Wine (Part XVI)

A letter to no-one:

I long for the moment where I will be able to describe you in the Pablo Neruda terms that are circling in my head without shame, the moment when I will be able to bring your thighs and buttocks to the table, among other things. This isn't a product of the hours of convo that have preceeded this, but it might as well culminate in this. It's a series of tableaux that capture you and me, frozen to the spot, wedded in the horrifying sucking gravity of the actual. And I am tormented by the fact that I can imagine something more for the both of us. We have variously sold our positions along the way; we have given way to the way things are supposed to be done--and, really, we could not have done differently. We all have to live. We all have to pay for rent, groceries, a few electronics and wine. It had to be tbis way--or at least, the most statistically plausible way, which our coldly rational minds had to push for. But all thought is not cold thought (I would go so far as to say cold thought is recent development, whereas hot thought goes back to the very first lifeforms in the phylum chordata). And because we can imagine our developing faculties could not help but bridge impossible gaps, could not help but scream out in the night against the din of clattering machine, could not help but compose poetry even if there were scarcely more inspiration behind it htan most common varieties of business poetry. Too abstract. I feel I'm getting verbose as a way of avoiding the porblems. Maybe try some symbolism.

I walked the streets today. I scampered up and down the broad boulevard. I tripped on the sidewalk. I bounced a tennis ball against the plastic facades of Chinese restaurants, not out of disrespect, but out of contempt for their not being open at 1 a.m. I might have cried, but I probably sweated in my eye sockets. I might have laid myself down, but I walked on in uncomfortable heelless shoes. I might have made conversation with the hipster chicks coming back the other way admiring the thick frames of my glasses, but I chose to clean the frames of thimbprints instead.

I know this, and know it well. Tomorrow will be my last night of life this free, life lived up here where things and the things Pablo Neruda wrote about could not touch me. Tomorrow I will be acquiescing to button-down shirts, pay raises, nicer couches, thrown-away mandalas and houses with facades not so crumbling. I will be seeking out projects, simply to still the thoughts in my head and on this page. I will buy tires that grip in the wet--innumerable joys to the irony of this reference. Eventually the memory of Howl will fade away to a few drunken hobo gibberish quotes to use in a game of charades. I will laugh at it. I will dismiss juvenilia out of hand, and the great Hebraic bardic breath will be taken from me and cut up into short, punch, clever sentences that will manage to eke out the money to paint my moudlings and windows. And nobody will remember our cleverness, buried on the fairways of golf courses. Nobody will sings songs of people so slightly-above-average they were stricken by the hilarious absurdity of their yen to pursue creative work. Above all, nobody's ideas on relationships will be broken by our lack of success. Perhaps the greatest tragedy out of all this.

I don't know what to tell you. And looking back on it all, I never did.

Yours,

A. D.

Consider the Crux: "with mother finally ******, and the last fantastic book flung out of the tenement window, and the last door closed at 4 AM and the last telephone slammed at the wall in reply and the last furnished room emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture, a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger in the closet, and even that imaginary, nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination--"