When Raw Emotion Ashamedly Hides Itself behind a Sort of Light Verse, This Is What One Gets

What lyric would be fair enough? --
Fair enough.
I won’t write it.

What object would be dare enough?;
Dared enough,
I might try it.

What defect would be care enough?
Don’t you care enough
to hide it?

Or perhaps, knowing
how you, in your going,
struck me as with a length of cyclone fence,
and I fell to pieces regular, quadrangular
for you to murder further
at your leisure, though
you’d rather not stir from present pleasure,
to deal with that bloody mess.

On a Certain Customary Exchange

Till death do us part -- perhaps the most viciously delusive phrase in our language.

Look at it. Move your mouth around it -- silently, if you wish, though to speak it aloud is to hear yourself spit and lisp and hiss like a cobra. Till death do us part. Imagine saying it to someone and having her say it you. You will, I assure you, never say anything less flippantly, less facetiously, than this phrase, though your postmodern sensibility enforces in you irony.

Till death do us part -- words of proleptic finality, of the expectation of consummation. Akin to another phrase: And they lived happily ever after. . . Words that are a sort of death, really, bringing death before Death. Words that try to cheat Death of its droit du seigneur, the ellipsis in tow simply a set of pegs for the figures in the story to hang upon, silent and still like marionettes in this nebulous, static ever-after. They depart to become our dearly departed, their reward in truth a sort of exhaustion, a moribundity.

Unlike your friends in the tale, however, your life does not brook such envelopment. Your fate is always to step out of this finality, the ellipsis not a set of pegs, but of stepping stones to a darkly aneschatonic after-the-ever-after into which you are forced by accident or perfidy and where you wait for the messianic dispensation of the wholly drawn arc, made cruelly to hang fire well after hair grays and cuticles bleed from gnawing.

This is the sort of "character" you are. Why, then, do you constantly try to yoke a narrative -- revised how many thousand times now? -- to this billiards game of existence? Why do you insist on being both author and hero, when you can be precisely neither?

These are questions I leave with you tonight.

Listen

Listen.
The crickets churn their drone in the night, this hot night;
hot ourselves, we lie together.

We snuck here because this night, no special night,
one of small significance, indifferent news,
was the only one we’d have.

So, as mosquitoes dip their meals from us,
as grass, coarse and searching, bedevil us,
we grow restless with itching, with sweat and noisy damp,

yet strain to hear the neutral liveliness of life,
and force ourselves to stay,
because we know someday we will beg time --

if only to itch, to sweat,
to lie together another moment more --
to likewise linger.

I Begrudge You Your New Life

I begrudge you your new life.
It tumbles the remains of mine
into a corner to slump bonily,
disarticulate on absent sinews;

or, better: a whispered-to nut skin,
trembling, to blow to flakes any second --
any second of these slow seconds
swollen to moments, grown to months --

thus the life arrhythmic
of a dying star dipping
to smear itself against the night --
a final dive of insouciance.

An Eschaton

He dreamt:

This hulk, this monstrous bygone them, which drags its listing ass, adrift, alone with loneliness.

But down to every thread of gristle, he wished to gather in his fist the miles and miles of arteries and veins in him and fling this missile into stains bloodily tentacular, believing then, and only then, in conning such spaghetti, would she have a picture, verisimilar, of his extremity.

He:

“Here, before I cross the bar, I swear I’ll topple every jar
of beshitted dreamers’ beshitted dreams.

Those turds hotly rotting, stillborn of feverish ambits; it will as I say! So be it.”

So was it?

"Infelicity Dogs His Heels"

". . .But perhaps I will find occasion to dust off dreams, mothballed, creaky from disuse, some future day when Misery no longer has me in her thrall. . ."

This is something I cannot allow myself to think, I'm afraid; postmodern weltschmerz lays too great a claim on me, clouding the vision of my mind's eye to such an extent that it cannot distinguish hope from hazard. Such myopia makes me timid, tremulous.

My hope and joy, nearly seven years in duration, have long since been eaten and digested, and I have been shat -- I AM shit -- into the dunghill that is the resting place of all of Fortune's nearsighted fools.

A Note on "Romance"

She languishes. Though she is reluctant to admit it, her hesitation speaks volumes, her eventual response, cryptic and evasive, speaks volumes more:

"What is romance anyway?"

"Who can tell the dancer from the dance?" is my reply, hollowly jocund. In sad eyes that meet tired ones, there is a mutual recognition: I languish because you languish. And languishing is the sine qua non of romance. Which thus shows itself the devil's most subtly cursed gift.

A Drive-By Fable

The wounded animal left out in the rain drew himself around his soaked body, baring its teeth at those who extended to it a consoling hand, until eventually it died, a victim of both its injury and its own vicious ignorance. . .

Auto-Da-Fe, of a Sort

This blog, this aching nothing, black and sad -- dandruff on velvet. It is pathetic, really, sending one cri du coeur after another into this void where only the mortally wounded circle in the small hours, looking for a place to die.

Will she ever say she's sorry -- she who invited the worm into the fruit, the canker to the bloom?

I think soon I will erase this blog. It's too hysterical by half, and equally as maudlin. I'd profit more by writing chirpy ad copy for some sticky cellophaned sweets.

We hear only the words we say, we read only the words we write. This agony that summons forth these words? -- an apoplectic in dumbshow.

My teeth can always fit around the barrel, D---. A fitter kiss now than those I had from your lips. . .

Beati Immaculati

A fool and his money, the saying goes, are easily parted. As are a fool and his virginity, those responsible for this wretched offering entitled The 40-Year-Old Virgin would have us believe.

Do not, however, simply take me on my word that this film is wretched. Rather, examine, as I have, the film's leitmotif: a modern version of the "problem play" so very popular in Elizabethan/Jacobean England (The Bard even wrote one and called it Measure for Measure), The 40-Year-Old Virgin invites us to consider Andy Stitzer's--the titular virgin's--condition as aberrant, strange. Having sex early in life, and having it often, then, is apparently as normative an experience for the typical American as his first NASCAR race or clean twelve-point-buck kill.

Andy Stitzer, on the other hand, has somehow managed to skip this quintessentially American initiatory rite -- a rite that inevitably brings one to the inestimable and inexhaustible pleasures of highly mediated consumerist hedonism -- opting instead for the hyperfetishism typical of those in a state of arrested development peculiar to pimply pre-adolescence and involving TV-show action figures left in their packaging. One, in other words, that centers on junk-culture collectibles, those relics of a more idyllic age when one's existence remained unimpinged upon by biological imperatives.

Andy Stitzer, with the aid of several friends and co-workers,is nevertheless lifted from the sociological bywater he has found himself in and brought to the golden shores of coitus.

As you can see, the above synopsis fairly captures the dramatic arc of The 40-Year-Old Virgin. Thus, seemingly aware of this paucity (I couldn't help but think while watching the film that it could have been dispensed with much more deftly in a five-minute Saturday Night Live skit) the filmmakers liberally lard their product with gratuitous vulgarity and digressive, sophomoric badinage.

If you want to see palpable evidence of The Culture Industry's creative bankruptcy, then by all means watch this film. If, however, you realize that you will die one day, and that the two-plus hours which The 40-Year-Old Virgin will claim from you are too precious, too irreplaceable to be wasted, then find some other way to beguile your Friday or Saturday evening. Because, ultimately, the only thing The 40-Year-Old Virgin ends up screwing is the audience.

Aqua vita

(Words I hope will console pyreflie)

Sometimes the heavens show mercy and let a brief rain fall on the man perishing in the desert...

For the past few weeks I have been mired in despair, falling into black moods that only become blacker, and I have been trying desperately to remain cheerful as I push another fistful of pills down my throat, as I attempt to ramrod into my heart enthusiasm for things I tell myself I want -- to teach English abroad, to learn Vietnamese, to become a published poet. But to no avail. That old hobgoblin Nihilism stalks me once more, making me believe that any project I undertake would prove empty, futile -- ashes and rust.

In a conversation I had yesterday, I maintained that, because we conduct our lives with a constant awareness of death -- and an often crippling one at that -- death seems to have more force, more influence, than life; that life is so thoroughly permeated by death that one may question, as I do, if we humans are ever in fact alive at all, or, better stated, if Life indeed stands as some definite dialectical antithesis to Death, and not simply the latter's more attractive profile, as it were.

Such a morose line of thought (this turn of mind, if you have not discovered for yourself, dear Reader, is quite characteristic of old E.) led me to make this assertion: That any nihilist who prides himself on uncompromising intellectual honesty could only write one work: a single page with a period in the middle of it. And that's all. Otherwise, he betrays himself as an imposter, a metaphysician in pilfered garb.

This asseveration seemed so apt, so pithy, that I laughed in spite of my stifling sadness.

I set my mind, then, to live my new-found creed: to live life awaiting death. Life for me would be simply a purple plastic chair in Death's lobby.

But, as is so often the case, I cannot make that move which is the dark inverse of Kierkegaard's one of "infinite resignation" -- a sort of infinite resignation in it own right, though lacking the intuitive assurance of an eventual boon in the hereafter -- because always some tiny fissure in the melancholic mass of my mind parts to admit some small drop of a promise of the hint of an intimation. And I, the parched crawler upon the sand, slaver drily after it.

So, forgive my lack of resolve, dear reader. It is not the result of an absence of faith, but of faith despite absence. After all, whenever we find ourselves in a darkened room, we instinctively grope the wall for a light switch.