How you move from one version to another, how the most recent version is both engendered and interrupted by the last version, how whatever the present in-between version is, it still bears the traces of earlier versions and now the things those traces were connected to are gone. Writing it is like trying to make sense of some mysterious thing.

Sometimes early on it’s like this accretion, this densely populated place with things hollering for attention. Then things start falling out and you think you’ve got it but when you look at it again you see a clean room full of headless people.

So you set up something to challenge it, something like a certain number of words or syllables or beats per line and then some of the old crowd shows up as well as people you didn’t invite and there’s a masked person in there randomly whipping them.

And some of them are enjoying it.

In the end it becomes a kind of crowd control, though none of it is ever well-behaved.