[a new year at the tundras]

What it means to write about the year, the year passed by, in its displacement, that the year is displaced, years never escape us, we escape nothing but our attention of or towards them; to call them them is to regard them as figures, as fissures we jump, we leave behind, finding velocity in abandon, as if lobes, whichever ear, if not both, escape, un-rivet their attention. Their person, riveted to comfort, creatures who fill themselves with creature-ness, shunning the creature-ness of others, finding the creature in a bubble, updated photograph, updated profile, the same billion cells dying and refreshing and lying to every mirror in the name of comfort, a comfort that, its butterfly in capture, frames their lives on screens as idyllic. Flameless. Cool idyllic tundras, praise for its lowly vegetative state. The limits of vegetation there, the paucity of their investment. The soil is cold and hard. Roots are superficial. Taproots are terminal, or never, rather, know of reach, they do not know what reach is or what it is reaching establishes through contact, the contact here a positive coldness that presents itself as blameless, engaging bonfires only to toss the real beyond its recognition. Safe spaces, these tundras or taigas, these boxes, while bombs fall. While people beg to survive. While others bristle at the timbre and typing, the syllables of pleas, others lean into the missiles, their missiles, their silos, their problem of relativity. Our problems of proximity, of impotence, of performance, of the opacity of fingers in ears, of washed and drying palms over eyes, of cages around consciences. Selective winds to meet the charred. To write about the year is to write about what was seen, what was witnessed, is witnessed, is deemed acceptable, is or has or will possess an accepted width of this world’s wounds.