.

Girls don’t like it when you have a beer gut

And girls don’t like it when you look around at everyone in the room

All the time

When you’re sitting in the computer lab

Not appearing to do much of anything

But girls go down deep

And they’re fishing for something

Within themselves

That is within you too

So don’t fucking worry about it anyway.

 

Plus,

You might miss something

If you don’t look at around at all the people

All the time

In the computer lab

When you’re not apparently doing

Much of anything at all.

I was walking around the library again, with apparent directionlessness. It wasn’t so much that I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but rather that there was nothing on the premises I didn’t want to do. I even liked looking out the window and at the fish tank in the kids’ section.

Something brought me over to the return counter and I returned the book in the drop box. The lady working behind the counter observed that I got to the counter before I left the drop box.

“You’re here before you left over there,” she remarked to me.

“Yup,” I replied. “I guess so.”

“Do you always do that, be two places at once, corporeally, as a way of reflecting the frenetic mania with which you walk around these premises?” she asked.

“Yup,” I said. “Pretty much.”

“Do you have any other superpowers?” she asked.

“Not that I can think of off the top of my head,” I answered.

“Do you have any capabilities whatsoever?” she then asked.

“It’s possible.”

“Are you even capable,” she then persisted, in interrogative, “of THAT, in a true sense?”

“Of what?” I asked.

“You know,” she said, kind of making a weird gesture with that hat.

My constitution felt flagged. With great ardor, I muscled out a shrug, as if unsure. All the things I wanted to do around the library were morphing and shifting in and out of themselves, as if suspended in a state of translucent ephemerality, hence theoretically adding to their appeal, but you usually have to sift a bit, no matter where you are, and where you are.

When you’re sitting there in the bar

Sometimes

It’ll seem like a world of possibilities is open

And it is

 

It is the decompressor

For the multitudinous populace as

 

It was even for this ferociously beautiful

Young girl of about 24 or 25.

 

She hung out for a little bit…

She seemed single and great and

I think her drug guru came for a little bit

(Weird since weed is now legal in Michigan)

 

But then she hugged him and was single again,

Sitting there in these high boots,

A sweater and black jeans, with

Lavender choruses of red hair

Falling

 

All over her head and

I swear a

 

Million times I almost struck up

A conversation but

It

 

Seemed that my blood was composed of a

Different substance entirely, that’s

How nervous I was, and I

Really had nothing to say anyway, and

 

Now I get home and

Reconvene, having also glimpsed

 

The bartender and

I know

That I made the right decision

In sitting there like a spinning top,

Knees bouncing, smiling and laughing

At the fat man and

Worshipping the god of the taciturn.

It’s right in the middle of town

Sports on the TV and

No attractive women anywhere,

 

So I think,

If ever there were a time

For getting down to brass tacks,

This would be it.

 

I order something very plebian,

A pint of Coors Light,

Tip well and sit there watching the Houston Rockets,

Getting a five-second death glare from a black dude

For reasons still unknown to yours truly.

 

Time passes over and

I’m pretty much rooting for everyone,

With a couple questions in mind

(Let’s just say it’s the type of bar where the tender cares that you’re looking for a digital convertor)

But mostly not looking at anyone.

 

The music seems pretty good,

Like a punk/emo version of Jawbox

So I remark to the main tender,

“This is pretty good music.”

 

He agrees and says,

“It’s his,”

Motioning to an overweight cook

With a beard and a Bone Thugs hat on.

 

I nod at him and

All of a sudden I’m back in my hometown

In mind, body and spirit,

As I’m privy to this sort of mystical, expressionless

Stare, on the part of the cook,

With no “Thank you,”

No mention of who the band is and no

Frivolity at the tender’s remark that

“He’s eccentric.”

 

He’s just the eccentric dude in the Bone Thugs hat,

To this day, I did

Nothing to dethrone him but

Stand a little bit miffed at the security of his ego and quite frankly

Suspect of the level of satisfaction proviso in such things.

The Best Buy employee comes over when I’m already talking to the girl

About the new phone I can’t afford and

The new service I can’t afford –

 

The purpose of his encountering the girl is in order to hit on her.

 

He correctly answers her question I was asking and

I’m trying to show gratitude

But he hasn’t addressed me

And

 

I can FEEL his pride coming

Off of him in desperate waves,

His face subsumed in an artificial vestibule of

The delusions he developed last night while

In bed thinking about TruTV and

When I’m done I have nothing but at least I know.

 

The world is throwing robust cavities of fire

Up at your jaw for being who you are

And you will stand among them and continue to reflect

Whatever of the stars’ refraction you can scrape from your happenstances,

You a walking pillar of wet paint

In wrong decision powder

 

Nobody would see that girl

And not think she was the meaning of life —

.

How sophisticated and curved her face is

But how opaque,

How wild, unpredictable

And unknowable with those tinted eyes,

Those squat eyes that sit in the middle of a volcano

Asking only to peer out as she is

.

Emphatically moving to Montana,

Almost more moving to Montana than is possible,

With her husband,

My pleas to her to stay,

My minor rubbings against her body,

Deflecting off of her like daisies on a Beretta hood

 

Every mode of living,

Every happenstance of existence,

It would seem,

Would offer certain flaws,

Obviated by the fact that

Said existence doesn’t last forever

.

And in our current sector the long hours of labor

Work their poisons on our minds and dispositions

But we love the personal aspects of the pay check —

We love the licentious finality of ownership,

Like a replacement for cooperation, a death made of glory

 

I go to tend to my business at the bar

And the kid is out there, averting my eye contact,

Which oddly is sort of like living in the moment.

 

On his body is an Arizona State hoodie.

He’s relating a story of waking up without his tailgate

On his truck

To a friend

And laughing…

I figure he’s from Arizona and

Feel sorry for him that he’s stuck in the Midwest.

 

Talking to him later I find he’s from Warsaw, Indiana

But lining up work out in Utah…

I say I think Utah would be a good place to live

And that I bet the people are friendly

And he fully agrees, eyes narrowing and

Head shaking when I bring up the topic of

Ever going home and, nursing his third

Double vodka and Sprite, he is

Laughing all around the world.

 

The name of the church was “The City” and it seemed like it so I went in there one day when it was 75 degrees and sunny. Now, it might seem like a stupid thing to do, go inside and do something indoors on such a nice day. But outside, everywhere you went, was evidence of the socioeconomic disparity — everything owned, all the houses and buildings locked or lockable, all of the streets policed by a force that outlawed theft.

It was a little bit dark inside the church and it seemed like once my eyes adjusted from the extreme light, the first things I saw were whites of eyes on me. I started to nod and gain acceptance of the human camaraderie I was absorbing but then I saw them — another one, and another, and another, another set of eyes, with fixated gazes and molten smiles, all beholding me and awaiting my next move. And I thought, this is it. I know what’s happening here. I imagined the churchgoers all having labored through ceremony after ceremony, mass after mass, seeing the same individuals in the premises and worshipping that same white figure with long, blonde hair, every Sunday. I saw a man with shaking hands and a steepled smile, laughing and nodding at everything, kissing the elder Sister Delores on the cheek before enjoying her complimentary oatmeal cookies in the celebration afterwards. I saw routine mentions of these entities, “God,” and “Jesus.” I saw men holding hands with men holding hands with women holding hands with women, dancing and singing, tears welling up in their eyes as they beheld their shared struggle in this world that is as hard as it is vulnerable. And all of this had happened but life was in corporeal form, the true directives were of the flesh and the art of the face and now I was the center of attention, a newcomer who came in without a thought on my mind but the 75 degree day the lord had given us. To me, a white man, he was a lord — I’d had the chance to go to college, do crossword puzzles, receive blow jobs on strangers’ beds and learn the difference between Renaissance and Baroque paintings.

A stout woman took a step toward me and said, “Hi.”

I said “Hi” back, barely able to get the word out in a moribund whimper. My hands were shaking.

“I am Pamela, congregation director. It’s so nice of you to join us today. Are you a man of God?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.

“Oh, good,” she returned, her face warming up into a half frenzy and hands clasping together as if she were starting a fire. “Well then you’re one of us. Come join us in a prayer.”

I walked over and clasped one of her hands and one of this elder black gentleman who was dressed in a suit and a straw fedora. An organ player started in the corner and they began in on a song I must admit I didn’t recognize and so didn’t sing along to. But it didn’t matter that I wasn’t singing, that I didn’t know the words. What was galvanizing was that I was another body in there — I was corporeal, was living, breathing with a beating heart and I was going to die someday. I think we all envisioned that day. We’d all had enough of the hackneyed objectives and the fakeness, so now we thought we’d let fakeness rule our lives and drown our identities in mythology. I looked over at the suited man without a thought or agenda on my mind and I truly forgot myself and I truly forgot Pamela, who was still over on my left side and whom I will never really know.