1.
Priced to ease pain and drain despair away, this made-up thing, trip-trap world, theme park. Jammed brain circuits flop like newspapers on New York Sunday streets. There! Who hurries into the underground headed uptown where the wish to be rid of all bone-weight steeps in a tea dish? There were dainty sandwiches one summer, our love’s ache, edible, put to the teeth, opera on the radio, the playoffs on TV. Like any person in the room, tree-bending winds invite our agonies, we might as well forget our own salvation, we weren’t made for it anyway, but don’t ask for the where or the why of it, I wasn’t going your way anyhow, not now at least. We live for the counteractual, my fox, admit it, carry for a while this bucket of lies. For your ears only, rumors are spread on the cobbled streets where Sunday papers dance. Not a column inch can do you in, saccharin are the sins of yesterworld. If you really cared, whose head would turn and smile? When did you think that last mile worth walking? Watch out for objects bearing compassion, thugs at heart, and humming with drugs of the tango. Oh, little one, sleep! If you must know, scissors and rock, how it all comes out, boot it up and be done with it, otherwise the game will crash, with nothing for anyone to do except go home. The pendulum, old hypnotizer, breathes with grief, numb any part you wish, this needle will not hurt your tale. So tell me now what time you keep, what tick or tuck or tiddly matters. Write what you will, these walls will never show up in court, so forget it, being there I mean. You are already taxied wildly away. Hang on, hang on as if your life depends on it, as it does, it’s just rain on the roof, unreal illumination that comes before thunder, there’s no ontology in that, just noise. Make the most of your off-the-rack walk, try to remember you were hung there in hope, threadbare some people might say. Focus. Focus. Public and private speech: do the State’s service or be done unto. The difference between window dressing and window shopping is the subject of the last book you read. It equals being bothered or what you bother with. Look to the weather with nothing to taste. Hope, perennial death ship orbiting the sun. The offshore cloud bank will make shore by night. Ho!
2.
Set up curbside, jewelry tray entanglement with things looking up, but nothing sells unless there is someone looking down, and who might that be? For the moment it’s not raining and off-coast in pods the gray whales parade south. Photographs sprout with the season. The gray whale’s spout is heart shaped, enough said. Just listen for the icon’s intake of breath and see what you can see. Yes, but that was yesterday and which way are prices going to go? There is a pack forming and they will need a leader. It’s then you kick the snot out of them, not before, and make it believable this one last time; but don’t depend on it, auditors, even though it’s turned out like this so many times before. There may be an image whose mind has changed. Sorry, no rain checks in this scheme of things, the windows are broken and boards keep out the light, it’s the cheapest thing to do and then forget it, as has been done before, before, etc. Could you pick out of a lineup who is the culprit here? The mirror is one-way and there’s no way to be sure which side you’re on, but so what? Go on making faces anyway, but be sure, now and then, to check your hand before your face, if just to say Wheaties, the best is yet to be. Our inventions, god and needles, for instance, are built to say this to us ever and forever. It’s obvious why we can’t give them up, they’re ours, for ourself self’s sake! We live in the afterlife of what, unalterable, has already taken place. The minute you start acting like Robinson Crusoe it’s plain to see you’ve lost your hold on the world. There are many such, so many, washed up on our island shores! They end up sleeping over grates and in doorways at night, far distant from tree ripe fruit and warm sand. The dumps of our artifacts bewilder them. They probe, not knowing what to expect from excess. They act out an experiment, a hairline calculation for survival: is the expenditure of energy to dig up carrots from the frozen ground more than their return in calories? Did you notice the price tag when the wine was poured, the cool chardonnay, the special cabernet, white and red absurdities of words? The motion lights are set to react outside the house but, tell me, did you see the clutter in the study, one would think! Those catalogs, the cave, shadows.
3.
Once again, flannel on the lawn at dawn. Threats of purgatory rising with the sun. Why so early, double? There are pros who play this sport for blood, yours will do. Edges of sardine cans await your hands. Caution is not the question, the question is who will be the last to be asked to dance! Watch out for the glare ice there ahead. Do not touch the brakes or the whole gazebo will go flying into the sunrise, late for school, yesterday’s uniform still unpressed and soiled. Stay on the phone, at least until you hear the beep, be sure to have your message ready, helpless, the oars have been left behind, the stars not out, invisible in chill cloudcover, it’s damn cold out here in the open tonight, no spooky moonglade to glide upon and sleep. And whose intention this morning is it to hang the jury before lunchbreak and jump ahead to night, armed with a chic and veiled beginning, or to try another channel in seriousness meaning now, today, remotely, but forever. Right there, with the questions unanswered, is where reality begins and ends and may well have been over before. Your turn next in the yard may come, make the most of it, keep those buttocks tight, chin up for class and country, the old home town. Yes. Like a god of legend, of a far distant time, and it isn’t a matter of like, it’s more a question of packaging and shelf life, a plea bargain is always possible, assuming you can hold yourself together in the soup for a whole day and night, and then show up on the lawn again, fresh-faced and vulnerable. Remember, there is no one minding the store. What store? Oh, just an expression they will use rounding any corner, drenched and testy with the accumulated facts of life. Pretend not to notice that the Big Game is over, that the “masses” have been moving away from home, except for the usual freeway snarls. Why doesn’t somebody say “There’s nobody here but us neutrals?” Which is not to say it is unnatural, only that it is nowhere to be found in nature, invented as we go along. But enough about you, a flame-orange sun does not (be sure you have enough OJ for breakfast) boil the cold Pacific, not yet. Also, before birth, before death from the common air, first cry, you should know this is a licensed no-host bar. Ohno!
You mean that? History? This traffic is history, it’s speed. Forget about crossing the street, you’ll get run over, like how far can the slow-pitch softball of sentience reach? Come on now! Over the plate, pretend you can bash it into realms of unbeing, it’s a game mon frère, the pitch and the hit must coexist, it’s in the rules, and it’s your only chance of making do, but remember, be careful where you’re pointing, there may be words hidden in corners, birds of a sort in any weather, morning may find that “you” did it, the rib-bitt merely of a literary frog. Each generation a box with all the pieces is handed down. Spread out on the table under lamp light each year the picture has more holes in it, don’t look under the bed, can you imagine anyone mothering you with your history? Suppose you were to blow the whistle, spill the beans, would anyone applaud, could anyone bear to have your name in gold on the party list? That’s just the way it goes, and you’ll miss those fat pitches or look the other way as a strike sails by. It’s the rules again, stupid (lie and let lie), and all that slamming, bamming, and, yes, breath-held hullabaloo of love is history’s traffic come to run you down. As if history is apart from something you did, you son of a bitch. Too late now for any midcourse corrections, midtown erections, the skyline is too crowded, besides, you’d never make it through the maze to a deconstruction permit. “Waltz . . . Ladies and Gentlemen, if you please” . . . the Viennese, that waltz of history, gentility’s fiction and reflection from the polished ballroom floor. Should the conscience of the race belong to women? Some man is always cutting in and cries of conscience, conscience in the night are, to most ears, silent, silent as the great owl’s flight. The kill is never clean, but if you must know, little brother, know that only you can claim that nature or an owl can care. Invention is your signature, your worth, the bliss of nature is anything but that, no pastures where poets may safely graze or kill, believe in Holy Name and Cause. That’s a nasty trick you have Saint Augustine, hysterical logician, “from weakness to habit to necessity.” But, seriously speaking, your subscription will expire in three months, so respond, respond, please mail now. Yes. Be an early bird and save.
5.
The pea beneath my mattress, my prince, is you. Don’t ask, you may be forgiven whatever offenses may be yours, and that paper moon may be a map of your mind, the sweet ache of a sky-blue day. Please learn not to depend on schedules as printed, deadlines are months ahead of every event. So gallop about as if your life is real as that jagged Matterhorn in Anaheim, forgive the local reference, so much of what you think you see flies by you truly undetected, you’re in a soup which, once again, you have mistaken for perfect vision. The pollution of old Pittsburgh has moved to Beijing, and speaking of being, as you say you were, behold an empty hand, a peace offering from the undersecretary whose eyes never once sought yours. It pours, it pours, when it’s not raining tears, sentiment so thick you think you’ll choke, but why not go for broke, head into the worst of it, a survivor setting off for help. Frostbite is common, keep moving if you can, look for landmarks you may have passed before. The trouble is, it all changes with light, no place to lie down, rest, or even weep. The best, there is proof, get run over in the sand, better to find a clan, a tribe, a gang—not likely for the old imperial you—you moved into civilization, remember? You can’t be a one-man fortress, comrades in arms have deserted, been executed as is the style today. That necklace of fire, the mind vomits it! A song sparrow sings in the brush, and in the firs the ruby kinglets’ chatter fills each tree. You have yet to try on language for size, some day, after the ugly swelling has gone down, if clan and all the rest fails, try religion, not one that from a high pulpit blesses war, try one that fights, Pentecostal say, or one that sanctions a holy war for an underclass. Otherwise, put on your grandfather’s old pith helmet, look ridiculous, and become a sniper’s perfect target. After all, indeterminacy is on your side, you could emerge as one more god, the man who orders milkshakes for all the neighborhood kids. Meanwhile, cast your vote into the lake, pretend not to notice that the women have left town, it’s eerie, you can’t disagree with that. Send out as many thank you notes as you have cards. The pink ones? Well, no point in those. It’s the mailbox, not the government, that won’t swallow them.
6.
Assume you have discovered an entropy of spirit, immeasurable of course, but it pulls graveward all those whose element is breath, not as the in and out again of water and the sun, but oblivion’s ass-first downhill twenty-four-hour drag. Knowledge is an after-the-fact affair, fair game for a hunger striker’s skeptic gopher tooth. Remember your “agenbite of inwit,” but don’t, please don’t, go knocking on doors declaring you’ve gone hollow with all the others, no one will believe you so long as your bag of flesh is fair. Fall down the stairs to another street. Have you noticed nature does not care for you, no matter the pathos of your fallacies, your antiperspirant, or your arms folded over the stretch marks of your hardest years? That’s you, cell mate, roping a Platonic calf. Rare air, this is all you’ll catch and never can. Live on that for a week and leave a message on your machine, “nourished by words alone.” Those fireworks you inherited, where are they now? Will you set them off to end the show? You have a story that simply cannot be sold, and no rewrite can change country or cast, so here you are in never-never land again. That figure off there in the mist is Nietzsche, stay clear, they say his breath is vile, he needs his space or so the professors say. Were you handed this out of an old script or are you improvising this to-do? Whatever you are, an actor or a human merely with all the other actors, or can you tell the difference without a script in hand, you talk about a text that is not there. Each morning your own short-form obituary appears on every page. An open mike will follow. But this is only in the babblesphere, don’t inhale those dialogues that bubble up. Weariness grows in direct proportion to answers that recede nightly as you snore. Did you audition for this part or did you win it in an all-night poker game? The difference is the same, none, today. Don’t give your chips to another to bet, that’s stacking the odds in your favor, sharing the blame. Avoid places where the lights are always on. Try finding a sunset through a simple gift of looking west. There can be too much light for your own good. Pace Pascal. Let someone close your eyes. Necessary, or so I’m told. That hand in front of your face, try it now.