We slump in mismatched chairs. Two hunches
over shame and a 3am breakfast, I think:
There’s gotta be a reason why art rhymes with fart.
If you want anything to go anywhere with any respectable…affect,
the force of pressure on the inside must exceed that from the outside.
Interrupting this genius, He asks:
How can you eat that crap? It’s so…empty.
He is flipping through his coffeeblack back pocket note rag.
It’s soiled, wrinkled concave with the ever-heaving
stomachfuls of his inky midnight doubt, and I would really
rather not have it at the table while I’m eating.
I am pouring another glorious bowl of Frooty Froot Hoops—yeasty,
store-brand sugarfuel for the lower-middle-income child poet.
He spends another tasteless oatmeal evening
reading essays about how to improve his writing.
Instead of, like, writing to improve his writing.
I ask:
If you took a knife to the edge of your boundary’s boundary—stabbed right into your life-world’s fleshy monad-sac,
glory running bloody down your blade,
As you breached forth into the well-lit unknown,
would it still be courageous, if you emerged from
your warm wet ignorance, and they were all waiting outside with mylar balloons, a banner, and "Congratulations on your Artistic Rupture!”
in blue icing on the cake??
There's still a moment there, right?
Petrified in the sap of thrill, in the momentous-stasis between
The arrow flung and the arrow fallen. A moment of
advancement …a moment of abandon!
(He nods along, but he isn't listening.)
I say:
Newness, originality, (birth), is purely indexical.
It points, and no one notices that all those shiny vegas lights aren't really moving anywhere—It's just utility bills and light-bulb trickery.
They're asking for genesis extended, genesis again and again
and each false gesture points only towards another
incandescent unreachable elsewhere.
(He nods along, still, not listening.)
But there's little monotony in taking a stab!
Even if it's just for them, again, those perennial spectators expecting,
Waiting outside with dirty little pocket notebooks of their own,
crowding the bassinets, ever-eager to begin another “surprise" celebration.
Gulping sweet, sugarpink milk, I say:
I happen to like this crap!
It keeps my knife sharp.
(He nods along, but he isn't listening.)