Shape of a window on the floor, distant typing,
the horrible pliancy of the afternoon. De Tocqueville says
America will perpetually confuse freedom
and equality and all the people at my office say, Sure.
Some people like to get high, but I go to work to get small.
Real small. You think maybe we could all be friends
of whatever ostensibly meaningless rank,
but then there’s money to embarrass us
and generate awkwardness through a sense of difference
among people who can’t unassign money from accomplishment,
even the arts are plastered with thousand dollar bouquets
for best indeterminate sigh. At the office I recognize normalcy
in the God who walks through our hallways of anger,
it makes me want to leave it all behind like Iowa
after the caucus, yes, but then it’s Tuesday,
fucking Tuesday, a chair in a truck splashing into a lake
in the middle of whack. But they can all come back and mean
something together unlike the logical palindrome “no more
limitations.” The window was so clean I wanted to lick it.
√
That which hasn’t moved is finally moving, the coffee
spills into a snowbank and sizzles down to frozen grass.
Expand. Extend. Am I the star of this movie? I’m always deferring
to coffee and its sense of urgency, I didn’t have arms so I hugged
with my legs, I wanted this to be over before I could walk.
Love, broken floorboards tearing down into absence
sunk below our celebration, it’s never been easily
in my shirt pocket and still insists on showing me arms
unproud and desperate. You, scattered messages on the desk
in a trumpet of shadows, I only ask that you find something
green and solid to put across my neck in advance of the day’s
bright lines and knots. Even if history remembers today as the one
when the internet began to seem quaint, we’ll still be without a way
to understand meatloaf, which I like to eat with a side
of vague embarrassment. Everything turns into liking.
√
Sometimes when I’m only a sense of myself, I answer the phone
and just breathe. Hey whoever this is a great time to talk
I’m just on my way to where. The soul coagulates behind the eyes
and I think not of unification or its implied division
or other usages of the self in its dissolution to the market,
a correspondent to what I hope is only a small nubbin
of our looks from one to another. It’s looking from one
to all that corrupts our delineation from air. Green countertop
with ashtray, resignation to arbitrary breakfast,
and suddenly the knowledge that no one can stop me.
I wasn’t scared or upset, incredible, not asked to be good
or bad or even helpful, I went on smiling my dumb-butt grin
cracking grace across my legs. I could stand on anything,
religion, a little baby, a sense of limitations, I don’t believe
in this. The window on the floor and the absence.
Waterlillies, waterlillies, waterlillies.
√
Abstraction is an attempt to remove the assignable,
but so are most hangovers. If ever you’re bored
don’t come talk to me, meaning is always happening,
if you don’t believe it it’s over, it’ll be Tuesday now
and forever, Ack! Lonely but for the cars and colors,
generous doorway growing light in the morning,
I know everything, I know everything,
the day’s welcoming empire of moments inside me,
losing my way inside it, the bottle in my chest
filling, I still believe in hearing this on top
of me and isn’t leaving you can’t, an empty shirt
flopping down the street, I saw the colors
bounce into your face and that wasn’t enough I know I know,
there are other colors to which this spectacle lends depth and clarity,
those that fill your pants with unexpected heat and those that pound
a fist into your skull for trying and those without hair getting restless
under a climate of disinterest and those your own body couldn’t be rid of
and those you wrapped around with squelching normalcy just to leave
terrible messages that only say hello I’m not any of them
and not enough. The day is all this dumbfuck intensity and I
am swallowing my own spit, light rushes over my head,
into me, becomes something of myself I don’t even own.
Trees filling themselves with flowers, a parked car,
normalcy deepening in the afternoon.
√
With all of the weirdness he brings to this life,
James Tate has called John Ashbery the people’s poet,
as if the people were the poet’s poem, and I guess
sometimes they are. Winter air turned calmer awaiting him.
The idea of his body grew as the faces around him changed in their drift
from the norm. They came to him like cars into a tunnel
and claimed nothing more than the air they cut through.
When they were gone, he was left with a sense of drift
that overwhelms and replaces the faces that gave it rise.
How was he never frantic explaining it?
His was an implication divorced from its originating content,
present only to be felt without designation.
You can’t see their mouths speak of these things.
You can’t thread through their eyes and pray. You’ll fray.
