Sing Muse or I shall bleed
you dry, chained to a Brooklyn radiator
for the month of August.
It's hot here in a coffin
that's slightly burnt of which
we speculated was used,
mistakenly of course,
for cremation
(taken out soon enough to be reclaimed
for resale at a cheap steal),
but it's hot in a wooden box
and being drunk isn't helping me
sleep--I'm only more lonely;
we assumed, I think unspoken,
that they buried the body.
Get up, I'm drunk, get up
or it's time to vomit on the floor,
but get out and make it to the bathroom door.
Careful the roof overhead, the planks
of resting lumber, the theater garb,
and the found drywall all resting
on the mezzanine;
careful down stairs that could be called
a ladder, to their living room refuge
of junked sofas, carpets, reffuse, etc;
careful lumbering, that drunken gait
which feels a step behind my mind
(perhaps this is when we're carried
by angels);
careful not to vomit since I'm almost there
and I have had to swallow it before;
careful not to look but I see it
on the kitchen island
where something that is between me and it
squeezes my stomach, like a nearly empty
toothpaste tube, up to my throat
then lets go;
and careful sanctuary
over the toilet bowl:
I breathe slow, clumsy breaths.
~~
“I'm sorry, but this writing sucks – this isn't how you actually think through the world is it?”
“At least in reflection it seems to run this way”
“And on line 25 you misspelled the word refuse”
“I know, but I wanted a more phonetic sound,
and I didn't want it to look the sound of re-fuse”
“I see.
Ok, I understand, but grammatically this is a list of nouns,
how could someone possibly imagine you're throwing in a verb?”
“But I'm not.”
“I know, that is the point I'm trying to make.”
“Isn't it interesting, refuse: re-fuse, ref-fuse, re-fuse(fuse together) and of course fuse explodes
into another litany of meanings.”
“God damn-it Rex this has nothing to do with anything!”
Leroy puts down the sheet of paper
and gives me a thick look of disgust
or pity from across the coffeeshop-table
with his baggy eyes.
We've grown sick of each other
as we've grown before
and repeated before and again,
but inbetween these spurts of spats
an affinity for something more,
that none of us seem to have,
keeps our company through these regularities
and it isn't that difficult—
indeed, this could be us flowing with the path of least resistance—
to love our philos.
“Arbitrariness is not an intention.”
“Why not? Can't I intend not to intend?”
“But you do and you don't,
and who can call it art if you have a system of line breaks
which you break repeatedly?
This is more simply called laziness.”
“Better laziness than artifice.”
“Whatever dude.”
“Perhaps there is a system by which these line breaks follow,
indeed it is a logical and mathematical certainly that some function,
or some transcendental number matches perfectly, perfectly,
isomorphicly it describes where each line break goes
will go, and I need not know it—perhaps I cannot—but
I am expressing it just as a computer
continues to circumscribe pi.”
“Now that is just sophistry. Bones dressed with fat. Where's the flesh beneath the skin?”
Now there's a moment here
difficult to describe
where a divergence of action
and thought occurs
simultaneously in the present-past, past-present
when in one, some sort of witty retort was made
(e.g.“we wear clothes to protect ourselves”)
which only upset matters further,
and in the other, a blankness of thought
when I wonder who said what,
and why (if it matters),
and more than the what or the why
is staring, like a horror-stricken mime,
at the pretension of a line.
“I can't keep doing this Rex: I am tired, it is 6am,
I have work in the morning, and we aren't accomplishing
anything by staying here.”
You're not looking at me when you say this,
or, more closely, I am guessing this
because I've stopped looking back,
to instead let my ear take in
your sound – the last vantage
unto the mood,
which let us in on the secret
that you're about to go home
any minute now.
We stare, somewhat empty-headed
and tired of course, at one another,
and it is the being-in of these silences
that I remember long after with pleasure.
Sometimes, and we could call it a moment of weakness,
I play with the serious make-believe
that I am all of you, you all me,
variations on the same theme
all played in the mind
of a Humean skeptic
and I suspect
the way out
is by faith
that this isn't true
like Indiana crossing an invisible bridge.
you know what I mean don't you?
I do.
“Let's have a cigarette.”
Outside, when it's the coldest
and the city is the most asleep
it can be with only its restless bowels
sweeping its gutters, clearing bags of garbage
from its sidewalks, I shudder between drags
in the false dawn and you stand, cross-legged,
speaking, as you do, loquaciously,
and we part, as usual, amiably.
Maybe we write what we miss most of all
(another allegory of the fall),
and you can miss what isn't true,
indeed, miss it more than anything real,
and when it seems that Hell is an easier creation than Heaven
it suggests one is likelier than the other.
Of course, to continue arguing with myself,
life, consciousness, otherness, what have you,
is a miracle, but one more credulous
than the alternative,
yet such a solution lingers,
as a bad taste would on the mind's palate,
with the afterthought that one answer
or other is one or another delusion
and it is more a question of which ones we share,
like which category: the living or the dead.
But the problem with skeptics is
they can never use the word is.
And failing to enact what is right is more the tragedy
than enacting what is wrong.
If perfect is the enemy of the good
then bad is an ally of the worst.
Certain questions don't have answers because they are bad questions.
And as exhaustion begins to cull my mind
and tie me down, metaphor
feels more to be
a metaballo
(to rhyme with hollow),
and I humor myself with the joking thought that
way back when
the first of us stood up and spoke
it was of how shameful we looked.
