Sometimes I wonder if there is any line between poetry and prose, or prose and story. Where is this line? What is the difference? Is it some kind of structural difference? The problem with this is it becomes difficult to define where the structural lines are drawn. Is it some difference in the use of language? Anyone who has read Burroughs knows there is very little difference between his language in poem and prose. It all comes down to that old bald thought experiment. If we were to remove hairs from a man’s head, one by one, at what point would he be bald? It must be the context. This is a poem because it is presented as such.
The thing about it is I don’t really give a ****.
The thing about it is that I’m just looking for something that I do not know.
And I get a kick out of pretending
And sometime something something I’m a little bit high now folks
Because sometimes I need something too
/
all the time
And Some might say that you can get a lot higher without drugs than with them
But at this day and age that’s becoming less and less clear for most folks
Including myself
And that’s pure Thompson
May the great decadent castle topple down!
And I, like a noble captain,
Will sink with her
I stand with hunched broken back
On the backs of millions
Pondering lifelessly
I smell something. I can’t really know what. It’s horrible. I do not know if it is me or someone around me. A woman in front of me has a dark line around the back of her neck. As if that crease her skin collected some errant dirt and she never washed it off. I don’t know but it may be her. Or I may be a ******* because she is pretty fat. And that’s empirical. And I know it’s not her fault, but I may have some sick bias against fat women brought on by repeated social direction. I remember when I thought of myself as undesirable. I did not wash. And I didn’t shower yesterday. And really I don’t know if this line here on her neck is really dirt, but ******* that smell. It’s killing me, and even distracting me from the gripping narrative of the American sedition laws during WW1. Honestly it is probably me, but why is it so persistent? Wouldn’t I fall victim to scent saturation blindness, or whatever that affect is called. The point is you can’t normally smell your own stink, and none of us even notice our own stink. I think there is something in that somewhere. I can’t smell my own stink, and so I blame this poor girl.
