Partial Inventory of Airborne Debris
Small wonder I recoil even from my own worn image looking back where I always find it looking like it’s trying to warn me something unspeakable is coming: Item. I stand before me in a haze where people can be made to want to make people stand precariously on boxes, arms wide open, strange hoods pulled down over human faces, little live wires hooked to various parts of the bodies ridden on like donkeys, smeared in feces, stacked one on top the other for a photo to prolong the swell an accomplishment like that engenders. Item. What kept us from discovering our selves’ worst wasn’t the lack of evidence so much as a failure of delivery, a kink overcome through the push in technology we’ve all had a hand in one way or the other. Item. Looks like anyone can be led as soon astray as to slaughter, disappearing down the long ill-lit institutional corridor misadventure unfolds one synapse at a time— and to presume immunity may be a symptom. Item. In time I begin to lose sensation, thoughts, I’m not complaining, dropped a sedative in tapwater and watched its demonstration on what we have in common with a sunset, gradual change and all the rest, difficult to paraphrase to be honest but I’m not complaining, it’s like being detained indefinitely but with three meals a day on a tropical island! Item. Looks like what’s done in my defense, or in its name, or in my interest or in the image of the same, no matter how distorted, fattened up for laughs or plain dead-on, connects to me by virtue of an invisible filament over which I can claim no know-how, no management , no muscle to speak of (anatomical or spiritual), what can I do, I can feel it tugging again, what have I done: rotisserie chicken, homestyle gravy, mac and cheese, a hot biscuit, sweet potato casserole— admit it, I’m on the fat side. Item. As when a putz collapses to the dance hall’s floor and the pianist stops his performing mid- waltz, always an angel in a large brown gown bends over the slowly reviving body and says Don’t stop Paul we need you now more than ever, whereupon Paul, without much thought, without the burden of thinking, sits back down, picks up where he left off and plays. Item. Or say a dream wolf found my room by scent, entered it, climbed upon my sleeping throat and camped there just to prove its point, and when I woke up I feared I’d never save myself or even under- stand what from without a little alteration, meaning I myself must somehow be the wolf, and all the rest must just be television. Item. Only in the ion- rich atmosphere around a waterfall too immense to be nostalgic did I feel what I now know to be “the feel of not to feel it.” Item. Actually I’m doing much better now, maybe a little, what’s the word, soporose, I guess, I think maybe I just needed to work it through and now in its wake I feel a little what was it again, a little soporose, that’s right, that captures it in a way no other word could ever even hope to, I suppose, I just feel soporose, so soporose tonight, uniquely soporose. You think I should be concerned?