12252010

When we were young.
A friend said to me that we are not young men anymore,
just men now.

We weren’t doing something new.
It came out of us ,
then, and sometimes now.
I remember discipline,
before we had such things
to discipline ourselves against.

Before we learned to count,
and run
on treadmills.
Before we cared about the sweat of sport,
and the cut
of a garment.
I remember being a child.
We stayed like children.

Anyone who has ever known
something simple of happyness,
will always know
something of misery,
not everything,
but something

This was before happiness became complex,
like algebra,
or something else
that we couldn’t bother ourselves with.

I thought,
it would be easier
if our pasts were
a bit harder,
that is probably true.

Sometimes one can’t help but remember,
like nausea,
like cold fingers,
the body refuses
to identify with the situation
in a suitable manner,
for what should be done,
how it should be felt,
to make things easy,
moderate,
pleasant.

We did something,
well,
and we were children
for as long as possible,
which is much longer
than most people can say they had.

Now
that I consider myself someone
who should do something.
Who reads novels and writes texts like this one,
for people who enjoy reading novels.

Now
I prescribe a purpose
as an explanation
for the wobbles
in my mothers voice,
on the telephone,
not at home.

Now
there are choices,
prescriptions for those symptoms,
which the choices have created,
for a purpose,
an academic purpose,
choices
that require distances.

I am sorry for that,
for grief,
for demanding grief from someone
who constructed
concrete simplicity,
which i academically dismantled,
with drugs,
with words,
with discipline,
with garments.

I learned how to cover it up,
like
muscles
cover
bones.

When we were young
we knew winter different.
We knew white,
but not airplanes,
nor paintings,
nor memoirs.
We knew the distance from one house to the next,
and where to find a caravan of people.

And when i think of this now
i feel the need to run,
because then we did not need anyone.
Maybe we were lonely
but probably not,
probably
we knew how to do the one thing
that we did
that was enough.

Certainly
that is not enough now.

[A]

DBEAT

That moment where you realize that you exist and you are caught in the spiral of recognition, caught comprehending the existence of existence in a mechanical spiral, standing just beside the massive engines rhythmically, perfectly hammering down, the sound only interrupted and accented by other sound, tones above being forced out by the rhythms below, a rhythm of something which you cannot quite place, not your heartbeat, not a clockticks, but quick enough to fit in between the two, racing, unchanging, the emergence of pattern or a lapse/exhaustion in comprehension, and either it skips a beat or you do, something rises in the sonic strata or maybe something fails within you. It roars up, unchanging, doubled creating a higher decibel, doubled again, another decibel, dropped in like grains of sand, another engine added to the anxious line, awaiting a flag, to stop this or start this, you’re in the middle but possibly just before, or just after, and you hope that this machine will run forever, until the world ends the one sound left in the universe, traveling at the speed of light, and not in heaven and not in hell, right here and you know it in the arced loft on the infinity loop, drugged but acquainted.

-A-

valentinesday

She wrote me a letter
about what happened and said
what I wrote
was beautiful
I think she could still be
in love with me but that
never stops.
I felt anxious
all day
really bad and I was doing all those things but not knowing why.
And in the end of the day
I had a drink
without ice
that whiskey brown amber you know what I mean
pure and gold
I wished everything to be that way covered in a gloss of whiskey resin
We went out even though
I wanted to stay in
and read and
it was beter I admit
we made a sculpture out of two toothpicks and a cigarette ash
it was more beautiful than you could imagine
And what is better than breakfast in bed
really to hell with all of it

[A]

Hanged on an Easel

Instead of dying he got sick
Which was worse.

Doctors gave him a sentence
(A few weeks, a month, maybe a year, maybe more)
It was hard to say.

One sentence.
Not a verse with a rhyme.
Full of beaches and canyons, though.
Then just one flat line.

"Why should I live?"
To be hanged on an easel?
Why is everyone is O.K.
But you?

---

(y)

If I wake up then I will start to think. It was different last night last night I could linger in that state and it felt pleasant
because I knew I was far too tired to set anything in motion.
But this morning was like other mornings
and nights where one thing penetrates sleep
and its done for,
because one gives way to many .
And before I know it
I’m up trying to make things look presentable
In the morning smells are much more pronounced and the dinner
that I ate myself sick on the night before
is just an echo in my stomach
and the smell reminds me
and all together it feels bad, noxious.

I shouldn’t care but I do.
The sun rises so fucking late here, makes one feel that they are inappropriate
at all times.
I wonder in the office buildings right near my house
if they feel a sense of betrayal arriving
in utter darkness.
Like someone was playing tricks on them,
the moon or sun,
someone like that.

[A]

The Lover in Another Country

How do you move? you ask yourself. You ask yourself this because you are moving soon. There is a certain date, less than a month away, and you are required to be out of your apartment. There are still many things to be done. You still need to make many important decisions. For now, you are evaluating. You’re thinking about you and your stuff. Soon, you will have to stop thinking and start doing. The driver of the moving van will want to know where all the stuff goes, and you’ll have to tell him something. You have no time yet to be excited or scared—that will surely happen in a giant rush as you sit in the van in the passenger’s seat and go north. You will try to stay calm and collected as you see the exit signs pass by at a frightening speed, but as you merge on to the interstate, the dam you have tried so hard to build the last 15 miles will surely break and you will laugh, or maybe cry, or maybe scream something terrible. You don’t know. For now, you have to deal with what’s in front of you. You need to decide what will be spared, which, out of all these objects you have collected over the years, will be boxed, and labeled, or put in a trash bag, gone. Every object is, now it seems more than ever, assuming its true weight, and you must dole out importance and necessity. You tag the objects mentally. Some of the important objects are not heavy, some weigh as little as a feather; indeed, there is an important object that is only a feather, one that your lover gave you when you were both living in his country, walking down the street, casually holding hands, when you came across this thing, this discarded feather from some blue bird that you thought was beautiful, or at least worth mentioning: “Oh, regarde la plume bleue!” and your lover picked it up for you and brushed it off, and you’d like to remember him blowing the dirt off of it with his beautiful lips before they were kissing you, quickly, and passionately, right there on that cobbled, foreign street. The feather will come with you now, though someday, you know, when you are trying to move even further away, you will think very little of it, so little of it that when you see it on the table you may only impart a sigh before sweeping it into the trash. You look around the apartment, which was, you must admit, quite good for you for the year you were in it, although too big for you alone, which is why, you decide, you had to put so many things in it, so many things that must move. You look at the bookshelves, and the bureau, and the bed frame—these objects are all heavy, but not really that important, and while they are not as important as the feather, they are necessary, but necessary doesn’t necessarily mean important, and that, too, is a factor. Each object must be taken into account. It is exhausting, even though you are, for now, just sitting here, looking, and considering. You take an object in your hand and consider it—it is a book, or maybe the ceramic lamp with the birds fused around its base, their bodies perched on the white logs, none of it moving. But you hold the object, feel its weight, and wonder where it will move, where it will go now, and then, where it will go later. You look at another object, a television, and it is then that you begin to panic, because it is neither important, nor necessary, but nice, a category that you hadn’t even considered up until now, when you saw it showing your wide eyes staring back at you. You call your lover in another country, because that is what you do when you are panicked, but he doesn’t answer. You put the phone down, and think of him, and then you think of his objects, his things around him, now as he is sleeping. Maybe there is still a picture of you somewhere in there, maybe in a black frame, maybe hung against the wall of his bedroom. You think about the things he had in his home, that large bed, the white sheets, the thick teak shelf that circled the entire room like a railing, the plant on his desk, the desk, the stool tucked under the desk, that book of poems you had read and marked, and gave to him to read knowing you wouldn’t get it back which made you happy. You wonder what he will do with all of his objects once he has to move again. But, if he doesn’t move, if he has considered already, without you knowing it, if he has decided already, without telling you, that the cost and weight of staying there with his things outweighs the cost of moving those objects again, then he will stay, over there, and you will be here, still holding a lamp in your hand, wondering how to move it.


...
(k)

Like all men of Babylon, I have been proconsul; like them all, a slave; I have also known omnipotence, opprobrium, incarceration. Look: on my right hand is missing my index finger. Look: through this rent cape can be seen on my stomach a ruddy tattoo — it is the second symbol, Beth. On nights when the moon is full, this symbol confers unto me power over the men whose mark is Ghimel while rendering me subject to the men of Aleph, who on moonless nights must obey the men of Ghimel. In a cellar in the half-light of dawn, I have slit before a black altar the throats of sacred bulls. For an entire lunar year, I have been declared invisible: I would cry out and no one would respond, I would steal bread and I was not beheaded. I have known what the Greeks knew not: uncertainty. In a brass chamber, before the strangler’s silencing scarf, hope has remained faithful; in the river of delights, panic stood steadfast. Heraclides Ponticus relates with admiration that Pythagoras recalled having been Pyrrhus, before him Euphorbus, and before him some other mortal; to recall analogous vicissitudes I need not find recourse in death, nor even imposture.

-Jorge Luis Borges