8.

I know you’ve come a long long way with this question burning in the hole where your soul used to be so let me try to answer it for you:

What is the Absolute Cute?

I don’t know. I guess it’s like The Absolute Truth if this was a game of Cosmic Charades & I was doing a sounds like, but then that would imply I knew what the Absolute Truth was rather than just suspecting I can’t not know what it feels like because it must be like the deepest truest part of me who cannot be mine alone —

I don’t know, but since you came all this way…

It’s not a style. Not the cutesy, nothing that can be marketed. Magnetic but not really attractive. It’s your Cheshire Cat Animal Mother grinning weirdly from that too high branch.

It can’t be quantified, if that’s what you’ve done? It can’t be quantified any more than I can be precisely located in any particular spacetime.

It isn’t a cardioid-shaped transformation applied to a generic mostly-mammalian face — not an infantilism. It is a giant ancient universal foetus too unborn to be strictly speaking called an abortion.

It is a mistake you can make, rolling a circle around a circle & then taking that too far, thinking it a formula of the heart instead of just a symbol for something terribly ineffable that also happens to be an everyday part of how things work & why they won’t.

It is a mistake that you can exist in — persist with — persist with & become wise — but this wisdom is the bomb blast of your annihilation — a light that comes on when the candle of everything is blown out — a spark that kindles in your mind — burns — burns bright enough to read by — a story about a hand from the other side — such strange long fingers — ever reaching out — in — stillness always already there — appearing at the last moment

to broken wing you back across the burnt circle of