“a responsibility to the trace of the other”
–Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
you move through your day,
like a bird through branches
bending between the briars,
oblivious to the consternations
of others as they talk around you
you remain caught up in
the net of your abstractions
“the absolute alterity” of everything:
colleagues, clients, trees,
squirrels, clouds shaped and
dispersed across an endless sky,
the reduction of the world
to your purview, the horror
that what you see is you
(May 2011)
