In Defense of Nothing: Selected Poems, 1987–2011

A Textbook of Chivalry

72 A T E X T B O O K O F C H I VA L R Y Learning how to give in to hate, or how to take, in love, won’t recuperate joy, or avoiding joy might become a paradigm easing a pain unwanted to dissipate. Is the love a syringe or merely a placebo that becomes habit, full of promise? Keep the score card close, Cheat. The earth is still tonight, without a breeze to compensate for the mind’s emptiness. Imagination creates a mother letting you go free amidst the enemy because unwanted the cravings grow too, laughing when promise fulfills its tiny shape. Never is also part of the greater composition, looking away at the toy horizon. Who will die from happiness, knowing that their ungainly self was loved and the clumsy heart embraced? Dinner is never dinner this season, living in a bubble, the I sinks, I decline too in this construction even and if only even as the putative author of these lines, this subject. The subject matters, 73 wrote the good scribes in disbelief. Wrote the poor. These slums speak to everyone, don’t they, though no one is listening are they, chevalier? are they? The tribulation of water is heavy. Out here it is an ocean carries this raft towards something, something unlike rest, or knowledge of where the surf will crash. The story of the woman who left the man to drown is the same story that taught him to swim. When you learn to read water your fluency increases thirty percent the guidebook says. The surface is moving as the groundlessness that surrounds one is more immediate and lowly than historically determined crises of self. I am waiting for my man, my man has a number in it. Staged and inconsequential. This may be tendentious but it’s hysterical. Though love is never a joke, even if it feels like a joke: the clown tumbles to stand up and they are made brighter by their laughter, give them bread & circus. Oh book, you are a strange friend but a good one, definitively a path opening on all sides, as all eyes open, and don’t merely gape, but dilate and focus as with the apertures of the heart. Open, to receive, become, to see, and is it only for honesty in letters that the will founders before it immolates. Who cannot die, continuing to die, who has become dead, becoming dead, who will never be dying, 74 as the hard copy corroborates a twin and the emptiness creates a slave and the wood recorder releases a sweet note ascending to embrace these actual clouds in an actual landscape unwittingly there to coax joy out of air? Where we are is on a street whose bodies linger, sweat pouring unlike diamonds onto the hot pavement where cellophane wrappers say 79¢. Days accrue a hollow dispensation for time served. The job done. Though some folks sit to themselves speaking, to no one, neck bent, face twisted. Is thy bread more stale? Outside is not as far as you imagine. The voice of a child greeting night. As a wash of cruelty sets out unlike an imagined river abrading the tin shell of self-reflection, wanting to be seen. To be permitted to march against the current to the “higher ideal” of an unnatural self-reliance, which seemingly one despises or despises oneself, let go. To not worry about realism for once, to wonder without becoming dry. If time is more than movement of a clock’s face, who will witness the supporting parts before they disappear? To buy back the empty lot, to build a fascinating life so it takes another lifetime to read it, never to understand why one is here, or why now, or who or what they shall become, whence written down. ...