from Startles

 

Writing not to know what I think, but to think how I write. Now, when the street resembles itself only and my bed is still firm, nothing else is the same. Nothing else feels like metaphysics, a windshield blurred by heavy rain, but is an ICE raid set to music. Only perform! If you say there is peace, then there is; if war breaks out again, it hasn’t.

How I write changes with circumstance, as if style were a mirror, after all. As if everything we post is a position, not an impulse. Even whimsy’s become instrumental. Be the frog who isn’t that frog, but isn’t real, and you’ve arrived at the counter-symbolic nature of fact. Meditation’s a fly-over state, all content striving not to be.

But none of this gets me to the end, even if the end is everywhere in sight. Are long sentences back in fashion? a friend asks, noting the cultural capital of words that fail to find pause. Your post will find more readers if you include music, the very music you find suggested above. A man wearing a Yelich shirt and zip ties gets pushed toward the maw of an open van. It’s 3 a.m. in Chicago.

The sound of the music echoes Fox during the bombing of Baghdad, classical yet hollow, in case you can’t imagine people dying below. Gaza re-opens, but there’s nothing left that isn’t wrecked concrete. What’s the music for that? Post-triumphal, like the melody of a single tone that warps on stage. Silence is freaky, don’t you think?

The era of magical thinking lacks magic. In lieu of cleansing mantras, we have the clutter of lies. America is a hoarder whose storage container is set to explode. To describe it would require one long sentence, if only you could walk inside of it. The dream has awakened us, as if we were its dream, folded inside a sheet.

Does the dream know we exist? Can it be witness to its own vanishing? Can we find it in Freud’s index near “pulled teeth”? What interpretations do our dreams have of us, of our desires to live them out? What dream embraces the men who walk the highway’s narrow shoulder, pushing their shopping carts?

Put music to it, the supermarket refugees. My son said a homeless man asked him for something to eat and he bought it for him. Said the man was brave to ask an officer in uniform. One or two different decisions and we’d be there, too, he tells me. I’m proud of his wisdom, if not the cruel economy that gets him there.