The Career
1
There are beings that rise from death towards life
but never make it. Are condemned to watch,
therefore – possibly guard –
objects. A rusting bench
in a park in a bad neighborhood.
The cane propped there
before the addicts come and after they pass.
A laboring air-conditioner blocking the view.
A squirt of almost thoughtful music
from somewhere. Music is objects. –
But the faint spoor of social conscience,
the more than likely accusation
of sentimentality accruing
to the above, come only from the living,
not those beings
whose role is just to watch and keep alive
what isn’t.
2
The dust, and some kind of powder
on the scarred surface of a bureau.
A stamped figurine,
two inches high, of the benign
elephant-headed Ganesh or
some lesser god.
A hairbrush.
Pills. The want ads.
Photos, unframed, of a child
pouting to demonstrate selfhood.
A mop. It’s not working.
I don’t even know the gender
of the implied figure. Stains,
unreachable, unyielding
to the heaviest rain, outside the window.
Keep trying. Books. They don’t count;
even biographies
of film stars or the crudest self-help tapes
point, immaterially, away.
The white trapezoidal containers
of take-out.
*Secrets of the Ascended Masters*.
To live in this apartment thirty years,
even to pay off the mortgage,
won’t make it yours beyond the cracks
in the tile, the mildewed caulking of the tub;
all that is needed
to make it someone else’s are death and paint.
3
A crowd is standing at a corner.
Traffic is heavy.
But it’s six PM, people have to go home;
or one, and they need to return to the office.
Once we hoped,
each September, for new ideals: vast tailfins, curves,
astonishing pastels. Later the SUVs
were black boxes, the rest white and beige.
Soon streets will empty
except for the tanks of the National Guard,
but the current vehicles
are leaden allegories.
They grind along on floppy wheels
with clown horns, holographic sandwich-boards,
spiked hubcaps.
They praise or mourn their own variety.
Their sound-systems blare
fat, self-accepted or –loathed;
world-mastery, facelifts, opportunities
to loot the next block, even
a way through. Driven,
much of the crowd at the corner tries
a broken-field run, is tossed
as high as the second story.
Downtown this happens every minute;
our streets are a mosh-pit!
In Canada
and the residually welfarist countries of Europe,
the cars are the same, but pedestrians wait for the light.
4
Incapable of seeing stupidity
as such, only as cunning,
the blank alarmed dismissal
that is the social function of most eyes
as anything but an expression
of loyalty to the dark god, of pride
in service … Dino Campana
hawked his self-printed
chapbooks, from one sidewalk table
to the next, to the literati of Florence,
who greeted him, or not, with condescension.
Sometimes he tore out pages
that were, he said, beyond a particular critic;
and sometimes, one by one, judiciously,
he tore them all out. In the asylum
he began work on a poem
that had nothing trivial
in common with the greatest, only the greatest
prerequisite: it was not wanted.
A poem of such coruscating love
it infected the quantum
substrate, appeared as a trace-element
in every cell, beneath all measurement,
leaving everything as it is.
It was resumed later
in the asylum at
Rodez, by Artaud,
who took a moment off from it
in ‘43, to send birthday greetings to Hitler.
5
Meanwhile, in a drawer
of the bureau, a yellowed letter
missing some pages and its envelope:
“ … of gratitude that your support
over the years has never wavered.
Not only for my work,
which you have cause to resent
for all the silent afternoons and nights
it keeps me from you; but your forbearance,
your unmasochistic (I hope) forgiveness ...
I know I’m intolerable,
childish, defensive, fearful. I know I tend
with debased dialectical skill
to make my pain the world’s pain
and put my failure on a pedestal.
I’m not doing that here.
I’m only speaking of me and you,
and more than anything want to tell –
apart from love and love and love –
how much I respect what you do, and resent
(though you don’t) every slight the world inflicts.
“When you come home, we’ll talk, make love
for days, and only then
I’ll show you what I’ve been doing.
It isn’t the myth I hoped for
last fall, whose very decadence
would feed back in a closed loop
to origin and even innocence,
absorb all criticism and whatever
fury is left me … No,
it’s just the usual world, that Wall
which no one will tear down. Which may
grow stronger as one colorfully beats
one’s head against it, making
that thumping noise called ‘quietude.’ I could
be discouraged, seeing no door, no crack,
but not with you returning in a week
and with the fire in me now.”
6
It was a bitter waning love that made
my parents make me, on a weekend leave
from where the ruling class had stationed them.
Or so my programming says. Actually,
my parents were robots – issued me
ten seconds back, when I began this poem.
My country is the gleaming hull
of a mainframe, my death
the heat that any mainframe generates.
My ancestors are overwritten code,
my thoughts the harried Hindu voices
that try to help (as fabulous as their gods),
my god myself, my corporation you.
Thus having written, I delete
all poems about grandparents,
cows, “rural idiocy,”
moments of communion under
the stars, the stars, mildly
abusive insignificant others.
The current will
still flow for a time,
like IV drips and lines on monitors;
windows will open, the blue light
shine from the depths of what Ginsberg called
the absolute heart of the poem of life.
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