Joseph Kay

My dog won't eat my life's work.

[Joseph Kay @JosephK613]

The guard tells me today marks another year. He is a liar, but not always.
I have no calendar to check or window whose square of earth or sky might offer a clue.
In any case, what can "year" or "today" mean when the present moment itself is in doubt? No heartbeat attests to it.

[Joseph Kay @JosephK613]

“You, between J and L, step forward!”

A cake. 142 candles.
Excecated Oskar takes Kodaks.

Brekekekex! Brekekekex!

[Joseph Kay @JosephK613]

In my windowless cell, stark naked, I do my callisthenics, a series of exercises patterned after the letters of the alphabet that allows me to spell out words and phrases for the devil who watches me through the peephole.

[Joseph Kay @JosephK613]

@VisitTwinPeaks Alien invasion?

[Joseph Kay @JosephK613]

@EleanorWachtel Your archive will help fill the void of your absence. Thank you for so many years of intellectually engaging episodes!

[Joseph Kay @JosephK613]

“Yes,” I shall say to myself, eventually, “I have been in this room before. I know that crack in the wall. I am sure of it.”

[Joseph Kay @JosephK613]

The room I enter may be the room I exited the year before. When I return to it, I am unlikely to know it as such, at least right away. In time, however, I will know it.

[Joseph Kay @JosephK613]

But they are not identical. Each is different, if only slightly. I am sure of it, despite my eyes.

About one hundred rooms, I say, though there may be far fewer. Only two are necessary.
The room I exit and the room I enter.

[Joseph Kay @JosephK613]

Today. Is it day? The night curtain is never drawn. The light in my room is always on.
Today I move to another room, a room in the same house. I can never leave this house.
It has many rooms. One hundred. More or less. They resemble one another. More or less.

[Joseph Kay @JosephK613]

@AD_Lobel Sometimes the vaguest wish is immediately granted.

[Joseph Kay @JosephK613]

I had just gone back to sleep. Who woke me up so soon? And now I can't go back. And there is nothing I can do. Even the doodles I drew, no different than my reddish drool, are no longer safe.

[Joseph Kay @JosephK613]

But the trustee's perfidy was foreseen, says the crow.

[Joseph Kay @JosephK613]

Nothing but ash was to have survived me. You mimics, you tome-tombs: leave my death alone.

[Joseph Kay @JosephK613]

A shadow with a faded squid-ink penumbra conveys on a skin graft card that an English butler brings in on a silver tray posthumous birthday greetings to myself. This is the same shadow that would observe my yahrzeit when I was alive.

[Joseph Kay @JosephK613]

Is that Max? Is that Oscar? Is that F.B.?
Is this Zurau? Is this Schelesen? Is this Berlin?

The mind sometimes wanders like this when wish becomes reality, when reward and punishment converge.

[Joseph Kay @JosephK613]

I almost forgot what day it is, one day now being so like another. Before all this, only the internal calendar failed.

How I enjoy these dateless days. How I dread them. Living in the shadow of the eternal.

[Joseph Kay @JosephK613]

@holdengraber To exist for 136 years isn't much. I've been dead for 95 of those years. Hard to say whether the first 41 were very different. Peace eluded me then; peace eludes me now.

[Joseph Kay @JosephK613]

To exist for 136 years isn't much. I've been dead for 95 of those years. Hard to say whether the first 41 were very different. Peace eluded me then; peace eludes me now.

[Joseph Kay @JosephK613]

@CallFromPaul @lithub Delighted your program will resume! If you could call the dead as well as the living I would have many suggestions. In terms of those who still stand on this shore would George Steiner or Harold Bloom be possible?

[Joseph Kay @JosephK613]

@CallFromPaul Agent about to drop after making the call. https://t.co/nuaBHElQpL