Cui Bono

I belong to the school of watching people try to act naturally

And decided recently to incorporate trying to get noticed for good deeds

Into the curriculum to replace trying to get noticed for voluptuary consumption

And its predecessor, trying to traumatize banality for the giggles. 

A deadened mind is no more attractive than a cankered heart.

Put that in your casket and cremate it, kids.

You can sit at the edge of my mental furniture anytime.

It is capacious.  Just sit and cogitate. There might be some anxiety in

Falling off the perch, but mine as well become becalmed.  

Leaving your spot, if you coarse out and down to the diastolic pump,

For whom, would you say, does my blood most freely flow? 

Can empirical measures tell? 

The outer limits of self-fashioning have softer teeth than

the outer limits of accounting.   

I would rather swim in money than self-expression. 

Going green at the gills when the pump stops working, then go

Blue at the tempo of funereal decay, which – mutatis mutandis –

Decrescendos out of time and

Into charred black history. 

I belong to the school of capturing people trying to act naturally.

Play acting Goffman will not beautify

Any of the old anxious slogans or titillate

Any of the overdetermined overtures.

A grinning shark and vertigo comprises all of

what has been left over. 

Still, a cankered heart trumps a deadened mind trumps

A desiccated vestige of a constantly-evolving ideal. 

Say what you want about the virtuous lash, but

It leaves a mark.   It’s mine as well. 

Just try to stop me. 

Non Sequiturs: Faulty Openings to Never-Consummated Narratives

I.

Of all the splenetic yuppie gin joints to walk into, she had to walk into the one that sat just below the apartment that I had been renting, for however long it had been since I got the boot from the large Modernist house where my family and my former life and ½ of my considerable net worth still lived. Black pencil skirt and gray fitted jacket, unbuttoned with the sleeves pushed up to her elbows, white blouse with a high neckline, encircled in a weird ruffle pattern, clicking and clacking across the bar room floor. I almost spit out my drink when I she sat down and I noticed she had a sidearm holstered inside the jacket. I knew I was going to jail, or to fall in love, and, at that moment at least, it didn’t matter which . . . .

II.

Rudy Petrochsky came to work the first day of his apprenticeship, having spent his mother’s meager savings on a large butcher’s knife and a thin white apron. He was 13, and often hungry. For the next three years, he worked on finding the right tendons in breaking cuts of meat that he ached to cook and consume. For the next ten years after that, he worked on finding the correct way to cut with and against the marbled grain of the meat, to use as much of it as could be used in correct proportions and with a felt sense of honoring what the word “meat” really meant. He began, on special nights, to take some of his work home with him and merge with it. For the last 10 years in the shop – during which time I was conceived and came into the world as his first-born son – my father began to travel out to the modest farms from which he sourced his meat. He deemed it the butcher’s prerogative to direct how the animals should be fatted in the weeks before slaughter. It was an auspicious time of his life, right before he came to realize that the increase in the amount of control he seemed to wield over his life and over the lives of those around him was not an incremental improvement on his lot in life, but an illusion the puncturing of which was going to be very painful indeed.

III.

By September’s third funeral, our man in Poughkeepsie began to try to take stock. John Black had been with the force for one-third of his life, detective for one-fifth. Walking up to the doors of strangers with news that was sure to rip a hole in their lives wasn’t getting easier, but it wasn’t getting harder, either. He came to see himself as a little bit of an enigma, which was far afield of what he knew himself, at heart, at be. The sense of foreboding had dissipated, sure, but increasingly he came to feel an affirmative thing going on to – like more than just familiarity at slipping into a role. Like he had been appointed to report to parents that sometimes being a stupid college kid with a penchant for experimentation was not a phase to age out of, but a fate to die into.

Sometimes a mistake was more than a lapse in judgment, even by someone whose station in life should have afforded at least that. Sometimes a mistake was the end, and it began to seem like that was so emblematic of what he knew to be true, that someone of his station – someone who had seen and heard what he had seen and heard – almost had an obligation – a calling, for shit’s sake – to continue be the bearer of the news.

IV.

As far as being a heretic goes, Sean Rafter was ahead of the curve. With a jailbird dad and a Stoly-saturated mom, he had essentially left to his own devices as soon as he graduated out of diapers. He ascended to the kind of freedom that other boys dreamed of, but would not have condoned if they felt its real heat. But he learned and he got on. By 13, he had grown tired of institutionalized culture and the bilious mass-marketed gruel that it offered, so he stopped going to school. By age 17, he had grown tired of the pre-packaged “rebellious” culture that was offered in its wake, which seemed like just a smaller tribe with more painfully acquired signals (the permanence of tattoos, the seeming permanence of withdrawal). So he stopped having the friends he had.

He kicked himself loose of context and, not knowing any better, he found that the best, most expressive thing he could do didn’t involve breaking the law, or sticking his middle finger in the air, or getting blotto for days at a time. The most militant form of resistance that he could find – and the antidote to the cold hand of fear that he felt gripping his heart at night – was actually something quite simple: red or blue or green paint, on a stretched out canvas, underwritten with belief.

The Flaying of Marsyas

                It took some of us decades to become comfortable in our skin.  Others knew, in the early haze of individuated consciousness, that such comfort would never be theirs to have.  Skin is the surface that can be skinned.  I cleave to my skin so it is not cleaved from me.  Acute proprioception comes and goes, and sometimes it’s like the world stops spinning or I start.  It was no accident that when Marsyas picked up the lyre, he got lost in the music he made with it.  Apollo wasn’t having it, as Apollo is wont to do.  And the response – why do you tear me from myself? – is what the sad young under-employed semioticians like to sit and ponder over, till the coffee grows cold and all the good drugs have wormed their way down to bedrock.  You don’t have to be 25 and stupefied, though, to trace that mercy-seeking plea across the play of surfaces.

Show Trials, Speak Memory

In a bewildered state approaching grace,

It came to me that being unchosen is not altogether different

And not altogether the same

As being abandoned. 

And then I came across a poem about boyhood, this poem, in fact

(how about that for instantiation?)

STILL LIFE

Boy with roof shingles
duct taped to shins and forearms
threading barbed wire through pant loops.

Boy with a safety pin-clasped
bath towel of a cape
tucking exacto knife into sock.

Boy with rocks. Boy
with a metal grate for a shield.
Boy with a guardian

daemon and flawless skin.
Boy in the shuttered district,
a factory of shattered vials,

green and brown glass.
Boy with a tiny voice
and crooked cursive handwriting,

with bent nails in a pouch,
metal flashing scavenged in bits,
with half a neck tie

tied around the brow
pushing a fire door wide.
Boy with a boy living

The boy in the boy’s head
watches sparse traffic
from a warehouse window

and takes notes on where
overpass paint hides rust,
where the cyan bubbles up

into a patchwork of pock
and crumbling disease,
a thief in the bridge’s body

he doesn’t see, but knows
is coming tomorrow
to swallow his song.

And I became less concerned, less anxious,

about the way in which choice and becoming lost

are wrapped in the tight space of unchosen abandonment. 

And then I think of Brodsky’s self-portrayal at age 40 and

How taking stock of boyhood and taking stock of age 40 are

Not altogether different and not altogether the same,

At least in this bewildered state of grace

With which I’ve been afflicted.

The Quiet Kind of Extravagance

[Come to accept the idea of a future that is exploring us and we can give ourselves, again and again, the possibility of remembering the future.   L. Berio.]

I once knew a sniper with a pink teddy bear tattoo on his left arm.   He told me he and every other Marine in his unit got the same one.  It was intended to provoke smart-ass comments, which is to say it was intended to provoke violence.   

When we met he was out of the military and no longer left targets in a lifeless crumple beneath a pink mist. He still killed animals, of all persuasions, and found it a moral imperative to eat as much of what he killed as possible.  Once the sniper feted me with bear stew, simmered in mushrooms and red-wine sauce.  It gave me claustrophobic dreams, like I had to dig myself out of a collapsed cave.    

I never saw him fight – never saw him drink either.   He told me he had to quit both or else end up dead.  In the winter we would stack square bales on a wheelbarrow and walk out to the pasture to disperse it in piles for the horses.  Without fail he stacked two seventy-pound bales in his right hand and a third in his left. 

Sometimes he needed a warm body to help with a project.  I remember one time he held a piece of four-inch polyurethane plumbing that was plugged full of human shit, while I took a Dewalt cordless sawz-all and sliced through it, expecting each moment to splatter us both with excrement.  That didn’t happen.  We patched in a new section, with ample amounts of diaphanous violet epoxy glue – enough to leave me cross-eyed.  The rich people whose shit had plugged the pipe complained about the smell.  We hated them, each for our own reasons, but we got paid in full.  I came away from the experience with a newly-felt but abiding sense of limitation. 

Where id was, ego shall be. 

Ontological precarity

Yes, yes, yes, all is suffering. We know. We read that book, too. We ratified the notion, acknowledged what it warrants. A quorum was present and everything.

And it’s not as if we don’t know the answer to the question: where to begin? Right here, right now, as each beat of a heart carries us forward in its staccato murmuring.

But how ? How to begin? So much depends on no ideas but in things, so much of the ballet between self-awareness and acknowledgment of consensual reality takes place off-stage.

That’s probably as good as it gets, the most that can be hoped for. The lash - yes, yes, yes, we welcome it, clear-eyed and with gratitude. That’s how.