a place that's scary, a place that's paved

Over steaming noodles i told the 12 year old poet what i mistakenly now call ‘the manifesto’. We do not write plays and poems and screenplays and scripts and short story feats for the same reasons. I also tried to explain this to the blond poet, the one who bubbles over with observations and images that bloom like developing photos.

There is something pre-existent in poetry.
There is something that existentially fails.
(maybe i heard that somewhere)

(light a cigarette)

let me try to explain what i want to mean
what i mean to mean
let me try to tell you what IT is.

a story shares with me. a play tells me something about myself. about the way i draw lines between motifs and metaphors and trains of thought. I am the reader. You are the writer. You know. Look how well you know. Look how well (i wanted to say good but i stopped myself. she would have been proud of me) look at how well you write. I know your characters I know why you want to tell me about them. About their idiosyncrasies, about what they ate for dinner, about the anchovies they spat out, about the way they tie their shoes, about the length of a breath, or the constellation of a smattering of freckles on their back. about the difficulty with which they see him again and feel their hearts beating against their small sunken make believe chests
buh buu
buh buu
buh buu
buh buu
bu…buh-buh-buuuuukhhjskka….

show me the way to your conclusion. that i might feel better about my ‘I’. that i might learn to understand why and when and how. that i might imagine myself a moral, a message, a lasting metaphor to fuse life, love, and all the things i try to justify. give birth into my arms. cover me with it. let me believe in love refound, in the symbolism of a pie, in the joy of birthday streamers. and i get one. and i do. like that! i get one. even if it is dialectical. even if it is confused. even if it is and is not. i know it is there. i feel it in every articulation of my body.

then the change, the flicker, the reason.

the poem offers you nothing. the poet gives you nothing. he writes because he must. he writes because he needs searches to come to terms with what? he does not know. always searching, yearning, aching for the perfect word, he never finds it. herein lies the birth of the anthology, the collected works, the life. none of his words ever come close to what he needs, what he seeks to find to eventually dissolve into peace. nothing satisfies him. each poem in its inadequacy burns him and he must try again, and again and again. and never will he find the word, the turn, or the taste of the vowel. he is stuck in the penultimate, the shirt with no collar. if he buttons it, he need only ever write One Poem, and in that wondrous collection of nouns and symbols, antithesis and prose, he would strike gold into the heart of truth, of the human experience, he would pierce us and we would fall. so clear and resonant would be those words (2, 4 ,6 , 8 ,10) that we could no longer live as we now understand it. we would all fall. we would all drop dead (except not dead) and remain there, perhaps half living, but never moving, paralyzed by the exactitude of the articulation of ourselves. with this in front of us, we could never complete another thing. the poet has written it all. it is the bible, it is the apocalypse, it is the big bang, it is birth and existence and finality, redemption and condemnation. he has killed the future, he has killed the past. and without them we cannot walk nor speak nor breath nor die nor live but rather stay and wait for his words to lose their accuracy. but they cannot by nature. thus, the perfect poem freezes us all, it penetrates us and describes us and re-appropriates us as part of its description, of its account. The poet too dies (but actually). peacefully, leaving behind what had provoked him to leave us with this legacy of temporal amputation. he has met his terms. in this glacial world, grammar itself disintegrates. the question mark dies, the colon dies, vocabulary breaks down. how many words in the English dictionary exist? they’ll ask. kill them all, except the (2, 4, 6, 8, 10) of The Poem. black holes, voids, comets, astronauts: pioneers of tomorrow all die. It is the moment of absolute present, of absolute certainty, of finality, of completeness, of understanding, and it kills in us any desire for art or creation or even life.

a poem could reshape the world
The Poem could reshape the world
and bring us to a place that’s scary
and bring us to a place that’s paved