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Dear Frederick I identified a lot with the first poem -that's where I am at at the moment social things are difficult for me -I do not have the energy Cheers Patrick -----Original Message----- From: Poetryetc: poetry and poetics [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Frederick Pollack Sent: 01 December 2008 04:13 To: [log in to unmask] Subject: 3 poems The Soundtrack *Do you want to come with us?* they ask, and you say *No, I'm fine where I am,* and for an hour or so you are. Wine, cat, even the view - all confirm your self- satisfaction, self-sufficiency. Time, however, doubts. The book no longer holds your interest, appliances hum, the light dies . You should have gone with them, even if only to a movie; now it's no longer clear who they were, if and when they'll return, whether they'll return for you, whether they'll find you unchanged. If the salt has lost its savor, if this isn't your beautiful house, you have begun to hear the soundtrack. The cat wakes for no reason, lamps delay when turned on, sunset is bruise-colored. Linz Actually, as weeks pass, slowly, after the election, I stop caring. "Hope," the word, debased, philistinized; the emotion something to be sealed and vanish like a wound . A liberal, per se, awaits betrayal. Not actual betrayal, because one is only given, carefully, ever, the illusion of a promise. To hope is to be infantilized: we are ruled by adults; to be adult means always already to be compromised. Remembering which I stop caring, having never compromised; which would tell any political actor that I have never acted. At Thanksgiving, among other liberals, judicious, hopeful, I zone out. "You're quiet today ..." I'm thinking of a show on the History Channel: Hitler in a room in the bunker, shells falling above, contemplating a model of Linz, the town near his birthplace, remade into a metropolis with his Tomb, his parents' Tomb, a Museum of stolen altarpieces and Rembrandts, a Hotel with his name, squares with his name, boulevards wider than anyone's, a Parteihof. Spotlights simulated noon, twilight. Pasty, shaking, he sat day and night, staring. One can unfortunately understand. It was a parody of an artist's, a visionary's farewell . but why a parody? I would have liked justice or triumph of any sort to be open, flowing, eager for input, feedback, but that wasn't me. The Story So Far The hero acts. Things explode. A girl provides plot. Girls die. Girls stop whatever they're doing for sex with him. Some have ulterior motives and try and fail to kill him. Some have tearful, soulful, mysterious, alien motives. Both types die. Villains die. Nations and larger corporate entities don't. The hero moves forward. His motives are a function of his look, which may be surprisingly ragged and surly yet essentially detached. Longer and longer stretches of *longueurs - the burning heavens reflected in mud puddles, rain on soiled and broken windows, functionless extras - are inserted and still we think we are watching the hero. More and more bored, yet unconscious of being bored. Until we enter a kind of singularity. Screens torn, the cineplex boarded, we follow on the small screen. When its last white dot fails, we read. When the letters drift into the heavens, we tell tales, gesticulating over rubble fires. When our voices fade, and our very bones are dust, and the dust sifts back into the quantum hiss, we come at last upon him.