How come, if I don’t go If I keep on to when there is no possibility any longer for touch, and what is now is more so, walking unshielded everywhere, inspiration in fits as the body cannot sustain, the body, the sensorium, flagging, untaut, cannot be played on; if my rich inner store can only converse with itself, inner variants with necks bent heads bowed in a ring: that will not last on and on: I will be reminded of the loneliness. If I keep on to feed myself, to brood over the ailments of my flesh gown, resist all the time, remember, and cry, and want what it is too late for, it will be because I know that I know what many others do not (--many! while it only takes chance enmeshment with one. think of guillotine mobs, sanctioned hunters, the rich dorky heir talking about “getting pussy” in an interview for a documentary about misconceptions of the rich, to be hip and because he can; the Hutu warriors swinging their machetes, the dull efficient Eichmanns; the gossipy girls who attack a stray from the pack with a bloody maxi pad to the face, the gangs and their automatic guns; the vulgarians, like H. Stern, who made a mom and grown girl-child French-kiss for pervs and snorted as an 80s it girl decomposed before him on the air, whose stench-buns and fixed nose have garnered now a seat on primetime (a well-tended garden earns reward…), the family who wished death on the gay son next door have a very happy son in a distinguished and moneyed line of work (divested, as scion, but unaware- what he lacks, he was taught not to value); the bullies on the bus, the mamas who mumly shield their acid-throwing sons; the townsfolk and governing bodies who burned grouchy old women and called it witch-purging, the tribes who slashed throats and buried alive in votive ecstasy, the rapists on every street corner who keep it to rapacious gazes, tongue flicks, hisses; the desperate workers who sell all to eat, who skin alive screaming rabbits, fur to go for trinkets, a shawl for Beyoncé, who want to live and eat, after that, who want to keep their hands, after that; those who feed a wide-eyed baby to a long snake and in the video on youtube are heard to snigger over the shrieking… and enter here, and here… there are many, you see, to lump, to stand away from… some guffaw at the tenet that seems self-lifting, that insists civility is not the first order: but that wackiness is chilling, tell it to the West Memphis Three), because I count to those mouth-stopped and despairing by my being alone, by my want to obliterate each nightmare in tiny, single space, though my want sees short and cannot do, grows feeble, holds scant. My care is for keeping, I am almost what they would want, I am the goodness they more than settle for, against sense and luck. And too, if I keep on, it will be out of spite, to hug close, in ferocious embrace, all the cruel smiles I can, and kiss them dead.
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issue12 UFM