Time is a Toy: The Selected Poems of Michael Benedikt

Accomplices

135 accomplices (1) At St. Polyana’s party, everybody is so bored that all they can find to talk aboutiswhetherornototherpeoplemightbeenjoyingthemselveselsewhere. Also, whether or not some other guest who happens to be there, and whom you have met for the very first time, is actually your long-lost or secret lover. So let it be your best bliss to tell them yes; and for the most anxious guests, let both of you describe your most intimate and-as-yet non-existent activities in vivid detail. (2) Then, at some later and larger party, after you have actually begunkeepingcompany,entertheroomatlongintervalsandthroughseparate doorways, and pretend that not only is your former love over, but that you have actually begun to positively hate each other. Start these envious people thinking that when you gave them the information they wanted and needed to hear in the first place, that maybe then you were holding something back from them, and maybe then you were lying. (3) And as a special treat for professional gossips, drive them into frenzies by standing in opposite corners of the room with veiled twinkles in your eyes, insisting in curiously inflected tonesof voicethatyoudon’treallyknoweachotherverywell,just“onlybarely.” (4) Walk together invisibly hand in hand; see to it that your passage in any direction is simply a generous extension of the bed—where, as everybody knows, nothing is ever accomplished with pleasure except for those things in whichyouareabsoluteaccomplices.(5)TheBed:aplacewhereyouwillfinally perform like two undercover agents. Get into bed with hats pulled down low over your eyes and dressed only in shiny shoulder-holsters. And when you get out of bed again, let your best behavior be that of two gunmen, aiming the truth of your feelings at this world and its curious inhabitants. ...