excerpt from my novel(lla)/chapbook/'something must emerge from this all'

things are changing or something. i am rarely sober at night.

i am sitting in my bed and everything outside is covered in ice. every night i listen to this song over and over.

tonight i am listening to a botched mixed tape i made for a friend's wedding. the tape is old so as it goes on the voices get deeper and sounds warp and garble until the end when the songs are barely recognizable.

i wrote today for five hours straight. it is the most time i have spent with a new idea for a chapbook or novella or something.

here is an excerpt:

I.

1. There is a man in the woods and he lives in a tent.
Every morning he wakes up with dew in his beard and a hatchet in his hand.
When he wakes up everything is dark and the ground is still cold.
He lies awake in the dark thinking of his work for the day.
He lies awake in the dark touching the hatchet with his fingers.

2. There is a man in the woods and everything in his tent is lined with moss.
When the sun rises he sweeps out the tent and folds his bedding into a corner.
In the morning he wanders through the forest with his pockets full of twigs.
He cannot walk without the sound of leaves being crushed.
For breakfast he has only hot goat's milk and roasted chestnuts.
Every morning he chops down small trees and leaves them to rot.

3. There is a man in the woods and he lives under a canopy of leaves and dew.
When he wakes up everything is dark.
Everything is dark and the ceiling sags down like a sickle in the sky.
Tiny beams of weak light break through the canopy and bury themselves into the floor of the tent.
When he wakes up he walks through the forest breaking off stray twigs and filling up his pockets with them.
When he wakes up washes his face at the river.
He watches the animals come to drink from the river.

4. There is a man in the woods and he sleeps under miles of leaves and moss.
In the morning he sets about clearing a space and felling small trees.
He collects small-, medium-, and large-sized twigs.
He checks his traps in the morning: one by the refrigerator, one near the washing machine, and one near the abandoned farm equipment.
Before breakfast he takes the twigs from his pockets and strips them of smaller twigs.
Every morning he builds a teepee and then sets it on fire.
Every evening he comes home with blood on his arms and wakes up every morning with a sword in his hand.

5. There is a man in the woods and he lives in darkness.
He is always moving back and forth through the trees in the dark, crying.
He does not know exactly where the thing is.
Just that it is somewhere and that many times he has perceived it as something else.
He has perceived the thing as another thing.
Something that was not that thing but a thing that was not there.
It was not there.
The thing was not there.