plaintive in fall
Ever since the thing that was happening conspired to be me I’ve been trying to lacquer my time with some other cuisine—other than experience I mean. What? Alterity? The sibilant dimensions of an unconfronted heterodoxy? When I hang out by myself I know only one thing, I will always be misconstrued. And when I use the word myself I don’t mean this elementally—the voices that resemble mine seem to chat relentlessly with themselves the whole long journey or journal of any day this week, and what they crave is a conversation that will be constantly recorrecting itself, and because they blame me when it falls away, that’s how I know it’s not me alone, and that no place will be my place. But I’ve estranged you now plus. Blink me a chute, will you, and allow me this reentrance. A formal space emerges in which I’m bound to proceed. This is my favorite time of the year in the Midwest for going on walks. The weather, busy making sermons elsewhere for the while, can scarcely be confronted, other than a whiff on the promenade of a season to come, and the memes, which post in summer like agonizing badges of a faltering deficit in feeling, relax now into something sweet as tho they are partaking a little less in being looked at. Even the cretins and trolls seem to be spending more time outdoors with their families, and I start to enjoy a decadent poetry again, one that imagined itself so useless to the crisis.
I was sitting out by the lake reading, then, one of these poems I love, layers upon layers of itself carrying out dreams of infinite clausality, a charm to proceed in the melancholy of that purring desire for the acquisition of myself which still thrums in its structure but is vacated into sadness now by the many seasons of its substitutability. Can’t you just see a radiant kindness emitting faintly colored streams of light, the poem asked me, and the light was chanting in this far out way & then plunged itself into the water as though to say this act is meant for someone specific, not you, but I was in this place and felt it was also for me. Perhaps this is meant for a future version of you, as though we could stay the auratic fog of a poisoned currency by disappearing into one of our own many folds, lose the hour in this time, and then maybe when we wake again? This all got so tall and mournful when what I’d wished for was a kind of surging vulgarity that would don in light my secret tryst with this new chill in the air stream, leaving as its souvenir a window-shape undeniably deranged and banal. But a poem despite appearances is not an object that starts and ends b/c it’s not the instrument of itself, it’s not playing itself alone. In order to imagine itself this object, that is in order not to move, b/c sameness is impossible, such a poem would be desperately bound to declaring itself the closure to which it aspires.
analogous to thought
This inoculated police state chaperones the levers of reinvention so that to pronounce anything about oneself is absurd. I mean, haven’t you heard this before?
I mean I tried to leave the house yesterday, I even got in the car, was on the threshold of backing out of the garage, when I was hit with the direct sensation of something I’d read in Rashid Hussain’s poems, “and you squeeze the tears of the exiled to water the Emperor’s grey colt” that then follows on by asking “why should his colt grow and why should his cat grow / and you remain as you are and not grow?” I then had the vivid thought of the long telephone cords of my youth that we’d wind round the stairway and squeeze through the closed doors of our rooms. I had this thought as tho I was the cord. And now just as I was feeling terribly about myself, feeling like I’m the descendant of this voice where every utterance is substitutable, I hear a voice go: “Death’s not last thing dude” in this way where
Death’s not
cuts with a finitude to end a line &
last thing dude
is all detached like it’s being said by a bro whose intuition around the question of his experience is so fatigued by being blunted that the utterance can barely pass for signifying at all. So I just turned off the car, got out, closed the garage, restarted the router, settled into the couch with my laptop and plugged back into a fantasy of my disappearance where in the glorious veneer of its variety (in which I’m a visitor moving thru information as tho I could palm the artifice of culture), personality appears like an entertaining souvenir a person has shipped back from their experience which they show now to their friends imploring them to speculate on the mysteries of a place they might travel to that would differentiate them from the rather staid thought of their general intellectual milieu. I smiled to myself now absently pleased with my tendency towards absorption, given to forget my recent feelings. But moments later the voice returned, reinventing itself as an add-on, “last thing dude,” that would place a counter on each page that would limit your time there, counting down, to the time you’d spent on the page prior. And amid this claim to a limit conditioned by successive horizons, I had to get up and find my laptop plug and plug it in and connect the laptop because it was nearly dead and I will say that my predilection for waiting until the very last moment to attend to the terms of a need, indeed even for the need to appear to me, has always annoyed me, and yet it persists like an obdurate lexicon specializing in the glottal & producing sequel after quotidian sequel long beyond, I imagine, any profitability, but rather b/c it’s so deeply interned into its labor that its allegiance is to a certain certitude beyond any interrogation into some of the many facile assumptions of its form. Anyway, my torments and self-harassments don’t need to be assumed as yours, even if you’re reading this as an impression in the synthetic air between us; after all, there’s a tentative discontinuity tenemented in the tryst b/w nature & error that allies itself in the murmuring intonation of a self we share in the not quite yet itself to become thing of literary experience, right dude? I mean, my condolences, since it turns out the psalm did not, in fact, qualify as a deduction on the taxation of our despair. Instead, as though there were a crayon that made only reflective marks, it is buried in an expanding circuitry. When we read it, somewhere between them and there, we and now, it tells a story of one of the Magi who, instead of arriving in time for the big birth, got lost in the desert and started to panic, and needing to calm down began to caress his nervous system with a mirage (a secret casement around doubt to amplify each gesture of the senses). In the story this, of course, was the last thing.
But we’re waiting now for an update to install before we can continue & meanwhile our nagging spirit begins to list a quantity of tasks we deferred, friends we really need to contact. I wish instead that we were in a more instinctive age, one that didn’t ask how the voice expressing this very sentiment has managed to survive all these mediations. And then of course it answers itself, it attached a pendant of stoutly packed earth and myrrh to itself as it emigrated from across the levant into what we now think of as central Europe where its seemingly irrecusable otherness was repeated as villain and fetish until it became fused with all the other diseases called ancient. I imagine for some reason now a formally dressed upper crust British child of around five years old handing one of those small diner packets of mustard, very creased but unopened, to the long-standing family porter, as they’re being shepherded by their minder into the mansion and up to the wing where they’re raised. I receive that this is somehow an image of my own problems tho they are not my own.
the pie
Here I am, a trove of pippi longforsaken reverie traveling in my work toward a trough of coconut cream pie, the kind you’d overstay your welcome to. Already I had thrown my juul overboard & touting an infantine joy had done a little dance, and tho my moves were probably passé, the sun was hitting the water’s blue just so, & it was as tho all the pudding in the universe had just banded and rallied against a patriarchy of food-scientists, fumigators really, who had in a deranged drive for sameness raised a mean temperature to mold the pudding lumpless, and now in this, its quarter-hour of real revolutionary certainty, it is a pudding finally ready to reassume its prior, more differentiated form. But I was, perhaps, amid my pining for this emergent and shifting quality, not quite prepared for the more deferred role I was to be assigned here: appointed as a kind of courier in the royal maze, I was to passively trail each bemused traveler at a small distance, not to surprise them with the way, but to prepare for them the moment they will slump to a seat, exhausted, against the tall & uniform green hedge & boof the whole world with their pain. I was to carry this out, I felt told, thru a program of haphazard tho strategic suggestion: like remember cussing Emery in your mind in 6th grade & feeling your breath slightly activated, your lips slightly murmuring; remember how we all went together to the premiere of The Revenant, like the actual premiere, & the bear actor was brought across the red carpet; remember watching on TV a football player suck in thru a respirator on the bench & to not have thought in any way a disturbance you quickly felt; & these are your thoughts not mine & a voice goes “just ‘cause we gotta live on the grounds of a fair don’t mean we can’t ride the rides.” My true faith, however, is to those who linger at the wide round tree, who’d rather bang on tin buckets to the curfew horn than find their way home. I can hear, vacated in the horn’s total blow, abortive cheers from our comrades in a distant maze, their green denim duffels slung over their shoulders while an armpit dampness seeps out from within them, embossing their duffel straps with the sign of a cross. Friends, I’m sorry, it seems I’ve lost the sentience of my way, talking & talking like this. For a second it had sounded to me like a solemn chamber orchestra, like a dust that was steam & a steam that was dust, & I was transfixed, but I see now, see it clearly, it was just a bunch of marbles rolling around a chat room, rolling around in some dumb detective shit, rolling in some phony corporate carbon initiative. And now suddenly, I was standing in a desert which I knew to be a perfect square & the total ease with which any of us might ruin ourselves came up for review — a huge steamship which transgresses its physics by tuning all its fumes into the acoustical vibrations around it & it begins to lift — turning every instance of being loved into error, our poor mothers, tripping all our habits into pathological turncoats who stay their route only by betraying it, approaching us with what I can only call an appalling humidity to press their freudian flowers like chapped, old imperial rubles, as tho this was our inherited wealth, into our debauched, always leaving always arriving, booked by a pride in our own goodwill, attempt to complete what we had just experienced. I am the author of a horrible viral video in which a whole mouse-choir enrolls at Juilliard & agitates an elitist, status-quo with their dissent, eventually, & thru their sweetness, teaching their teachers & breathing new life into a whole form & practice.