My first thought was, he lied in every word,
That hoary cripple, with malicious eye
Askance to watch the working of his lie
On mine, and mouth scarce able to afford
Suppression of the glee that pursed and scored
Its edge, at one more victim gained thereby.
Sorry I haven’t updated in awhile – sometimes life begins to gain a little momentum and I just don’t want to spend what little free time I have in front of a computer, summoning up some last reserve of energy for a coherent post. In any case, I’m preparing for a move into my new apartment next week, stressing over my almost-certain library job, my almost-certain petition at York, and the almost-moronic bureaucratic hell-spawn that is OSAP. I know I’m not alone with that last complaint – navigating the red tape required to file an OSAP loan request is, at times, like being in Kafka’s The Trial, running like a caged mouse through corridor after corridor, speaking to people so sunk into their roles that they wouldn’t notice if you’ve just got your hand chopped off and were dripping blood on their wall-to-wall gray carpeting. Sometimes I feel like stapling my finger just to get a human reaction out of them, although I imagine he/she would just take the stapler back, put it carefully in its place beside the pencil-holder shaped like a cat, clear his/her throat and say something like, “I’m sorry, that stapler is not for public use. There are several others available at the reference desk downstairs, just to your right…” Yeah, I’m a little bitter.
On the up-side of things I’ve been performing some of my poetry on the streets with S. playing on his Hang. We’ve just started on this little venture, but already I can feel that it is something special. I love the radical difference of poetry when it is taken outside the confines of a bar or cafe. Within an enclosed space, in the structure of a poetry reading or show, the poet can be sure of his/her audience. The people listening to you have no choice but to listen – it is what they are there for, it is the role they must play as members of a polite audience. They are, in a way, bound to you and your voice, and it is very rare that someone gets up and leaves in the middle of a poem. This is not the case on the street. When you are performing on the sidewalk, the only influence you have on people is with your art. There is nothing else to keep them listening to you, no social strictures or assigned roles. If you suck, then people will naturally begin to drift away; if there is some gravity in what you are doing, then people will begin to congregate, listen, dance, laugh, or simply hold your gaze with a bare acknowledgment and understanding. There is something liberating in this.
Sitting at Future’s after a refreshing rainfall, I wrote:
The Return
The whole scent of an evening
distilled at the bottom
of a coffee cup,
the particular heat and light
of a day’s work
coiled and waiting
in the midst of small things:
a hand resting with one
finger over the abyss
of a table,
the fine yellow hair
above the upper lip
of a woman in pastel blue
shivering like antennae
poised above the moist
surface of cheese-cake;
and there,
lurking at the edges of things,
that sine of cloistered distress
in the eyes of strangers.
He wipes the café table
clear of rain
collected in anticipation
of his arrival,
the fine crumbs of bread,
flax seeds poppy grains
he holds in the bowl
of a swiped hand,
all that residue of
others’ satisfaction –
Has it always been like this,
the world’s crowd
suspended like puppets
during the intermission,
waiting for his return
to a comfortable seat?
Or has there been a
reckoning
in his absence,
and now there are
no things
but their collisions
to wait for.
——————————————————————
Sometimes I feel like I am returning from exile. Not a physical exile, but some kind of mental displacement, a withdrawal of my being from its fullest engagement with the world. This withdrawal changes the quality of my movement, the momentum I like to call spirit. In these long stretches in the arid deserts of my mind, my spirit becomes stunted and unable to see more than a few feet ahead of itself. Sometimes I am caught by a mirage and blunder halfheartedly towards it, my mouth dry and parched, practically smelling the cool water I think lies just a few more miles ahead. But invariably I am deceived; the sustenance I thought was waiting for me was a delusion. After a few of these solitary failures I return to the world, feeling out my newold surroundings and relearning my existence. This is the Return I mean: the divestment of fantasy and the return to the real. Many years ago this return was a painful process, and, in some instances, it still is. But now I am beginning to enjoy the warring calm and anxiety that attends this ordeal. It seems that every time I relearn the ability to see, to hear, to smell, to experience, I feel that it is an emancipatory process, something that makes me stronger, surer of myself and the ground I walk on. The things I had left behind me are waiting. I do not know what has happened in my absence. Whether or not I have been judged. All I know is that waiting.
