erase the railroad that brought the trains here. erase the trains & their antique machinery. erase the saloons & the syphilis. erase the families that settled this stretch of desert & called it uninhabited. erase the conquered families, cities, & civilizations. erase the conquerors & erase their horses. erase the documentary exploring the history of this region on my computer. erase my computer & all the lives it lets me visit but not die in. erase the website where i can follow the satellite’s many eyed lens into my family’s gray yard & see only pixels. erase the amateur video of the couple fucking in another tab & especially erase the moment where one whispers something unintelligible into the other’s dark ear & the body shudders. erase the video still open of eric garner being choked to death less i, in my whiteness, forget. erase the mention of the black man murdered by police in the last line for its utility & the privileged detachment of its witness. erase my body sitting at this table erasing through accumulation. erase the many diseases of its mind, its obsession with pleasure & more pleasure each addiction replaced by another addiction, a door opening into a hospital of doors. erase it fugues & hubris & melancholia. erase its dysthymia & mania & chronic insomnia. in the beginning there was a word tortured into birthing new words. & here we sit at the prow of a great ship cutting through text so thick it resembles black water. here is the curtain opening its throat to reveal a pair of scissors: the railroad syphilis. the horse computers. the satellite fucking the other’s dark ear. the video hospital. the mind tortured into curtains. curtain.