after the storm

a catalog of devotional scraps that point to memory -- nonlinear as memories appear and there are gaps.

yesterday new york was knee-deep in water .. before I left for Lake George, i meant to put some items i had been periodically setting aside into an album for safe organized preservation so i purchased an accounting notebook from P&P art supply, and set it down for later. took the scraps and put them into an old paper packet temporarily from developed photos. holding them made me feel cold and compressed inside and this i noted. upon returning a week later my roommate who is a pop star told me the winter would be rough astrologically.. the next morning in my dream, in my childhood home i was reading a book that my student wrote (do not have students) saying that the winter of 2021 was to be the same conditions as 1776. whether or not this is prophetic, there is no doubt that shit continues to go down with more frequency and losing heat or power or internet may not be out of the realm of possibility and it may no longer time to be saving things for our children to look through once or twice to say that's nice and so the notebook would not be wise and instead opted for photographs ... i laid the items out on my bed just so spaced apart and delicate, warm and wet wind would slap them off the surface and would have to begin again .. the hurricane laughs at the attempt to salvage long gones and we now play nature's game. in my stubbornness and need to soothe the forgetting of life here they are and there was a deal made with my A/C unit on alternate and energy saving mode .. where i would have about 3 minutes to lay out the work between light blasts of air that would uproot it. this is how it is now I guess .. and we only have time for what is essential and still the references to our lives and the people in them get to be important too. some of these are from high school and some of them are from earlier this year and some of them are from mid twenties and they all sit together on a whirring drive that will be swallowed whole as well and as we don't slaughter goats anymore, the scraps are my sacrifice for better life on earth.