What is to be said of the Chinese film?
It is full of colors in every frame.
The cinematography is impeccable.
It ends in death for every person.
Every army wears a different color, and all are magnificent.
Each character betrays another:
One of love of daughter
One of love of mother
One of love of lover
One of love of life;

But the end is this:
the emperor knows best
and punishes incest.

Fugio

I am nothing other than time. Time and agreement – a temporary living arrangement between some carbon and some oxygen, some hydrogen and nitrogen atoms who migrate in and out at all hours, carrying supply to meet demand. (As I typed that last sentence a babbling group of foul-smelling methane molecules made it past the last border checkpoint – and in a zone far north, thermally charged caffeine and lactose molecules were admitted.) L’etat – cest moi!

But though the molecules themselves be most apparent, make no mistake, it is the time in which I swim. My constitution carries an addendum – a morbid post-script scribbled at the bottom, making clear the genre in which I act, “This message will self-destruct in ___ “ And there a careless clerk has left a t uncrossed, as it were, and an empty opening, left to be filled in later, comes to dominate by virtue of the power invested in its emptiness. It yawns at me in the morning -my telomeres are ticking, my stem-cells running thin.

I see my hands before me now – the hair upon the knuckles which I burn back with an old cigarette lighter left over from years ago when I still smoked – the hair upon the knuckles which I burn back when it becomes long enough to reach out and touch another finger – I see my hands before me now – and I see the beginning of the first liver-spot. The first spot – yes – but not the first sign of the impending revolution – no – there have been others. The sound my knees and wrists and ankles make have been with me for years – but only recently has rising from bed begun to sound like a string of small, pathetic fire-crackers – hair has long harbored in my nose, and for years even my ears have produced hair with an abundance and energy usually more assoiciated with the fierce and misplaced fecundity of youth – but now abundance has doubled down upon abundance, but instead of pliable and whispy young tender shoots I put forth black stalks of the kind to be found upon the more intimate zones of a matronly rhino.

The silver has sparkled in the lines beneath my lips for some years now – some ladies say they find it attractive – which doesn’t stop it being what it is – a sign the times has left lying across my face, encircling my lips, so that whatever words I offer are seen as emerging from a well of wisdom distilled from experience, as opposed to the fresh leaping genius of youth.

I am time – time cest moi. I am conscious of time – I am self-conscious. I know well the potholes of my road, and I watch them deepen with mounting alarm.