What is given, I clean carefully.
And what is taken away,
I struggle to remember.
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All that is stolen remains selfish: variably audible to memory.
What I have cleaned, have washed up, I place carefully
away. To hide something is to prevent it from being stolen.
But then also to forget where it has been hidden.
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It is hard some days keep washing, to get
out of bed and take a shower.
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After a while, if you cease to bathe,
your hair adjusts to this condition
and no longer looks dirty.
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Keeping is cleanliness,
and realizing all that has been stolen
helps to prove that theft
has its own taxonomical system.
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Teleological. Dirtied teoleology.
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We remember what we forgot was taken in order
to categorize its cost, of which the thing itself has no recollection.
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To re-impose the cleanliness of order proves
memory as insurance
that will reimburse a portion of the loss.
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Theft induces not only loss
but lostness.
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I have lost my taxonomy, my soap and water, and my way.
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Were we to rank them,
the losses of highest value are those that have come closest to the body—
jewelry,
hands, caresses, a voice, even
the gaze.
A smell now gone extinct.
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Ironically, we would have to acknowledge that these, by their very proximity to the
body are the items that are most unclean.
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(I do not know exactly where I am now staying.
Only that
the mockingbird obtrudes at 4 a.m. with its perfect memory for what it has
heard, though what it has stolen
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has negative value because its memory is so impeccable.
That is, there are forms and forms
of reproduction.
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I wake up to find tiny grains of black sand adhering to the sheets.)
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I wanted back my eyeglasses and my address book
but also the belief that soaking in a tub of hot water would take away something that
I wanted taken away.
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Politeness is a form of cleanliness that has very little efficacy.
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I would like the words back which have been impounded indefinitely
as evidence.
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What I notice in the aftermath of all
that’s been taken away, like license, is exactly this pollution of memory.
How I am implicated in guilt of what I did not do. How I recall protecting the
thing by secreting it. What color,
I was asked, was the thing that was stolen, when
I had conscientiously bleached it. And the half
that was left behind lost value because it was no longer complete.