You hear something idle. Sit down and write everything, or find a hangman’s noose. Think about a cocktail glass and the rain in September, a thread on the collar and a stolen look, some billow of clouds and disease, an insane man and Schubert’s music, solitude and Rene’s paintings, a pebble and the anxieties of ants fractured mounds of color and the reticence of a wound, eventually a thought hovers over the coffin without a lid, even if words are recklessly strewn, doomed metaphors then their parting is also their lingering though it’s just a desperate shedding on sentences of disjointed words, phantoms and roof- top stories, don’t be so concerned with the story in the coffin because life is also just a large coffin without walls without the smell of wood, I’ll tell you of illusory lives when we lie in the coffin contemplating the rectangular moon You hear something idle. Sit down and write everything, or find a hangman’s noose. _______ * title of a work by Rainer Maria Rilke --translated by Đoàn Tuấn Đức & Kaitlin Rees