright and and the best looking, but he had no father. For that the other mothers felt fine. And Handsome Boy looked at the water every evening. Sometimes into the night. Sometimes he looked so far into the water that he could see another moon, a brother moon. He knew that it would be dumb to reach down and try to scoop it out of the water, with his hands, but he had tried. Only once. Handsome Boy was now ankled in the stream, looking at the water and smelling the mush. The other children made no noise. They had stopped splashing. Handsome Boy was broken from his look with the water, by this no noise of the children. He looked away. He saw their faces. Their arms, little like his, wrapped around each other. Their knees, hobbly like his, bent. Like that. Handsome Boy saw their eyes. He followed them. They led back to the stream where he was ankled. He saw up the stream and into the stream and saw a diamond. A diamond. Like the mothers had talked about, that stone they knew all about. Handsome Boy watched it come down the stream. It was big and it floated. It looked like perfect and it went back and forth like wine. Handsome Boy could see the water on the diamond and could think of the diamond, and the boys and girls held each other and thought of the diamond, though some wouldn't know. Handsome Boy felt it stumble in the water, but soft, as it came closer. But some wouldn't know. Handsome Boy put his fingertips in his mouth and knew that the boys and girls who weren't in the river and who didn't know would be the ones to go to their mothers and be better, back when the moons were out of the water and the diamond, a diamond, had gone. Handsome Boy let the diamond walk by. With little feet in the water that kept it up, because it stumbled. And Quiet Boy kept his fingertips near his lips. His eyes had followed, and the diamond, and the water, and the moon.

Stealing is transcendent and more bound to cosmology than you'll ever know, and I also do it.

A break in me. The lung games. Often forgotten. Played only by neophytes. Hung up in the shredded rooms when done. Foreign and dominated. Pleasure, while players sense inertia and all come at once. Coach: An intercom, but live and run with winks.

Zone is an understanding. Void is a brother. Space is a lack of sleep. Learning is a function of never leaving. Never is a relation to mirror. Zone is a callback to relations, their relations, and that love is a picture of ice. Understand? Understand? Correct? A rainbow is only tempic.

I'll leave you to intuit. Obviously. What I've given you is a plate of inedible fruit. You can leave it rot or watch it or eat it. You can eat it, though. What I've given you is a plate of inedible fruit. See?

Watching me.

THE HAND IS HERE!

No. Not honest. I see the contract. Yes: There it is. My XXXXX is written on it in an ink I don't recognize. Take the ink of. Take the ink of.

Pleasure pleasure pleasure pleasure—

I've got to get some principle again.

The longest you've endured, my dear? Please: Hold out your hand. My god, what a fine glove. You, surely, know the finest things.

Allow me to walk you through it — oh, watch the stairs, watch the stairs. They're deeper than expected. And the heels — I don't know how you do it. Please. Right this way.

Ahhhh — and here is the central landing. Yes that piece was brought in by my grandmother — a patron late in life, all sorts of fine sculptors. Yes, that one is quite famous, actually. We've had people from all over come to see it — I just watch from the windows. The help charges admission. Ahh! I kid. I kid I kid — come. Here, watch the cobble-stones. That grass has crept up around the edges in such a peculiar fashion, don't you think? Hmm. And here, this magnificent — oh, please do — yes isn't that quite a full sound? These magnificent doors are late exteenth century. From a Spanish oak. Taken from a stripped monastery in BEEP. Oh, why yes — they were neutral. And like all neutral things, (breath) the world must… touch every bit of it. Was what, darling? What was what? Let's continue on — this is the main ballroom—

Cut the shit.

Count the king.

Bury the horses. Do you see the labor? My back is basically breaking.

Did you know that phantasms first appeared in wax?

You are formally contained to the territory for its entirety. The ball begins and ends at midnight. The theme of the evening is 100,000,000 Pardons.

If known, a place is a known plane of planes in space unknown in their relation to the relation of the planes of place. This is in my blood.

I admit: The stream is there. Remember?

Or take a plane ride, set yourself there. Feel the layers of full air on each side. You must imagine first. Measure. Then, know that a name exists for the full air on each side of the plane in which you are laid, and that the name is only discoverable through abandonment. But then there is a layer of, a bevel of, useless space, no plane at all but a static, sorted, in between. See it and now you cannot see it. Hear it and know your ears would burst. Feel it and know your mouth would swell and cry. Sense — know the planes around you now are the planes in which you lie. you have left the center again—

I can't help but laugh.

A national poll: The morning brings everyone awake, and wears them formal. They are cast to each other on freeways and broadways. They are made to eat food. Lights click on in intervals. A national poll: The sun at night or moon in the morning. Are the rays meant to be castrated. Are the animals to be kept on provision with gag order. Do the stones set in a row, do they, should they be moved. Is the speaking voice still proper. Was the control collar a viable — thing? thing? was the — control collar? And then: Boom. Hands sweep aside the ballots. A nationwide sigh as magic goes away. An internally circulated grin at the success of a self-effacing, disintegrated voice. COSTS become an echo in tertiary space, and as it passes the satellites and diode cables, the astronaut feels it move up through his feet and out his helmet.

Lapse.

Numbness in the shaman. Cry for that now.

Or if the wall opens and offers a child: I will beat it to my chest in the just-dead way. I will sob for all mothers. Sob for all mothers, like good myth. Obliquity in worship.