“It’s easy,” he says. “Just wait.”

And so you wait. The lights,
the cars on the highway,
    —you think, it’s not shrill
or callus, it’s thunder, it’s

one-one-thousand
two-one-thousand
three, and

    "—that’s enough for an ending."

He says it’s easy—
    —you say it’s not
He says, “that’s nice.” So you—?

You say it’s specious. He says, “that’s better.”

“Illuminate—”

“(To be authentic is to forego creation. (
    i.e., creation implies contrivance...
))”

Stream of conscience. That’s what he meant.

§

“—too many concepts” He’s speaking now through the window. “It’s like a bullet; it’s my favorite simile. It’s shallow.”

one-one-thousand
two-one-thousand
three-one-thousand—

“But it’s not really a metaphor… you know?

§

"But you want—a story?"

A definition.

"A moral which explains the point and means enough to conflate life with holy-water, hand grenades, life, the blues—

An excuse:

    one, once.
    two, twice.
    three, thrice; then a semitone.

That’s what love is worth.”

§

“They call it—?
    verve”

“No, life is contained. This is the nature of cataclysm.”
No life is contained? This is the nature of cataclysm. If

    we  attempt some consummation, 
    we become cannibals,
we swallow the pedants and indulged academics (
    the ones “most offended” by indulgence
), is that—?

“Every poem ought to be revolting—
    truth? A lie constrained?”

[unintelligible] life is contained, so

one-one-thousand—

“Breath.”

two-two-thousand—

three-three-thousand &

suddenly you weep—
    the world is a dead mystery—

it’s

“Just like a poem.”

I would like a simple life 
yet all night I am laying 
poems away in a long box. 
 
It is my immortality box, 
my lay-away plan, 
my coffin. 

        —Anne Sexton
 

I wrote this book, and it is sentimental 
Because I don’t have a right sized reaction to the world

	—Hera Lindsay Bird

This would be tomorrow any other day.

A moment, preemptive as nostalgia,  
tangible as watered-down citrus drinks— 
a moment drowned in missed translation & 
sensation as tenuous as our dance floor 
stained by wash lights and acid hope: 

As you negotiate the new year wrapped  
in your second-best dress, remaking  
torpor into second kisses, I'm downshifting  
ahead of the E Street exit in standby blue jeans,  
cultivating motion like over-smoked cigarettes. 

Later, the Circle will be exhausted, it will  
heave its saturation patrol mundane and you’ll 
explain its language with precision—you’ll never  
forgive me for refusing to understand but I’ll 
misremember and remember you eidetic. 

For now, I’m stranded near 20th and S, a  
tracing paper fantasy in this barely-my-city  
on the verge of event horizon—but you believe, 
you say it’s time to put our prophets to bed,  
to become diplomats and dream like drunks. 

We know what happens next: Walking back to your  
car we’ll meet a man missing a girlfriend and a  
labradoodle with whom we’ll trade rumors for  
jimsonweed and flee through the towns along  
the Potomac and survive like January romance— 

we’ll become inclined to digression & conspiracy
and too old to claim indifference, though naïve 
enough for these moments as acrid as the pharmacy  
and its shattered glass—these moments, 
rationed like falling stars at daybreak. 

Reflections (as in salt, as in the cracks in the sidewalk):

12/12 (Thursday) – Positivism is, without a lie, impossible. Negation without desire is dishonest. These are things I know.

11/20 (Friday) – Lies without meaning approximate truth. Desire without loss is nothing. These are things I know.

10/24 (Yesterday) – Time (i.e., being) is a normative claim.

Nothinginsomuch

My skin into sleet, 
My shivers into sacrilege— 
the black ice cuts me  
cross-sectioned, leaves  
the seconds trembling, 
paints me erudite:  
I sink myself into the  
pavement—I wash it away  
with whiskey. 

My emptiness into air, 
My breath into transition— 
dreams, then Capitol Hill at 
dawn, city bus broken down  
on the roundabout—I found  
a t-shirt in the snowbank, 
once worn by a mystic  
who got tired, so  
he grew up  
and became hard. 

Your star sign  
    into my viewless evening, 
My shadow  
    into your paper-mache winter 
when we sat lieless, hands 
folded into simile like
paper cups and burnt coffee— 
you, the silence of my morning,  
and I, pollyanna-inert, 
sharing a last stand between  
tomorrow and careless  
innuendo. 

A Soft Ending: When you finish reading and close your eyes, what is left of the character you barely met? Recall Ursa Major, recall the cruel mercy of her insecure god.

And the laurel, too—stalked by Star-hearted Apollo.

Like chicken pox or poison oak.

My birds find the dark
imposing—it’s not properly
abstract. You know how it is
when we feel excessively real—

or entirely present. They sing 

strange polygons, into and  
out like pretense  
woven through a plunging sky, 
dislocated parallaxis, cold and 
somewhat unlike storm gods. 

This is how I kill my time in our  
suburb-persistent cul-de-sac: 

I think I remember  
you were going to steal a Camaro,
a convertible, transmogrified green &
we’d name her something like Shameless Reality
and she’d hold 115mph through Middle America
'til we hit the Rockies where the plunging sky
becomes dry land.

They say it’s different when you die out west. 

~But~

my birds will never drown, they 
only shudder—they become the  
last moment to survive my windowsill

the last moment 
into frantic
dawn,

muted,
itinerant,
utterly enthralled by  
unburdened second chance.

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“This would be tomorrow any other day” first appeared in the Red Ogre Review.

“Nothinginsomuch” and “Like chicken pox or poison oak” first appeared in The Word's Faire.

I
We start with a car lot,
burned down because the fire alarm had been 
     disconnected to save money
     so the manager could pocket the difference &

misuse irony then
retire into the silence of sand and shade and sea & 
    other things reluctant to mean more 
than the waterlogged ledgers & 
their stories that teach us nightmares
and give us a sense that we could 
    get away with 
    murder 

if only we pour the gasoline

just so.

II
Imagine we sit far between intersections—
    just to the left of the setting sky 
fading through shades 
    of viridian then violet &
into the cyan of a city along the shore of a lake so static 
    every sound hits like a bus filled with ambition, 
like a tourniquet 
soaked in 
    the salty sweet of a fever dream—

i.e., the idea behind the tragedy.

Imagine ripples and reflections
    like a broken TV 
playing the last scene of a movie you’ve 
    never seen and it’s terrifying because 
        you know no one dies 

    —they just linger until the sequel 
where they linger again & 
become less than a voice
    speaking in the timber of 
first-person accidental.

III
Should I break the fourth wall?

—you wouldn’t listen, you wouldn’t believe me if 
I told you I’m not partial to streams of thought 
that die and wallow, caught in sensations that 
taught life how to live & 
how to breathe and believe and leave you
    groping for a plot, an overture—anything that won’t 
have you grasping at meaning measured in 
micrograms by a man compulsively correcting you 
when you say you don’t know, 
but really, you know—

I would never tell you how to read a poem.

IV
The car lot burned down.

The Everything went wrong.

There was nothing left to leverage; 
so the owner’s son dropped out of college &
got a respectable job—
    he’d learned to be a bricklayer &
    later a lineman who climbed
an electric pole and fell &
    after the funeral his wife finds a manuscript,
a novel where the main character and narrator share 
a name and an elevator 
    down to a postmodern hell 
filled with antimodernist 
        impressionist sculptures made of 
concrete meaning, 
    which they bash to pieces

after declaring their sins by dying 
and leaving journals
for their wives or lovers or au pairs
to find and read, edit and publish 
    and finally wonder why the neighbors 
   don’t come around much anymore.


V
Another thing was that the
claims adjuster had been 
drunk when he wrote his report; 

he’d exonerated the cleaning crew.

Which was fair
but it got him fired because 
he’d preempted a lawsuit meant to provide
bonuses to the shareholders & 
secretaries who keep the system intact
as it atrophies and dollars are packed in the cracks
        —inefficient, yes, but that’s not the point;
    the point’s a counterfactual where

a young man (really) reads Marx &
reads like a saint; he comes away with the insight that
capital is murder, but that also becomes not the point;
so he comes away exhausted and wheezing & 
wondering what are his options—other than give up on long weekends
and summers at the beach and become

some stoic who thinks 
    he feels nothing as he
he sits stoned, faces down
    sales seminars and pep talks
    from life coaches who don’t 
    notice that he never really learned 
what it’s like to tell a lie.

VI
In the end there’d be another funeral
with sandwiches cut in quarters &
daiquiris with an overbaked cousin telling stories
about the ends of wars too remote to remember, 
the battles so secret 
they’re recorded in flavors of Pynchon or Wallace
or Emerson and Thoreau doing shots of tequila while
sorority girls watch and wonder if university 
was a waste of money, or if they should become hypnotists 
who recall Atlantis like a practical miracle &
articulate absolute motion like a

whirl-o-wheel rusted after
too many generations of material fanatics
took too much and demanded too little.

VII
Car lots are like leech fields that have run dry.
Car lots are like broken topsoil when the wind
blows east-west and piles into anomalies 
which cause poems and mythologies
and other sentimental cataclysms as we go
drifting from interstate to interstate,
surface street to side road, then along the 
drag along the shore of a lake in a world 
like a planetarium in disrepair.

VIII
But I would never tell you how to read your poem—

    after all, I don’t feel your lips or the tension
    behind your eyes or the rhymes that prove 

your beginning is gone:
    this is the concept of a used car lot that lived 
    too long. This is the fire & 
    the consequence &

the half-remembered sunsets drifting left to right
    across the plane of a galaxy with stars that
    live and die along spectral lines, the signified mechanics 

of half-lives and afterlives of the ledgers 
that intrude on the conscience of a poet 
    well versed in the flash points of ordinary
    hydrocarbons.

Exposition. The world is a confessional without a priest, a metaphor that feels out of place. If we trace our history through the moments when we had something to say, we would soon find ourselves at a loss for words—for words are encapsulated loss, an emulated motion that refuses to stick. What, then, of the world that began with a word?

Imagine this: You stand at the foot of Olympus Mons. You look up, the sky is stubbornly familiar: this is the edge of Western civilization. You are like a poet. Perhaps, like Rimbaud. Perhaps you’ve learned how to be a barbarian, a sexton tending to a dying compass. Your savage gods anoint you as Shelley’s rhapsodist—unencumbered by eternity.

Imagine you’ve exceeded your corpse.

Some thoughts on politics.

People still think Nietzsche was a Nazi.

Which is, of course, absurd because he was
the Unabomber if the Unabomber was a 
real poet who      almost never   wrote poems, 
like a monk taking alms 
while his last illumination rots 
at the bottom of a well while

the cold and the snow turn the color of patriots
blown to smithereens by the creeping irony 
they thought was dead. They thought, ‘irony's 
a concept & concepts are dead—like the night 
the American Revolution was canceled because 
the wind and the rain blew out the transformer.’

Time is another dead concept.

It's why we’re alone, it's why headstones 
become just stones, it's why we burn 
books in piles reminiscent of Olympus 
    or Sinai after the cleanup

crew comes to take away our 
commandments & anachronisms & 
our obituaries bleeding ink like manifestos 
bleeding wine.

For naught but a moment.

§—

⌠ I suspect there's a 
    lie at the center 
    of every love affair—
⌡ if such a thing exists.

Can you imagine need without 
    desire?
Desire without conflagration?

Can you imagine a lifetime            inside
                                                  a landmine? 

§—

... —you understand (sic), the war’s simply 

anguished indulgence,
    a kinetic fetish; the 
            bombs and guns and broken bodies 
    —spasms of clinical significance.

(i.e. The transactional enumeration 
of despair ad infinitum.)

§—

Tangentially related: To exist as engendered being is to exist beyond substance, to exist as an embodied metaphor—it is to have knowledge of the atom bomb:

sit(uation) rep(ort)s:
    dry
dry
   dry
like fiction,
    mythology,
        exculpatory contradiction (like 
real time (captured 
                        in transition)),

a temporal affliction,
            neuropathy
like a firebird, like (ashes ashes)

we all
    fell down.

Things we should have known. Poetry is an artform in perpetual regress. If it were ever secure in its meaning it would become undone along with the illusion of meaning itself. Does that make you sad? “Of course not,” I can hear you say, “the metaphor is too opaque, too cerebral, too much like a professor hopped up on coke and mescaline as if he’d stepped directly into his mid-twenties from the burnt pages of a burnt copy of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe.” I might not ask you what you mean. Your face probably says everything. Still, I’m sorry about the book.

In any case, I know that to you I’m disembodied. I’m already an anachronism—already too much. So, let me try again: Should it make you sad? Consider the liquified caterpillar wrapped in her chrysalis. Consider her an allegory for the simile ‘like a dipole moment’. Her life as a caterpillar is over—pupa is her in between. But she only becomes what she was, she emerges from her own flesh. She becomes beautiful by an act of self-consumption. This is the force of nature. This is like the part of us that’s like dipole moments. This is why butterflies are pretty.

The World as Imposition

For what it's worth, chrysalis has always been
inconsistently beautiful, a redundant becoming
yielding to a universe of gesture and implication,
an end to a means—pointless only to the point
of inevitable; profound as a matter of imagery.

In this spirit we consume our creators—those
obstinate corpses bereft of their ancient finery,
forgotten for what they once were or remembered
for what they failed to be. It's a shame they
had the faith to abandon unfortunate meaning 

so we could linger in their halls, wounded by the
atrocity of being—the stop and start of a sensation
that eludes us: Theseus and his ship were always 
doomed. Sisyphus, undone in his moment of imagination, 
finally offers up his liver to the crow.

But, it’s still a dream, an incidental reality,
a nothing-at-all content to exist as much as
its passion allows—our history traced in circles
from marrow to bone to flesh—our metamorphosis,
the apostasy of birth.

Redactions. I learned to sleep when my emotional dipole collapsed. That’s how I learned how not to sleep. Now I can’t quite sleep enough. Do you remember when I said, “poetry is an artform in perpetual regress?” I really meant it. Just like I meant for you to picture yourself suffocating as Olympus Mons looms so tall you don’t notice it’s there. That’s like the death of Western Civilization.

But Shelley and Emerson, Plath and Ginsberg and even my own poems will continue to mean something because that’s the only thing they can do. The poet is a façade atop a tempest creating shadows of poems that can never be undone. This is the mirage created by a civilization’s anxiety. It’s the same reason the butterfly is pretty.

Perhaps we should have only our caricatures, the ones we had drawn at the end of a pier on a lake. Imagine there’s a paddle boat docked, and its steam is fake because it’s got an electric motor. For a moment everything’s quiet. Someone you love stands behind an artist who draws you exactly like you want. Then the moment is over. The paddle boat and its electric motor have gone, and you’re left holding an exaggerated picture of your exaggerated self. Imagine this lake and you and an artist you love at the foot of Olympus Mons and imagine the stubborn sky.

Imagine you’re sad, because sad feels good at ~0.38G.

1. It was supposed to be the storm of the century. Nobody actually said that, but you know how minds are—minds and moments, etc. It’s twenty-four degrees Fahrenheit because I live in America and in a suburb, which is a place like any other. It’s a world, accidental minds and moments—an homage to a dead storm god. A suburb’s got a memory like a small town where the courthouse burned down so they built a new one that also didn’t survive the millennium. The suburbs are where past learned to be prologue. Now that it’s cold, time is my suspended epigenesis, my obsession—my tautological indifference. A suburb: three centuries of history, changing slowly until I arrive to live in past tense. It was supposed to be the storm of the century.

2. I’m an American, which means I’m supposed to be a pragmatic individualist without an ego. I was supposed to read Nietzsche in my early twenties and come to my senses by thirty. And I did, in a sense: I didn’t write so much I’d remember. I didn’t remember to read. I stopped doing drugs.

A STORY.

‘Yasser Arafat is a bad man.’ Once, this was a necessary truth. There are no unnecessary truths.

For the sake of argument, let’s say I’m nineteen and talking to an old man on an old man scooter (red). We’re at an intersection (it prefers we don’t cross). Let’s say we’re in Florida. One of the sensible cities—like Orlando, Ocala, or Saint Petersburg. It’s right after a gentle shower, but I don’t know what petrichor means.

‘Fine, but we all have to believe in something.’ The sun squints and stares at me through a puddle. The old man stares too. I hope he doesn’t understand what I mean. He believes in America, but only like a registered trademark. I believe in that too except I’m skeptical of authority, so they kicked me out of the Army. I’m certainly not going to tell the old man that. We have rapport. I like it.

‘Well, you’ll grow out of it.’

3. I want to write a proper essay, that way you’ll know I’m serious. I want to sing for the nihilist on the Metro and the realist suspended over surface streets (in a different city). One day I’ll talk the latter off his ledge and he’ll leave a toxic relationship and trade some baggage for a child. But that isn’t enough for me, just like it’s not enough to sit in the confessional and in silence. That’s why I want to write an essay; I want to say what’s already been said, dress it up like a doll I’ve never played with. I write poems to grapple with feelings I’ll never have. A proper essay would change everything. A proper essay proves epistemology.

4. On Chopin. A cliché wouldn’t be a cliché if it didn’t mean a lot. Cliché is only a sensation we’re tired of having. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt, only that nobody wants to listen and so the older we get the more it aches. That’s a cliché.

I know what petrichor means. Now I know the sensation of the sun as it sets over the Blueridge Mountains, its breeze wanders the uneven terrain between myself and the closest peak. It’s the sensation of Nocturne No. 1, remembered just as No. 2 crescendos then trills. No. 3 reminds me of a last date that never ends. It was the first time I said I wanted to be a poet; it was the first time I wanted to explain. Later I would promise to never be sentimental.

But that’s not how Chopin works.

Chopin is like comedy, only taken seriously by the writers of proper essays. The rest of us, if we listen, we can hear him. He never strays far from a disarticulated arpeggio, or a moment drawn out just long enough to make us feel as suspended as a realist who has discovered that real-time is too broken to trust.

5. Petrichor. I finally understood petrichor this morning. The cat—the black one—was scratching at me through the blanket. The other had jumped onto the windowsill and for a second I could see the snow. It’s come earlier and thicker this year, I think. Later, after I stand up, I notice that all the houses have turned into steeples. I realize the weather and minds and moments mean the same as they did before. Meaning: few things are less themselves than the rumors you tell yourself because you get old and it snows while your spouse or partner or significant other is downstairs talking to a psychiatrist on the telephone. That’s petrichor.

6. It was supposed to be the storm of the century.

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