On the balcony,
It's pseudo-social housing,
Nothing fancy.
So I'm on the balcony,
And there's this beetle, this little beetle
And it's either high with me
Or dying with me
Just kinda flying into the ground and sorta sliding around on its head
On the still sunlit concrete.
It stops. On its back, legs flailing in the
nothingness. It rights itself.
It's sat still (well, not really sitting; it's a beetle.
but I imagine it would want to be sitting. I'm sitting).
There's a lightning bolt urge to crush its tiny carapace,
Just as quickly dashed away.
I take my last drag.
We watch the setting sun a while.
Spring is beginning to warm.
I leave the beetle to its business and go inside.
Escapes won't save me;
How terrified I am.
Last night there was a spider
Floating down from the bathroom ceiling
Tethered by an invisible silk thread
On a backdrop of powerful yellow made dingy by the incandescent light.
It was so graceful.
It looked like it was falling in slow motion.
I went to the kitchen and got a plastic cup, and came back to the spider,
Scooped it out of the air carefully, catching the thread,
Went to the living room and threw it out the balcony door,
onto the then dark concrete
(I didn't see if the beetle was still there, I didn't think to look,
I didn't care, but I assume not).
So today I was volunteering in a bookstore
(I remind myself of that old saying: charity is the pastime of those who don't care)
And as I came down the stairs
(upstairs is sorting, downstairs is selling)
There in front of me, evental,
my whole horizon, centred, unexpected:
A familiar form that had forcedly been forgotten
And an all too familiar sensation,
a chest-tightening-heart-drumming
terror
as if thunder thundered just behind my head,
Zeus piercing my heart,
His claim:
A woman who works in the coffee shop
Who a few months ago I asked out
(not the coffee shop, they don't pay their taxes)
Who has a boyfriend who would say he has her.
I think my disdain for chauvinism and possessional language
still arise from motivations chauvinistic and possessive;
I have not outgrown the oppressors in me.
La Rochefoucauld once put it: 'there are some people who would never have fallen in love
if they hadn't heard there was such a thing.'
I'm one of those people, or at least it was wanted.
We had only really spoken on that one occasion
(not me and La Rochefoucauld, he's dead; the barista)
and briefly on that one other occasion
other than those service-consumer paradigmatic motions and incantations
In the practico-inerte, or beings-in-themselves, alienated, i don't know.
But really, it hurts to be reminded.
She hadn't yet seen me.
I had absolutely no idea what to do for a few seconds.
I say hi and timidly waddle toward her
And at first she doesn't seem to notice, but then is like, hey.
The awkwardness is peppered with short exchanges of information
And smiles that remind my soul it's alive.
I'll skip my failures in making conversation:
Turns out she draws. An artist. The knife twisting.
She's not into politics though
As if that somehow changes things.
I buy a pile of books. We leave the shop.
We're walking the same way a while.
I'm dying here but above the clouds.
She says it's nice that it's warm when she comes out of work now.
I say something weird about spring.
The laugh says it all. Baudelaire said it all:
when you walk, you dance, when you speak, you sing.
(he's dead too)
I asked if there is a lost and found at the coffee shop: there is:
I intend to retrieve a gross lame letter I wrote her
that one time I broke the symbolic order,
to my shame and undisclosed superego humiliation
(an all too familiar sensation).
Am I in the age of guilt? Was I transubstantiatiated? And hell? Pardon the details too many and too few.
The short walk had filled me with such energy
to prevent me being sad when we parted.
Back on the balcony, in another sinking sunlight
The spider scurries out of sight,
And I can see a glimmering web built onto the vertical bars.
