I knew a man once because he was my father, though my knowledge of this word (this phrase, this father) has become somewhat obscured; I find its meaning difficult to locate amongst the absence of context, quotation, and reference he supplied me with. My subject lacks a sentence; he runs astray, tangentially, in the margins of a story like scribbled annotations serving to mark the beauty of someone else’s language. Sorry annotations, always dashed off in a hurry, elegant and slanting at the world.
He started to disappear word by word.
I began to wonder where all his words had gone until one day they were so hungry for meaning that they ate, chewed, and spit him out in distasteful little pieces. And right at my feet!
Now sometimes I will receive a little telephone phone call from one of the little pieces, and sometimes I will pick up, and we pretend to talk like we are whole.