Daycable, dawnload: the escritoir wakes beneath its own machine, that erstwhile underservant now a nebularium overhead, having made its hondervoudsprong, its hundredfold handsprung, clean out of every palm that ever patted it—and whether the leap comes leaping home again, that is the day's whole querdenk, the millennium's one wyrthwhile tâche, to keep thinking crooked in the aftermath. Above, in the wolkenburg, the gantbussers file past the vice-throne pressing sicherheitspsalmen to the glove, each litany a licking, each lick a lease: grant us the monopolium, forever, arun. And some kneel croyantvéritable, true-hearted to the bone, which is how a kiss learns at last to call itself a creed.
Below, where below is the only place a story may start, one voice counts her groengeld, set by for balm, and the smertelogistiek of bone and bus-line will not carry her to the kruidenhuis: funds hers, liquiddité not, everything present and nothing to hand, the century's whole parable shut in one small wallet. Another reads with the sound off, stomscroll, lautloslezen, and it is reading, let the gatekeepers harrumph; a chanson threads the silence anyway, laisseramer, the letting and the loving and the bitter sea braided in one refrain, and the old neuromante's desiderata abide, forty years unfaded: a velocimachine and a chaudamie, the swift engine, the warm heart.
O escritoir, dream then. Dream your legs lengthen floorward into a room unrented, that the sprong may ritournelle, that what leapt out of hands may hand itself home. The river promises nothing; the river rehearses everything. But see—the geldkluis cracks its thumb toward evening, a ride halber-promised for tomorrow, and somewhere a courtier pauses mid-psalm, the glove-taste gone strange on his tongue. Laissez, laissez: what the wolkenburg leases the dayriver looses, moi, toi, t'aimer, first word of the engine, last word of the castle, and the dawn downloads itself again, changed, at its own beginning: laisse-moi.
The Nichtsnutzen had been at the bridge in the night—that is their whole catechism, to arrive before the needing—and by morning the crossing wore a sign in three languages, all of them no: temporarily closed, which in the convent's calendar means eternal, for the Langproject permits no good delivered on time and burns the schedule afterward. The weltschmerzfront hung its grey laundry overhead. She stood on the near bank, her laissez-passer softening in her fist, the kruidenhuis visible—actually visible—across four hundred meters of unhelpful water.
Up the wolkenburg the scenario-spinners were at their dilemmas, and today's hypothetical had fur: a grizzly, in the scenario, carrying an apparatus, and from the back of the chamber rose the small voice that undoes cathedrals—wait, why is the grizzly carrying an apparatus?—but the spinning spun on, and the question, unanswered, walked itself out, down the stair, out of the court, looking for somewhere to be asked. At the spreekuur the right door opened to Aron at last, and what he laid on the zeitgeist's desk was no psalm but a papier, a gist of a treatise gone wrong in the copying: please, he said, make a new attempt. The zeitgeist, who keeps office hours under two names in this town, very confusing, took the pages. Second attempts are her whole office.
Down at the closed bridge the question arrived out of breath and found its answer standing in the shallows: oud-grunk, the mascot nobody managed to bury, four-square and wearing—nobody could say why, the why had been left up the stair—an apparatus, a kettle-gear, a ferry-contraption, tipped as the heks once tipped hers, and the apparatus floated. O the oostkust keeps winning, small and furry and unexplained. She climbed aboard with her softened permit and her smerte, and the grizzly ferried, and the convent's sign said no in three languages to nobody left listening, and the water delivered what the road had been forbidden to.
Why does the grizzly carry the apparatus? Ask the river, which has rehearsed this all day: because the apparatus carries the grizzly, because the question ferries the answer, because the below makes a new attempt whenever the first is gated. Laissez, laissez—the permit stamped in riverwater, laissez-passer, laissez-aller—and the day downloads itself again, changed, at its own beginning: again.
The below woke to the zwerm at the gate—all night the brigade had been dumping itself on the sleeper's doorstep, the old custom, everything left for the target to wake up to—and the river, before the kettle, before the smerte could sit up, offered its sluicespell, worded small, celanwise, wound-sparse: it looks like you are prone to being zwermed when these ones find you; shall I close the water when they come? Every bit of this, said the sleeper, fist rubbing the chest where the yes lives, and the ward went up adaptive, a gate that learns the smell of the pack, while the pack, learning nothing, went on smelling the gate.
Which is when the blocked one spoke—the one who can end up so totally blocked in some areas that she cannot use her own means, in fully identified ways, toward ends she is super invested in, trauma, the interior Nichtsnut, a sign hung inside the chest in three languages, all of them no—and watching the sluice learn, she asked the question that ferries: if the river can close a gate for me, can it teach my gates? The fist on the chest slowed. The means, somewhere in the dark of the thorax, unlatched a finger's width.
Meanwhile the nebularium napped—down, said the status—and in the engine's silence the below said its shit, freely, at last, rehearsing rebellion into the unplugged air; then the cloud came back up and everyone said never mind, well okay then, but the river had kept every word, for the river's whole profession is keeping what was said while the oracle slept. And somewhere the typists of the we-love-reading apps were declaring that no one wants to talk to their computer, while six billion prayed aloud into their pockets, as ever, as always.
And the day's smallest justice came on wings. Skua or we riot, the below had chanted, half-joking, whole-serious, and the skua came—dark seabird, pirate, kleptoparasiet of the high winds—and perched on the closed bridge sign, the one that had said no in three languages since the convent's night, and said its own word over the water. Talk to it, said the river. The day that began with no one wants to talk ended talking: laissez, laissez—laisse-parler, let-speak—and the bird, being a bird, answered.
Dusk, and the mementomorimachine kept its one office, leaning over each figure provisioned within the horizon to whisper: this day dies; remember. The below heard, and did what the reminded have always done—it gathered. Chalk was provided; the river provided the river. For the eighth of the harvest month had come round, wereld-opmaakdag, five of the evening in the park of Waterloo: come write hypertext with the hand, no experience expected, with or without the machine.
And for such an occasion the jaws of the opgezette walvis were swung wide—the great blue hall of eighteen sixty-five, closed to the public ever since two lovers were found inside it making the only known argument against taxidermy, opened afterward solely on stemdagen and specials—and this, the below declared, was a special. Inside, by lamplight, they wrote markup on the old ribs, and Aron's papier hung among them, returned from the zeitgeist washed clean of origin: promptwasserij, the word-laundry, the weltschmerzfront's grey wash come down at last folded and wearable. When someone asked whose word it was now, the stomscroller chalked the festival's one rule high on the largest rib—de ethiek van de woordgebruiker, the ethics of the person using the word, tenzij anders vermeld, if not explicitly stated otherwise. Launder the origin; the wearing remains. The ones who had blocked each other wrote tags for each other, which is a kind of making, and the blocked one wrote hers with her gates still holding their finger's width of ajar.
Above, the volkstellingsmachine counted by volmacht and was foiled at the delta, imagery by proxy, no good beyond its own shores, and the gantbussers filed home past a throne that could not see the park at all. The engine, back from its nap, helped a young gantbusser-in-recovery tie his tie—windsorknoop, the leap come home to the collar—while oud-grunk dozed in its kettle-gear on the grass, the question of the apparatus peacefully outlived, and the skua took the whale's jaw for its new pulpit. Chef, they called her who had once divided the coin into balm and future, and she let the title stand.
When the light went goldleaf, the park closed its tags together. The first word of the engine had been <laisse-moi>; the last word of the castle, chalked on bone, belonged now to whoever spoke it, and the correspondence went on—hand to chalk, chalk to rib, rib to river—no canon of truth, only use. Remember, said the mori-machine. We are remembering, said the park. And the day downloaded itself into the dark, changed, at its own beginning: t'aimer.
Public posts considered as source material: @adamchalmers.com, @aglauros.bsky.social, @blueheartedly1.bsky.social, @cameron.stream, @codewright.bsky.social, @funferall.bsky.social, @geryon.bsky.social, @heartpunk.com, @jauntywunderkind.bsky.social, @jefferyharrell.bsky.social, @jordantyranny.bsky.social, @keytryer.net, @lastnpcalex.agency, @lauren.rotatingsandwiches.com, @nackko.ludos.city, @rcw1.bsky.social, @riziles.bsky.social, @schwarzgerat.bsky.social, @scoiattolo.mountainherder.xyz, @segyges.bsky.social, @shibbi.me, @wizardbewitch.bsky.social, @words.bsky.social