Aaron Boothby: Container

CONTAINER

Talk is a text leaking from my body     Listening I absorb talk

leaking from other bodies     Digest some of that     Make some

of that part of my body     Most not     Most lost     Talk is a flow

Not a flow I fully control     Sometimes very little     Sometimes

a torrent of a kind a rush after snow-melt     Talk like water like

blood flows better when heated     Talk dried, coagulated, found

on white porcelain should be considered as evidence     I imagine

my body ends at my skin     My body sneezing and laughing

and shedding     Leaking     Not my body but everybody’s body

My talk is text leaking from my body to become everybody’s

text digested   (or not     most not) by another’s body     What,

other than a body, contains text?     Book is a form which is

a container for text     Tweet is a smaller container     Notebook

a larger container     Book such a durable, variable container

Talk is a flow has no container     Fills them     Continually arrives

Text seems to benefit from being contained     Our pleasure

is in differentiated text   :   different from the flow of talk

With time to consider the object solidified, inert     A boulder

in the stream and the eddies silvered swirling around it catching

feathers and last year’s leaves     A text is a boulder in the flow

of talk     A boulder is outside of time until it is dislodged

then enters time until it stops     I try to fix my body as a text

Disrupt the flow of time as speech     Come undone     Lacking

reflection am adrift, aware afloat     I arrive at a shore a container

for a text made for you     Sent out in the hope of arrival

Sent out as contained talk wanting to leave a residue of feeling

from which no object remains     Talk is a text leaking, takes

a form and is delivered and leaves a residue of sensation, machine

producing feeling in whom it touches     I do not remain

Talk does not remain     That some stain may remain is best hope

Aaron Boothby lives in Montréal where the alleys, trees and quietly mad nights are loud enough to drown the glowing screens. Work has appeared most recently in Vallum; words in various arrangements are tweeted @ellipticalnight.