In Diegesis

“You make everyone want to read ‘Steppenwolf’,”

Erica jokes; as of this morning, she’s a few pages

deep into the preface. I’m really not trying to own

my loved ones’ time. I put on “Dance Yrself Clean”

all the time to make everyone listen to it, to make

myself listen to it, for effect. I don’t own yr love or

my own. When I was twelve I decided to spend my

time watching movies. By seventeen, I had left my

spirit where I knew it could be safe. These days my

heart is stuck within that Art-prism. My face reveals

very little, and Erica wonders, where are you, lover?

I am looking at Dionysian colors, life, the children

of the Sun; and the Apollonian plane where people

stroll sequentially, where editors cut and directors

yell, “Action!” In the best times, what I look at and

feel affirms my self, reminds me of childhood and

that eternal optimism. I’m addicted to the best times,

and I’ve been making a map of the muses. That’s

what this has all been about. And if I ever forget

I need only listen to ‘Person Pitch’ by Panda Bear.

But I know that I’m done forgetting, that I don’t

forget like Voldemort wouldn’t forget what his

Horcruxes are. What I need to learn is that old,

favorite artworks can’t receive my good, that the

children of tomorrow’s utopia need inspiration

like I need food and sex. I have been dutifully

living since I was twelve, latched onto the teet

of the beautiful and sublime, getting busy not

killing myself. I need to get busy helping Erica

and the kids not kill themselves, because they

are alive and awesome, and I know that, ’cause

I see it.

This is not a good poem;

this is just your life’s time;

that is all.

Hey, man, I am

talking to your listening part.

I’m talking to the poet

who breathes in your heart.

When are you going to stop

faking a start?

You’ve matured yourself

in some ways, sure.

You wrote a poem earlier today,

and last night, and quite a lot relatively.

But you’ve been masturbating yr spirit out of you

in the room of regularity, been honing some disciplined individuality (which, guess what, has no life,

and I’m not just talking about the sperm on the wad of toilet paper floating with the rest of Philadelphia’s un-loved, un-wanted shit).

You are a survivalist.

You had to be, you suicidal Steppenwolf,

you invaluable child, you dwarf star.

You’re also a closet-case opportunist which is why you latch so smoothly and desperately onto the kingpin of justified suicidals,

Socrates. You man. You serious, principled man, you you

you wannabe father, you phony Jesus Christ, you devoted philosopher.

Yr no diegetic liver! Yr no self-aware leaf. Yr no sentient photon,

and life is no sunbeam, and yr time is no wave of light

and yr death is no one else’s heat.

Except it – you and life and death

and the rest- is

it is it

is this is

it is this

is

happening. Now

I’ve wasted more time than I’ve not wasted,

which was a stupid decision, but we know what we do with those.

We regret them.

I can change if I simply rearrange

everything in my mind. It’s not hard.

It’s impossible. What I do is the impossible trick,

what I’m going to do before your very eyes.

I’m gonna show you something, I’m gonna take a system,

a familiar everything, language, sound and vision, the venue through which

exist all my friends and all your favorite meanings,

and I’m gonna dance with it, seduce it with the song that shoots out of my loving part,

I’m gonna make love with the poet in your heart, impregnate her,

I’m gonna make you a father, son.

What you feel now is just the baby kicking inside you,

your heart thumping. A moment.

And another.

Beauty is a box

clenched in my hand,

and it’s filled with rocks

and moments as fine as sand.

My box is leaking,

because my mind’s power is weakening.

Where once imagination was so strong,

now most things are mostly wrong,

like when I listen to a great song,

and it’s just drags on so long, and I know it,

so I can’t wait ’til it’s gone,

so I can press play again. Play.

And it keeps playing, it keeps playing and playing, keeps

playing, playing and playing, and it keeps playing

’til the day I press stop.

And be someone great.

My mom asked me once to provide her with a pool when she gets older so that she can swim to stay “lucid” at 80. By that I imagine her to mean, if she’s still alive,

then she wants to keep her soul intact, to remain gloriously alive, spiritual. I don’t know how to segue to this, what to say, it’s just that I feel like that pool: empty, non-existent, an idea, abstracted,

a hazy hope for the future, that the little piece of the Soul of the Universe, which burns most brightly in us during youth, should not abandon us for the sake of generation, eternity.

You’ve been drowning in that pool, Erica, trying to live contented in something that doesn’t exist, in me, and meanwhile,

I’m looking at cheques on the ground, and looking back up at the sky, and back at the ground, and across at you lying nude in the bed, and then

closing my eyes, and expecting that, when I open them, my incredibly powerful, imaginative will will have turned the world into art; that

all those lost Greek songs will soar through the ancient air, and unite our city and every other and the whole earth, and show each of us our identities by shimmering to us our reflection in the Soul of the Universe, and we’ll see that we are one with the human soul.

This I quite seriously and gravely expect when I open my eyes and see you, Erica, and those cheques and the big sky. It’s true that when I walk to class,

I tend to see just the concrete below me and the clouds above, and not much else, especially if I have headphones on. If I’m in a building and I’m among people, it tends to go that I’m either

looking at you or looking at my professor, or the walls, or nothing I’ll ever remember. I’m doing so much work just looking at you, babe, learning

those things my professors can’t and never will teach me; that is, how to look at someone. I never know how to look at my Philosophy professor who, meaningfully, I have a Platonic crush on; at times, I’ve looked at her feet, and I’ve noticed her kick her foot up, scratch her shin, fumble about, suddenly self-conscious.

And at times I don’t look at you at all when I should, or I express some annoyance too soon, when it could wait, when it could use an accompanying touch, or something nice, a look. I always get self-conscious

when my professor gets self-conscious, or when I think she does; I think, look at her face, look at the board, look at her face, what the hell is she saying? What is Hobbes on about, exactly?? Sure, I understand it, but has it infiltrated my entire network of meaning; have I realized it? Work

harder, son! And I come right home instead of letting her teach me more stuff after class (which she is prone to do; it is her idol, Socrates, after all, who argues in ‘The Republic’, Book II, that the virtue of a craftsman is the degree to which he is able to benefit the subject of his, or her, craft — teaching not excluded), and then

we talk some, and live, and populate all this paid-for space with our bodies (the most un-broken parts being penis, vagina, fingers, lips, namely), our stuff, my abstract mind, your fragile heart, the music I’ve downloaded, your craftiness; and we listen:

It’s you and me, won’t be unhappy.

Come on, baby, come on, darling,

let me steal this moment from you now.

Come on, angel, come on, come on now, darling,

Let’s Exchange The Experience.

(if i only could, if i only….

i’d make a deal with god, and i’d get him to..

swap our places, be runnin up that up that road…

that hill…

with no problems…

I wait for the day I come home from the lonely past.

I look for the girl who has put up with all of my shit.

I never needed anyone for so long…

The other night you said you might try to kill yourself;

You are too strong for you; you are invincible….

I learn in your bed I’ve been gone for too long,

so I put in the time, but it’s too late to make me strong.

Now all I want is your pity.

All I want are your bitter tears.

But – but, but, but – it really, really

can’t be gone.

We’re still right here..

It took so long.

Can’t say we heard it all.

Limbs parallel, we stood so long we fell…

(We painted a song.

It started when we were young,

but now it is in our lungs).

I’ve been honing my intuition, been clumsily carving a man out of will, humanity, geist,

and calling it art – can you believe that? Been saying my life is in diegesis – like my life is

entirely of my own creation, like the art of living is the degree to which we steal our identities

back from our creators, like somewhere inside me is a child that wants to slap my parents and

say, “Don’t fucking tell me what to do!” Like my life isn’t endebted to every single person

I ever share time and space with, like I’m invulnerable, like there is no pain I know.

I put on ‘Alley Cats’ by Hot Chip, ‘All I Want’ by LCD Soundsystem, ’10 Mile Stereo’ by Beach House, Girlfriend,

not to oppress your space or to control your entire perceptual universe,

but because as Cormac McCarthy once wrote, “A man…can know his heart, but he dont

want to. Rightly so. Best not to look in there.” I am but a human, a weak communicator,

flimsy with language, and only ever half-understanding of my true emotions,

so I say those things I’d rather say, feel those things

I’d rather feel, and I try to keep them as sincere as I can.

I put on a song that I want to hear, because I’m my own

God. Girlfriend’s getting her broken body fixed; at work, she stands,

bends, swoops, paces, scoops, races, pauses, bored. I don’t work;

my mom (who works as an English teacher up in Alaska)

sends me four, twenty-four hundred dollar cheques

per year. When Girlfriend’s not here,

I’m left with this universe we’ve created, and I admit,

most of this stuff belongs to her. I don’t want to ask myself,

do I Feel any less human presence when she’s gone?,

because I want to keep up that I’m a lover, and some believe

that we are what we think. It takes a muscle to fall in love,

sings M.I.A. as I pull out that bit of flesh and muscle and blood

which sometimes finds warm shelter in my beloved; I release my excrement

in the toilet (two chocolate milks digested before and during Philosophy

class), shaking my hips to the groove, gazing directly at my shadowy reflection

in the ‘Reservoir Dogs’ poster. There’s a bloody cop; there’s a gun

pointed at my face; and in the distance there’s me, my whole damn persona,

or is the soul more than just a body in motion? I turn and see a human body’s shadow

shaking on the wall behind me; I think to myself, Momma told me I was born free,

but she never told me to look where I pee.

an arrangement i find appreciable, perhaps even in some way – to me – ideal.

1. Eden by Talk Talk; 2. I Walk the Earth by King Biscuit Time; 3. Things I did when I was Dead by No Age; 4. Comfortably Numb by Pink Floyd; 5. Archangel by Burial; 6. Higher than the Sun by Primal Scream; 7. From Stardust to Sentience by High Places; 8. Suddenly by Herbert; 9. Together We are Beautiful by Fern Kinney; 10. Caecilia by Fennesz; 11. Never Content by Air France; 12. Don’t Fight it, Feel it by Primal Scream; 13. Soon by My Bloody Valentine