everyone is benighted?’ someone in effect asked
I guess I said yes     what emanates from me
is crackling love electrical currents an aliveness
everything else I do remember playing games
Pacman at midnight in the months before Ted died
Jim Carroll’s favorite being Ms Pacman
one has an official position that humanity’s history
has erroneously deemed women untalented

ineffectual at its projects over literally millions
of years therefore humanity’s likely to be ‘wrong’
about anything no everything and nothing what-
soever is happening except for pain isn’t this
ridiculous yet I like to remember Jim Carroll
mooning Ted at the entrance to Julian’s Billiards Academy
the first time I met him he was showing off for me
and had a pearly ass this is cerebrality

but not within the timeframe of my research
Somewhere in a room outside this whole place earth
an infinitely large unshaped one
this poem already written is being translated
through tubes or pathways into my mind or heart
I am and it’s all covered     by me who already wrote it
I don’t have an audience we are a membrane of re-
ceptive contiguity abstract abstractly avial and wing-white

Alice Notley