Little SMS in a prospect of palms

 1 August 2022

Those days the mind was a stock market for wild animals, until the doubly metaphorical became fact. The bull inside gored my skull from within, leaving a hole through which I rushed like a waterfall through a long shutter speed. The blurs are jewels, water unfit to drink because it’s flat. Render the photographic subject flat, prop him up like a cardboard salesman by the curb. When wisdom literature comes closest to confessional verse, then you’ve gotten somewhere. Excise the pronouns and continue with the parable. You’ll find that seed somewhere for the Buddha and remain immortal in your anonymity. (It's the best kind.) But you’ve got to dig to get there; the boneyard yields nothing as it is, except stench. The former president failed at the words “defiled” and “yesterday.” Put them in the tiny trash can to the side of his screen. It’s not the words that incriminate; it’s their very sound.

I prefer stills, though they suffocate the sound. To measure time in saccades, rather than in legato vision. It’s the lack of transition that’s true, not a seamless swerve between incoherent moments, incoherent because past. The historian lived in another century, but walked the streets and heard the honks of horns. That other century invested in a different account, but there was no making a living there. The brain drain was open. One man said he’d never thought about the pluperfect before. For me, the dative of respect was the mystery.

What we can’t talk about includes our individual experiences of office culture, the way you develop like a long vine in your youth and are then pruned to near nothingness as you get older. That sentence reminds me of someone else’s prose, but that’s appropriate, because he wrote about such things, the careers that blossom and then don’t so much fade as go away. Get your ticket now to irrelevance; it’s a better gig than you’d ever imagined it would be. You still have to brush your own teeth, but there’s no syllabus to follow, if you were even to read it.

In the phrase “coming civil war,” where do you mark the coming of coming, or the going of it? The violence is either random or accomplished at the behest of larger forces. You don’t need an actual politics, if you have hate on your side. You only need the instruments, the occasion to go to the mall. Shopping is a form of destruction, yes, but the destruction of shoppers reduces the equation to nil. Self-contained, like an era, the mall houses my worse memories, not as they happened, but as I tried to get away from them. Memory itself became the problem. If I do something today, I will remember it. If I remember it, it will have been lost. If it is lost, then so am I.

But that manner of thinking can’t survive serotonin. Meditation creates space, as do the meds. Space opens choice. You can now say yes or no, getting on with your life until it gets smaller in the mirror, mattering less as pain than as pain’s history. He remembered finding his lost glasses a year later in the archives. The archives is a lens, but the cap is usually on. Ornette Coleman’s hands arrange photographs before the lens turns to his fingers sifting out black from white keys. I don’t have the sound on, so his fingers move without singing. My daughter just sold some stocks. The printer hums to itself. Lilith sleeps beside me, half-covered by a green pickleball shirt. Details absorb you when you need them most. I'm the one who can't be absorbed.