.

 

The frat row in Terre Haute, Indiana

Is interspersed with inexplicable closeness

With the grid-bound innards of the municipality

In a way that makes no sense —

 

I sit here in my apartment having all night taken in

Sounds of dogs, trains, curmudgeons and little kids

And now, at 1:28 A.M.,

There is drunken yelling coming from a block over and

Although we live two miles from the nearest decent grocery store,

There is still all this life,

Which I marvel at, in my own way.

 

Sometimes on my walk home

Down 7th St. which is mostly strewn with endless residencies,

I’ll see some buxom college ages smiling at me

Just hoping everything is ok and

Reality seems ephemeral, the subservient

To these strange, inexplicable moments of seeing these

Explosively beautiful college girls who are 15 years younger than me and

As old as I am,

I still don’t really feel like I know everything,

Probably because all we ever seem to crave are

Change and madness.

How egotistical we are
To take that master piece of music
And claim it as our own.
.
How pompous we are
To assert ourselves
As so inextricably linked
To its grandiosity and perfection
As to render a false connection thereto
For all of time.
.
And how noxious we are
Not to slow down and look around
And notice the music of people’s laughs,
People’s smiles,
Not to notice the music of police sirens,
Motorcycles and freight trains in the night
As they all create an orchestra of their own
Under chameleonic skies.

The artist has “love” in his daily membranes
And that is an offset —
It is something powerful and
Not transmissible within conventional realms,
Not the product of logic or mandatory deed,
But rather permanent

We now are so many that
The furies and the spirits are gone
And that dive into the cask
Which you wanted to be truth
Was just a thorax of hate and
Bilious killers,
But somehow life will kiss you up your sides
With new sets of smiling eyes
Because that is what it is —
An incessant orchestra of antennae
Always betting with each other on what just happened

Walking back in to do dishes
(I think I’ve washed about 50,000 dishes this year)
I encounter a guy who looks a little like a Mexican Bukowski
(I’ve been getting a lot of these lately… one was riding a bike with one hand with a 44 oz. soda and unbuttoned short sleeve flannel)
On the sidewalk
Ready to face the rest of his afternoon as he bids goodbye to some client-type person.
.
He engages in conversation with me and I’d been having
More or less a sort of nervous breakdown type thing all afternoon
In my air conditioned cave between jobs
So I stop and chat even though it’s going to make me late…
I need a way out of what I’m doing…
I say I’m from South Bend so I’m not used to this heat…
He says he was just up in South Bend…
And here it comes…
The Studebaker museum
(What kind of pompous egomaniacs would make a whole museum about those piece of sh** cars)
And Tippecanoe Place, this non-profitable restaurant with a kitchen located in the stuffy, windowless basement…
He is doing these things and discussing “South Bend” as if it’s something constructed
When all the while I grew up there and I know that its movement is lateral —
The vast majority of commerce takes place in the adjacent suburban town of Mishawaka
And even life itself,
As it passes upon any day,
Moves laterally —
With people stopping stone still and watching you like a hawk
People needing to be able to make fun of you,
People craving superiority over like a needle in the vein.
.
This “South Bend” that this guy discusses is a myth and
I placed in the upper echelon on the SAT’s and the
80th percentile on the English GRE’s but
I think I’ll go back into doing dishes because
That’s real, if only to say that in my time in this life,
Even though it was crappy, I at least did something real
And didn’t have to tell lies.
.
About three and a half hours into my shift I’m drinking some water
And this little black kid (I call him a kid but he’s actually like 22… he’s just really short and skinny like a lot of black line cooks are in Terre Haute)
Strikes up a conversation with me
And I happen to be really hungover, hot and tired so
My conversation is complete garbage
But I persist anyway,
Oh,
I work tomorrow,
Oh,
I so didn’t wanna come in today,
Oh,
My last day off was Saturday and I didn’t do anything,
Oh,
My last day off was 10 days ago and I didn’t do anything,
And deep within this thing it hits me:
It’s real.
This impossible situation we face every day
Is life,
Is what’s real,
Is what is so undeniable,
The ability to clean out your mind seamlessly to a person around you
And fully grasp the condition for what it is
Will always be a floating form.

I wrote a book and
This is what it’s called.
.
Unfortunately,
There are no pages in it.
.
I didn’t write any words.
It’s just two covers, bound,
With bright, red, unmistakeable
Rubber skins, hugging the floor and
Protruding out to arc down and poke
The opposite cover, somewhat like an
Armadillo’s snout, respectively.

In the
Bar
Is a girl working
Whose face reminds me of
The Allman Brothers song
“Little Martha.”
.
One time I caught her eyes
And I think we spoke a little and
She was friendly like
All the girls are here in Indiana,
Especially the ones who are bored bartending.
.
The breasts are puzzlingly voluminous and pronounced
On her, as is
The general trend of thin girls in the 21st century.
.
I always just talk to her clumsily,
Sometimes getting her irritability,
But the last time in,
Not expecting to see her,
I got a high-pitched “what’s up,”
Made some small chat and
This dude 10 feet to the left of me
Wearing an expensive, ornate red shirt,
Tommy Hilfiger underwear and
New-looking Air Jordan shoes
Planted on me this fuzzy gaze as if he were
An animal stuck inside a car that was
Running or not running,
Or had the chassis running and motor dormant,
I asked “Can I help you with something”
Only to get flak from his friends who
Appeared conscious and all in all
It was another crazy night at the center of everything.

We are the only class that was in high school during both
Columbine and 9/11.
We tend to talk little.
We wiggle a finger around,
Meditate and look at the wall,
Constructed of fragile fibers,
Blood flowing within vessels to
Serenade crazy, gushing thoughts that
Illuminate the empty world.
Between the good of us is an understanding:
I will only see you if you want me to.

Around the corner the woman comes like a bomb
And she is unpredictable,
With inexplicably beautiful eyes,
Eyes which give to contact,
Eyes which glow with pain and
Volcanic fury,
Volcanic understanding,
.
She articulates new words and makes cookies
And
You swear you were ok but
You want to fu** her like a thunderstorm,
You want the full sin of the gripping flesh while all the while
You can’t “make out” like you used to
‘Cause the love is gone —
.
There is no “girlfriend”
There is no laughing and
She
Just like you
Is floating around in fear,
Practicing facial expressions against blank walls and
Just feeling more, maybe,
Like an ideal of a boy playing a Rubik’s Cube at the
Bottom of a well.