Of Another Sameness

When I say everything is the same here in the States, I mean in an entirely disconcerting way. You'd expect that given a certain amount of time away from something that it would change, if only in marginally perceptible ways. You'd perhaps not expect but certainly not be surprised by, say, the Gimlet's having shed the sum total of a human being in one year of absence. But when I returned to this land, for good, as they no doubt say with more than a little irony, all the little things that should reasonably have changed, have not. The dollar has inflated with frightening regularity, yet the cost of daily goods and services has not appreciably increased to coincide. Sure, people bitch about gas prices, but they are still within the limits of fluctuation from before I left. Food costs are roughly the same, and an American media, the Finest Free Press in the Free World, continues to balk at a glut of meaningless information they refuse to digest before their next deadline.

So, I find comfort when something that really has stayed the same suddenly becomes something else to me. I take comfort in the fact I largely manufacture my own truth and reality, because, well, I'm not an analytical philosopher. I probably could have been one, could have learned the ropes of their subsistence, could have been a damn good one, but I'd likely have even less hair up top than I do now. With this in mind, I took another look at this poem I recently wrote, one of the incomprehensibles.

an ode on a CD cover of a woman named Apple

WHAT I WANTED from you was an essay
on matter of fact, I would like to stay, hearing
your ear over cocaine and a beer-stained
mustache—I listened—four hours—two—the
dull pain of the evening silences, whose lenses
I WOULD SEDUCE, they’d click and fall in love
with the suicides treating lovered wounds
with pesticides inside the bottom left cabinet,
behind the Drano. Oh, black and or white, you
simple woman, death’s first maiden of songing
the life from the evening silences we made
love to by candle-blight, oh lips too tight to
kiss too slit to miss, I’d heal the wound in your
face two face unloved each other we last.

I'm a fan of free writing; it's one of those lame MFA tricks I think actually does help you distill your thoughts into something coherent, but only if you go back and read it. I hate how the general tack with free writing is that it is a simple mechanism that will lead you into coherence, narrative, and other such boring things. On a read, not a write/read, I was stopped up by that first line and what it said back to me: I'd been plowing through all this lyric material, hoping that something would stand out as The Perfect Essay of the Marriage of Form and Thought, and I was having trouble just letting songs be songs; what I wanted from them was that perfect dictum that would sum up everything I want to say about poetry, so I could go home and read a trashy sci-fi novel. Then I noticed what I had capitalized (I'm still not sure why I did that) and made the two statements into one: what I wanted I would seduce. Don't get me wrong, I'm not some Neo-Freudian claiming my subconscious will speaks in the poem. I make meaning, and what I find here now is a co-incidence of me reading a fragment of myself.

I come upon a thorough piece of gibberish like "death's first maiden of songing" and see how seduced I am by the desire to read into its overwrought layers of verbosity. I seek out those moments in texts, most likely perfectly benign, that are a trap laid for the overzealous; which is a long-winded way of saying I do not merely overdo it, I want to overdo it. I yearn to make too much of things.

I see in my own writing an unsettling mix of hope and fear, rather my hope and fear are the same thing, but I don't have a word for that. I should probably make one up. When I see myself having written, "face two face unloved each other we last," I get goose bumps, not because I'm in awe of my own verbal judo but because it scares me that I could say something like that. Unloved, the two faces (it doesn't matter what they represent, as they only represent what I tell them to) wear each other out. Last is not a transitive verb, but by force of syntax I've made it one. The two faces, opposed, endure each other, which is really two statements: the easier, "I suffer what I've already said," the harder, "what I've already said suffers what will become of me." This is one of the lessons,then, I think, of Heidegger's life.