Chop, chop, chop, chop, chop,......
.....stack, stack, stack, stack, stack.....chop,chop, chop, chop, chop....  stack, stack, stack, stack.....
HEY!!!
  What are you doing here??
There's nothing here to see but an old man chopping fire wood and stacking it. 
 Heard tell it's gonna be a cold winter.
Colder than a witches ***. 
 You don't need to be here for this boring, repetitive, chore of mine.
Run along.
I'm sure you can find something better to do.  
And let me get back to my work,
Thank you very much.  
Chop,chop,chop,chop,chop.....stack, stack, stack, stack ....chop, chop, chop, chop, ...etc...etc...

1

I’m driving.
I don’t know where, I’m more being driven, but all there is to do is peer out the window at the rushing
trees.
Anita is in the driver’s seat, moving her head slowly to the beat of the music playing delicately in the
background.
And we’re stuck in a time when the world flows around us, where our actuality is habitual.
With no concern for the world outside me, I contemplate a perfect stack of rocks outside the window,
on the side by where we are stopped.
Time is unravelled.
And I am taken to my childhood, on foreign beaches where people had stacked rocks.
Anywhere I have ever been, there has been a stack of rocks, even inside myself.
At the end of a twelve mile hike through the mountains, a stack of rocks.
I wonder if she notices my consciousness.
In the space between time and something else, she stacks rocks that will plaster themselves together
endlessly and she will bring some home to stack in our kitchen as a reminder.
The stacks take us in.

2

I paint rocks for her to stack.
Each rock with a symbol of reality so that different stacks have different values and all add up to
something invariable.
Family comes over for dinner and asks about the rocks painted, stacked on our furniture and tables.
She smiles with a look of embodiment, for if they must ask they do not know.
And the neighbor boy comes on slow days and stacks our outside rocks, runs away in fear when we
catch him.
But we only ever catch him to give him more rocks to stack.
They tumble, sides not enduring and wind breathing against them but we know that if they fall they were
never meant to stay up at all.
And the totality of the stack is a dream where the world stacks itself onto a neat shelf and never asks to
change or move at all because it is logical.
And the atmosphere of the rocks is the behaviour we choose to observe because they come together in
ways we never could.
I love walking on the beach.
Each and every one has a stack of rocks.
If a human has walked the shore, there will be one.
She picks up a smooth rock and glides it into her pocket.

3

A common misconception of people is to think they are different from everyone else, to expect humans
to differentiate themselves based on irrelevant variations.
Her and I understand them all the same because we have breathed everywhere, and the air is always
abounding with repetition.
The repetition is the stacking of rocks.
The human tendency to stack rocks.