NIHIL
History makes its fish available
to everybody in the
form of print and electromagnetic waves.
Shockwaves of fish, electroshocks of fish.
No day passes something big doesn't catch
that must somehow affect or smash your awareness.
Each day tables change, maps change, faces on small change
change. Everything catches too fast as we are sliding
closer apart. There are no more correspondences.
The falcon no longer hears Faulkner, the
Nobel Prize-winning novelist, nor
the Nobel-winning poet, another William,
but merely flies in some seemingly arbitrary direction of d...
Arbitrary direction of discourse,
now that's big fish. Nah, scrap that.
Don't analyze me this process as meta-literary,
I beg of you, just let me traipse
calmly to my conclusion
in the fairness of time and then we'll see.
Look, today is such a big day.
Why is it that I have nothing to say?
Right now I just can't be bothered
to tell you the truth to even dream of making
any sort of ample pronouncement.
I shut off my loudspeakers.
Especially today, espec. for you,
for I know you will be the happier
without my e-lucubration or other,
my e- or other lucubration,
depending on delivery format. Let's just
get two beers (the lightest they've got on draft)
and sit down in silence, listening
to each other across all the noise of information.
It's time to state something serious
after all these years of something serious
being on the tip of your tongue,
but nothing serious comes to mind.
Let's drown ourselves in radio silence!
The wells of sincerity have dried up,
we have hit the hills of no return.
We see a helicopter in each other's eye.
I read Jack Spicer's poems today (they are so gay),
then listened to Quebecoise singer Linda Lemay,
who carves out an aesthetic enclave
for the Canadian dialect of contemporary French.
Elsewhere an innocent politician
dies for a bunch of words. To die for a bunch of words.
Fish in themselves vs. fish as they are.
Fish in themselves vs. fish in the ocean.
Consciousness as emptied heartache, ventilated liver,
preponderance of dried spleen.
I didn't my taxes today, I must be sic.
Only big fish are as they are. Small fish are
all in themselves, out in the pond beyond. Let's do like they,
swim through the day with nothing to say.
|