There are parts of me all over this city. A fingernail chewed and discarded furtively onto the carpet of a Cherry Creek department store. Snot blown into a paper towel now buried in a dumpster somewhere in LoDo. My spit on a sidewalk in the Tech Center, my spit in Boulder Creek, my spit floating upon the surface of the South Platte. Spit in the neighborhood streets of Aurora. My DNA lives bunched upon wasted cigarette butts on Capitol Hill, in Lakewood, in the Highlands. Hairs strewn about the foothills, hairs abandoned and sunk into the Earth somewhere on Colfax. Everywhere on Colfax. Dried piss in a men’s room somewhere in Highland’s Ranch, in Littleton. Eyelashes, dead skin cells in Fort Collins. Fragments of me transferred from money or my credit card and now embedded into cash registers across town, parts of me digitized and spent by others. McAvoy as legitimate trade. Parts of me cluttered upon the flesh and in the mouths of the wandering women of the world, all of whom I had met here or somewhere close-by, women who enchanted and puzzled the younger me, all of them now charted upon their own foreign paths. A tart drop from a nostril now dried and crusted to the bottom of someone else’s shoe, someone else’s pant cuff. Tracking my remains in all directions. McAvoy as pandemic. Somewhere, everywhere, all-where. Random registers of my being ride the wind across the icy plains, they carry their own deranged voices out to the frigid canting West Slope. Microscopic and profuse treasures, wasted and worthless traces. I think about all the parts of me dispersed across the world and I wonder where, truly where, is home.
Author: TJ McAvoy
-
Cords
Cords, the world is a system or network of intertwined and braided cords, with each generation or era representing a new cord, every day or week or event a single thread in each cord. The threads themselves serve as the primary elements in the overall braided communion. The cord is two things, it has two distinct but wholly related purposes, the first of which is to support and sustain the overall sociability or compatibility of world cultures, and the second is to provide a narrative of this process, even when the threads become frayed and the cords unravel. For with each frayed thread the overall fallibility of the entire network of cords grows apparent and measures must be put in place to re-fortify the weakness, to support the entire system. This is where the narrative function can help sustain the cord’s health, it can help curtail the damage.
-
Window to the self
I crack my window when I write, even in the winter, in the dead of night, the sounds of the city soothe me, the sounds of the city guide me down into my cellar of self reflection, exactly where I need to be in order to examine the shadowed recesses, to peer down into the hidden places where no light nor exposure exists, where things go to remain unobserved. These are the very things I’m trying to discover, secrets, the crawling, slithering forms of the mind, this is where they live and the open window on the wall behind me helps cast light upon those forms to send them scurrying, to upset their patterns of concealment. I don’t know why or how the sounds of the city can bring me such clarity during my ritualized introspections. Wind, insects, vehicles, midnight pedestrians, distant sirens, rain, gunshots, screams, howls, silence, all of it like some cipher upon the door to those sacred inner spaces, allowing my entry.





