my hotplate works, too, but it isn’t a source of heat necessary to anything but toasting bread or limping out a box of pasta.
who here has conversations with dead people? a few of the outcasts on burnham street begin to raise their hands until he says
he’s not talking about those kinds of conversations. he’s got his hand in his pocket and we’re all waiting to see which bird balloon, which
coal-mine canary, which version of flight of the bumblebees comes out betwixt thumb and forefinger. who’ll be able to read the cover. people begin
venturing – perhaps, perhaps up to the third row. but no further than the fifth. the ghosts hear these mutterings and respond in kind, knowing the truth of
the matter. only a mother knows how to let her boy go free. it’s the bottom of the barrel for everyone else. spread your wings all you trilingual poets! says
the magician, as the turtle that has just appeared very slowly walks off, stage left.
Written While on an Incredibly Anxiety-Ridden Call with Customer Service
Does it even matter with whom? It should matter that it’s with
someone to whom I’ve forked over thousands of dollars through
many decades, and yet since May I’ve been blocked from receiving
normal services. I even have an old acquaintance, a local one, who worked for them as an attorney for several years, and given that I’ve been so clearly upset and wronged by the way they have treated me since this bizarre suspension for violating a rule but i do not know exactly how or when or whether it was even me or whether I’m simply
being given the runaround, I should reach out to him. Yesterday was a
particularly productive day in which my mood stayed where it needed
to be to accomplish much under really poor circumstances, those being mostly financial, something that continues to really bring me
down given that I have 30 years of experience in a well-paying career
in which I have found it impossible in fifteen years to get a full-time
permanent position, mainly because I have been niched into contractual
work for that duration, causing my quality of life to greatly decrease. This
was catalyzed with by being kicked to the curb by someone I trusted for
around a dozen years. Maybe all of this is neither here nor there, but
this is just to say that I have completed two very anxiety-riddled
calls with companies with whom I have what I would call an integral
and monthly paid account. Oh, whatever. I have more calls to make soon.
I’ve got a therapy call at 1pm. And at 1:30pm I have my quarterly CalFRESH update call. And I have to speak with my immigration attorney at some point today, which, well, if you happen to know where I live and what moment this is in history and the fact that I’m trying to get a 5-year fiance to the states so that we can finally have a life together.
And it will be at least a year before he gets here once I’m able to turn in
the fiance visa application, if I can afford the $700 plus the $400 attorney
fee to do so. And I’m broke. I know I sound such a mess. But when one
is a mess one does sound a mess. Anxiety has gotten the best of me this
morning, but I think I can correct that. And I must. There is too much to do.
Way too much to do. For example, how can I salvage these silly and frustrating words into any kind of thing that suggests it is a poem. Well, voila, it’s a poem.
One problem solved. Perhaps just to create others, and for that I really apologize.
I had a bit of an arc of a storyline going that sort of came to an abrupt halt.
Am I an artist or just a guy trying to make a life for myself in a world that
seems to be losing me with each breath I take? Oh, this cannot be salvaged.
Let it just be called notes. Which is, at times, a fine way to splay out a piece
that one might also call poem (I try at least to convince myself). Onward.
Onward. Apologies. Hello.
Unhinged is Terribly Unflattering and Not Very Much of an Art Form
How does one celebrate the value that friendship brings into our lives? We certainly cannot place a price tag on such
connections, can we? My thoughts go immediately
to my dearest, most treasured friend, the lovely lady
Susanne Swinert. She found me, as friends often do, when
I was at my worst. I was taking out the trash one day, there
was a bit of light rain coming down, just enough, as it were,
to mask the waterworks that were quite literally transpiring
within and about me. Yes, I’d been crying - had been up all night. It was early one morning and I’d been scrubbing and cleaning the place in which I live,
having just moved there a few months previous during a bit of a high moment in a long slump of what had been, for me, the lowest. I was giddy to
have the privilege of such an eviron, after what I rather too remorsefully thought of as a too elongated unfair era. Well, I’d only had the joy of living in this
divine little home for a couple of months when, as my luck would often do for that period I clung to as so tortured took another downturn. To mindlessly mend my insomnabulent
and despondent spirits, I did what I would sometimes do, which is clean. I’d scrub and rub the floors and walls and dishes and furniture as if I were removing all of the dust and rust from my
very soul. But by morning, the task had failed to brighten my spirits in the least. I had twisted the detritus into a few grocery bags that I tied up neatly and was carrying a trinity
of these balloons filled with trash outside my apartment building and to the nearby garbage bins that accompanied my building, where I thought myself alone, letting the rain
fall as it did upon my uncloaked neck and douse my hair, perhaps in an intently dramatic effort on my part, rather than the light rain’s, when out from beside the
fence where the garbage pails would be aligned, where into one of which I was bidding an unthinking au revoir to whatever I had deemed dirty and unworthy, yes, out from
practical invisibility slunk my fine friend, this being before we’d made any acquaintance whatsoever, well, until that very moment. And there she stood, having in essence
made herself a sort of oratorial blockade between me and the release of the last bag of swept nonsense from my new home and the bin into which the other two had
already gone, with a loud, high trill of “R-r-r-r-right you ar-r-r-e, si-r-r-r-, what a gor-r-r-geous mor-r-r-rnin’ it blessed be here at this hour, wouldn’t you say?” I
nearly dropped that last bag right upon her own bonnet (she’s such a wee lovely lady, that Susanne). Needless to say, I swiftly found my manners, toned myself up to as
near her splendour as was humanly possible with some pithy comeback. And we’ve been darling companions ever since!
Who’d say that close ties of friendship go so well together with excellent litigiousness? Well, I’m no attorney, but I’ve worked with many,
and some were pretty fantastic, really, but none can compare with my close pal Kenbrough Clift, Esquire. How often can one draw open the handiness of
friendships when, say, a class action lawsuit is heard being grumbled under-breath such that this good pal immediately comes to mind and
is called. For good measure. He’ll let you know, and quickly, if your pride has been bruised in such a way that it might know amends by soon becoming
awash in cash. How I do love my dear fellow Kembrough! I could list how, I’m sure, from many an angle, and reach the same conclusion over and over, that there’s only one
man I know to call when there’s a stain upon my heart brought about by the crooked practices of corporations and their once dear bedfellow compatriots, the ilk now known as
customer service representation. How long have I know my man,
the distinguished Attorney Clift? Long enough to know he’s a lawyer, that’s for certain. But what’s that thing we
often notice as blaringly missing amongst our colleagues and acquaintances who practice, however firmly, within the law.
Why, a moral compass, am I not right? I’ve never known a man
steadier and more well-versed in what is good (as opposed to well-stained in how to be crooked) than my dearest legal remedy, the honorable sir Kembrough Kavinley Clift (of Clift,
Sire & Remanded, lest any of us need be reminded). I dare you to attempt to find a better man who spends most years hanging about on slews of desparate-sounding billboards.
Alternate-side-of-the-street parking has been suspended, as has parking. —John Ashbery
But we haven’t had a car in decades. In case a memory needs to be refreshed, we is, simply, me. We were on the horn to Microsoft earlier regarding the suspension
of account since May. That was about five months ago. Needless to say, we’ve been on the horn with Microsoft for an entire workweek and a half since then. That’s at sixty hours. If
you don’t count the time online. Or vice versa, who can remember? The situation was escalated. This marks the 3rd time. Or is it 4th. With a pro mise for a phone call and/or an email of explanation
between 48 and 72 hours from now. Oh, they’ve taken out the $9.99 monthly subscription, despite the suspension, each month now since June. Except for this month, due to the depletion of money in my checking account. This may
go on for some time, I’m told. The depletion. And the fading of my memory, thanks to inaccessibility. This happens, we are told. We do not have to be reminded of that.
Those who came closest did not come close. —John Ashbery
We learned to play that game. “Hello!” we’d say. There was, of course, no response. Meanwhile, we were decaying, filling our bottles with poisoned and sedi
mented creek water. It was probably irradiated, as well. How were we to know? We were just the ones to whom no one got close. When I say we, I do,
of course, mean me. It was just me here, filling up my bottles, watching for the per sons who never arrived. I tried to make a game out of it. “Let’s count the minutes,”
I’d say to myself. “One.” Then a bit later, “Two.” Then “Three,” of course. It went on.
Eat the lamp that lights, I say, yes, eat the lamp that lights. So that everyone’s darkness is mine, he said, so that everyone’s darkness is yours. So that no one says anything and the face grows dumb. Nobody eating nothing. There’s anything but love in the room, until there’s anything but love. But we must have light like we must have food, I say. Light keeps us from going hungry. You’re wrong, old man, he says, all the light and all the love having been already eaten, sucked out of the room with its bed-caked floor
and its ahistorical walls. And then
the poor man wakes up. And he begins to stretch and and he beg
ins to yawn. It’s well before dawn
and on the table beside him lies a plate upon which lies a slice of some delicate cake, which, with a forlorn fork he begins to eat. And he chews at the pieces of cake that are delicate with the taste of, what? Of nostalgia? And swallows a piece or two, thinking, recollecting, Down the drain, down the drain, well, that’s when memory awakens at last and once again. Oh, how he’s ripped apart and torn asunder, this relapse of unbearable pain with the wheel of memory’s reignition. It’s not yet dawn. Why, why these blinding lights with the curtains all drawn?! Eat all the
heart is also blank— it either grows invisible or clamors for attention —Wayne Koestenbaum
Please allow me to.... Let me—might I?—find a way toward some meaning?
Smoke and mirrors are my default, my favorite fallback flavor.
A plea’s length, I have it on experienced authority, is inversely proportionate to said plea’s success rate.
Please, hear us out the door, therefore. Where we may, armed each with megaphone and flail,
make our legal, logical and anguished point.
We’ve had it with you, the boss of us! You know, as we do, how intolerably wrong you are!
The way you deface us! The way you displace us! The way you dispose of us!
The more gargantuan the monopoly, the more miniscule its citizens’
prisons.
They’re barely alive, by no choice of their own, as if they’ve ownership at all.
Enough is enough!
[loudly, through the megaphone:]
Hey assholes!! I’m not an activist!! I’ve not a penny to my name!!
So I can’t sue you to the hellish grave you deserve in order to earn more justice. Woe are us, you and the rest of those lying inert beneath your thumb.
...[putting the megaphone down because it has become very heavy]...
...[sitting down slowly onto the ground]...
I’m so exhausted. So I am just going to sit here and stare each of you criminals down
as if that is doing something that matters, knowing full well that it does not. Until my eyes.. ..won’t..open..again....
Don’t worry (as if you would), this’ll be over in no time.
Brand recognition is your best ass, or so I hear, and can put your assets indelibly in the minds of all of those who glare upon it. I’m no dangerous
liaison, I do this for a living. To liaise is to engage and can make for strange bedfellows. The light in the attic is the last one that goes off in my building. I
live and work there. But I stay clean and can cut my own hair. Everybody’s a penny- pincher in this day and age: the age letting go of all of the pennies. The channel that is
still on when the light in the attic dims. How much are you willing to spend on the lederhosen?
