Obscure Line
When sleeping pills fail, I suck my brain.
Endorphins, serotonin
will eventually run out;
and then I’ll have to read till dawn
the usual bad poem and worse critique,
but for now the technique works. With a new soundtrack,
private despair becomes triumphant, heroic, public,
solitude a crowd
hanging upon my every mumbled word.
They have no other entertainment,
for media once switched off are dead
and what crosses the eyelid screen is immediate me.
Late-middle-aged women return to high-breasted youth
at the cost of being probingly
interviewed forever about our month
or few seconds together, so that
their every guarded sentence starts with “He.”
One channel up are war crimes trials
I’m no longer even interested in
but have been playing so long in my mind
I won’t know what to program when they end.
Meanwhile, the cultural station is showing
how all parents, grandparents, etc.
abused or elegized in current verse
are the same two people, all dogs one dog,
all landscapes kudzu. Which is boring too,
except for the part where they all vanish.
(I turn, and my fetal position
becomes a commanding though seated pose
in another dimension ... ) What’s on
the nature channel is more interesting.
A ship drops anchor in a shallow sea
that seems both Freudian and Jungian.
Its anchor scrapes along the bottom
until it snags on the idea
that the seabed is the surface of Europa,
the sea beneath, and warm.
A tantalizing form
both radiant and dark is there
like Schelling’s self-divided God,
a teddybear clutching a teddybear …
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