There’s nothing I remember, so I shall invent a life.
It all starts with a dichotomy. Speech, lack of speech.
Logos, preceded by the lack thereof.
A heartbeat, maybe, echoing to form a vowel.
And then a sigh, with inexplicably twisted tongue.
“I”…
I…
I’ll tell you. Raising a finger from my desk.
I’ll tell you how it began. I was in the dark, and decided I had had enough of it.
I flipped on a lamp at my side and began to write.
There weren’t any words yet, but there were symbols for sounds, and that was close enough for now.
I pressed enter, and the message flew to a compatriot.
Or an enemy. This flush dichotomy of forms abounds!
I hold my breath and wait.
Waiting, for a response.
Waiting, to imagine words I’ll never hear.
And the light hums.
I…
What is it, inside that filament
which speaks?
What is every minute morsel of matter telling me about my beginning?
I’m not sure I want to read it, when my phone shakes.
But that’s what that behavior dictates.
A laugh, a cold analysis, a response.
This could go on indefinitely.
I don’t even know where you are in the world.
I’ll never see you.
I think of a more advanced dichotomy, I read about.
It was attributed to Freud.
A baby masters the objective universe through two utterances
in a ball game.
Fort… gone.
Da… there.
For now, these words are silent, but if I were in a crib
You would be the breast I long to devour,
The meaning I would choose to fill my mouth with
Muffled exclamations:
DADADADADADADA!
And I cry. But I don’t know what this all means to you.
Because I haven’t told you with electronic signs.
I’m not sure the word “to cry” carries any meaning.
It just stands in for fear.
Fear of being alone in the world, with the dark,
And no logos.
But I could go on for days reading walls of text on webpages developed by people
who have long since died.
I can summon the likeness of every celebrity onto a screen
rubbing my ***** while I look at them.
I can hear the music—
I CAN HEAR THE MUSIC—
Of all the world, vibrating. Rhythms contracting, like vulvas after birth.
And the silky, black discharge is this emotion in my brain after I think of you.
I created you with my words.
I illuminated my world with the thought of you.
And now I have nothing to say to the creature I created.
I am in horror before you.
Fort, fort, fort, away!
You have left me, without ever being present.
You were here, you were gone, I had no control.
And when I weep, the fear drowns the sun’s luminescence
The clouds hide the sky
The air sculpts my lungs
With emptiness
after words have come out.

Laurie, it's almost Christmas.
That's why so many quietly desperate people
wear old woolen sweaters, fantasizing about being in
on a joke,
just this once.
Your friends are wildly cackling,
you're not dressed like the others.
I prefer my desperation loud, too.
I'm rather skeptical,
however,
of
forty-year-old Lauries wearing lace tops and wedding rings,
with wet words
sloshing from dank tumblers.

Each seeming mispronunciation evokes
excedingly excessive expectations
in the form of imagined saliva beads extruding
between bottom and top lips.
But they aren't mispronunciations, are they.
It seems that, over time, words have come to sound this way,
for us.
And you've done nothing wrong,
But twenty years ago, you wouldn't have any reason
even to speak to me.
It's fascinating to watch
the canopy of aging shield
youth's shallow perspective
from those rapidly fading stars
of disquieting mortality
which fall, bringing with them
forty years of confused burning
into vision.


How many times have you come to a place,
chatted with a stranger,
and gotten them to leave with you,
in your life?
I've never been able to, myself, but it's different when you're a guy.
I struggle with subtlety, but not as much as you.
There's just no room for ambiguity, were I to brace their lower back,
then casually walk by.
I have no doubt this approach has worked for you.
Only, from my perspective, your effort pulls
that growing chin
further from your forehead,
leaving room for misused eye-
contact with me.

Laurie, I know where you are.
You're in on the joke
outside this bar.
You're still in Nebraska,
as far as bodies go, so am I.
"The Good Life!" you slur,
having never left home,
you never want to go.

Laurie.

Laurie.

Laurie!

Please move.
I'm trying to shoot.
You impede my cue,
thrusting between my fingers.
My actions, words create an un-registering ricochet.
Fine, mock me when I miss.
I am not good at this game,
but I don't want to be.
It's not flirting.

If Nebraska IS the good life
it is the good LIFE, for one.
Like Jesus lived once, so do we, in this room.
He would also agree birthdays are meaningless.
Regardless, I can't be with you here,
because I don't know who is living that one good life,
but it isn't you or I.

I didn't ask about your husband,
I'm left to speculate. Assume.
You'll buy your children presents
and give your husband head he's used to.
Isn't that what rings means this time of year,
or is that only what you used to do?
Did he stop eating like you tell him?
Does he take care of you.
You probably think someone like me
would be willing, know exactly how to.
I can see you touching my arm,
I can feel your friends
rubbing me with their eyes.
My thighs recoil with every shot
as people say their goodbyes.
I know you're ready to leave me behind
and take my body's memory with you
to sleep within your head.

I'll miss you, Laurie.
You remind me that there may be one good life in this state.
Or, at least, someone who wants to **** me without knowing my name.
But the closest thing to a good life I can hope for in Nebraska
is to be noticed by a woman
who will help my imagination
think of a place better than here.
Before I reach your age, Laurie,
I want to find her.

Youth's last call yells loud,
and quells years of chased memories.
I know you can't hear it, Laurie,
but those years are over for you and me.
If you keep the thought of me alive at all,
do this kind and silly thing:
give your children gentle kisses
on their heads before they sleep.
Tell them that they have the one good life
the way my mother lied to me.

You want your pickled herring
you want de jure
you want all the caesar
sections
gobbled up
pure
and shallow
waters
drip
from bellies
to replace salt
to preserve
the children's minds
you eat
while you
transport them
to the other side
of your soulless
empire
with no objective
existence
in reality.

I can’t think
Because I hear the noise
And the noise interrupts my thoughts
So I play music
To cover up the noise
And the music creates more noise
In my head
I’m not safe
From my thoughts
With all this noise
I will never hear them coming

Nebraska has over 6 million head of cattle
and is perhaps the largest beef producer in the world.
This is strange, juxtaposed to my neighbors
who are Hindus, from India.
On all sides, I am surrounded by young, attractive,
friendly Indians
living in Nebraska,
studying information systems.
I rarely eat beef, but I joke, for them,
this place must be some kind of sacrilege,
or purgatory
where they go before returning home to join the "growing middle class"
we hear so much about.

They have gatherings, food,
language and ways
of maintaining hegemony among their group
while they are here, in my hallway,
and I am alone.
I have no information to manage,
no home to return to.

They gather in my neighbors’ apartment
talking, late into the night
I once made friends with two of them
who, unlike the others, were both atheists
instead of Hindus.
They told me that Hindu women, like the ones next door
do not have *** before marriage,
but the men do.
This seemed like a paradox, but I believe them to this day.
And when I hear this platonic conversation, muffled by the walls
it sounds like pigeons
cooing
flapping their wings in an alleyway
And having nowhere to go.
The countless, devout Hindu men
visiting my charming neighbors
remind me of adolescence
how I used religion as a cover for my shyness
I admired these men, in their pursuit
of something I was told to be obtainable
and then I remembered all the people
who were not devout
******* the religious girls I tried to flirt with
while I was in high school.
I laugh.
I wish there were a high minded reason I stopped believing in the zombie Christ,
but it was the fact that no one from my church was having *** with me, because
of God and all that, but they were having *** with other people.
**** christians, really, you can have them all.

It’s easier to imagine my neighbors as trapped birds
subtly fighting for scraps
without ****** desire
than to imagine them as people like me,
who know what they want but assume it’s out of reach.
The alternative, to know that they are having ***,
and I am not,
is too upsetting.

I want them to sound like cooing birds,
shy and timid and lost,
because that is how I feel.
But, if their voices, distorted by the walls,
sound like pigeons to me,
what must my silence sound like to them?
How do they want me to seem?

Lonely people, quiet people,
sad people, fending for scraps of trash.
That is not them, but it is me.

I realize it is easier to be a Hindu
than an atheist
in Nebraska,
and it doesn't matter what (or if)
you eat
when you're alone.

I walked to buy some Marlboro Reds
the kind I always used to smoke when I lived at home
with my parents
"Cowboy Killers"
"Coffin Nails"
My mom would relentlessly criticize my choices.
I tried to drown myself most nights,
but my parents broke the lock on my bathroom door
and stopped me, taking to a country hospital in-patient
facility.
I felt alone, and my shoes were stripped of laces.
But I drew a picture in an art therapy session
of my car driving over a bridge
like the one I'm crossing now,
that spans a creek I don't notice for the first time.
It was a clear day, in my picture, but I had been stripped
of my car keys, as well.

It is a clear day today, too, but it is still Nebraska
and the wind is blowing
and I still want to swerve into traffic, on foot.

My family liked my picture, and made allusions
to helping me cross this metaphorical bridge.
No one asked me about the way I imagined the bridge ending,
how I would fall over the edge and die.
But I successfully crossed the overpass, alone,
my shoes permanently tied.

When I got to the counter, the cashier made me aware
that the prices had gone up since 2006.
I had expected this, but they were already expensive
before
for my body, for my lungs.
I was thirty
pounds overweight back then
and ate mostly fast food, and cheese tortillas,
but the body I carry now seems heavier.

I wear earplugs to combat
the unrelenting flow of traffic
and people going to their houses, families.
I try to fabricate a reason to tell my parents
I won't be there
for Thanksgiving.
But I can't,
I just won't go.

I walk harder now.
The trouble I had breathing
as a fat schmuck
remains
as a skinny schmuck
and I go back inside
to ask for matches at the counter.

I just want to smell the sulfur strike
it reminds me of the chemicals my father used at work
and it is extinguished by the Fall wind, like I knew it would.
But still, I stood behind the gray gas station
the red trim.
I find this oddly exhilarating
this moment,
this fading scent,
from failed matches,
reminds me of when I got a friend to buy me cigarettes
in middle school
and I hid them in my room, until my parents went away.

I took them and the matches, to my parents' porch
and smoked one, imagining my neighbors saw me
imagining they cared.
The crinkle of the foil, the match strike--
these were the experiences I wanted.
And the nicotine.
But I did not want the coffin nails
for the dead cowboys.

I had a lighter with me, though.
I knew I'd have to light one.
I pull it from my pocket and inhale.

I had removed my ear plugs to ask for the matches
and all I hear is wind and vehicles.
I start to walk across the bridge a second time
I spit on the dying grass
that hangs in the dry chill
between the cracking sidewalk
in front of a gas station employee
getting off
her shift.
Her shadow races mine, and I am going to win.

I don't feel the nicotine yet, but I expect it to
kick in
as I listen
for a sign of life, not drowned out by thoughtless travel
for a moment,
I hear some young birds, sqwuaking under the overpass
spanning a creek
no one takes time to look
but I do.
All that collects there is trash.
There was a torn, Tar Heels hat on a rock, in the water, once.

I start to think again. It's working.
I'm open
Enlivened by the sound of hatchlings,

I hear young birds!
But I can not see
an anachronistic Spring
in my step, I am sure
for the first time in weeks.
I imagine having hope
and stride, watching my shadow crash
against the concrete ditch, relentlessly.

Suddenly, I realize,
what I thought were baby chicks
bound to freeze
were clanging coins
in my pocket which
I couldn't distinguish
until I'd passed into a parking lot, away from cars.

My momentum faltered.
The ******* my knee-support lost its velcro hold
and before I knew it
I was under the leaf-less trees
where red berries dangled
and no squirrel felt brave enough to ****** them.
I thought of reaching up and grabbing one,
but I knew no one else would think this seemed brave.

I smoked the cigarette until it burnt my finger,
then put the **** in the receptacle beneath my stairs
and went inside.
Enabled by the substance, inside my body just ten minutes,
to write again
19 times.

Hallelujah, I’ve found you
one I could have chosen.
Were your body pliant, capable
more slight, more saudrey
a subjectivity
easily disposed

I would be able to hold your breath, capture your voice
contemptuous, mocking and wholly undue
spending more than a half a day
being who you are would make me hate you--

But for a morning, maybe from eight to noon
I’d take on your face, look straight in you,
my mirror.
Shout out my name three times
with hope, I would appear,

without your bated breath
from jagged mirror, foggy-eyed by shower
I'd be able see me touch your body, glistening
parting your quivering lips for
myself inside, to feel your smile.

A phantasm to myself.

I want you, my significant other
my lover,
my ontological
displacement
of
milky
misfortunate
malaise.

Your substance is my fortuitous down-going.
My ship-sinking speculum.
Desire, mediated by a lack of being-there.

Klage.