Thomas Cook & Tyler Flynn Dorholt: I’ve Erased Over Five Thousand Messages
Excerpt from Henry Miller and the Bagel Shop
I’ve erased over five thousand messages that existed in the space which was becoming close to what can only be an ethereal mess.
Going back to what we’ve said, to how it all changed, it is better to have released the stomach ache and the endless board meetings.
I am next to a young man who wrote a beautiful poem about a farm, and he has since done well for himself, though he has stopped writing poetry, as I have.
I have hit a slot between the thinking and piled on the supple. I agree, the meals are very much in front of me. I agree with pure duration.
I think of it first, before anything else, because it stabilizes both mind and body. As if I could reach beyond the reaching test of the early 90’s now that I’m taller and more willing to be observed by walls and boards. In the garden, I imagine the dead chemist, I imagine the name of the pages that I haven’t read and will never read because the author has disappeared.
We exchange snippets of where those from the past are now living and what is most baffling is that their names have not changed their bodies. I am flown over my own home. Or something of the reverse.
Grass will be the only green color I can comprehend. The people will not be in a good line, but near bovine and rather terrified for I will have blindfolded them all and have asked them to take time away from their families. One by one they will piece together the anxieties of my past and solve me. Then I will move forward with my credit cleared and a paid-for house and a lot of new voices I could not until now have placed with faces. Do you have a universal settlement with land or are you squeamish come divergence? I am game for adding on the weight.
Thomas Cook and Tyler Flynn Dorholt live in Los Angeles and Syracuse. Their collaborative writing has appeared in Alice Blue, Posit, and Spinning Jenny among other publications. American Flowers (Dock Street Press), Tyler's debut collection of prose poetry and photographs, was published in 2016, and Thomas's poetry and fiction are forthcoming from The Cincinnati Review and Bennington Review. They are both Editors at Tammy.
