Commentary on Self as Someone Else
Asterisk next to the distant character, footnoted:
I am sitting on a swivel chair, forehead creased,
debilitated by the favors that wreak havoc on breathing.
I am a middle-aged man pulling the V-neck from my hoary chest,
leaning on a papered table, vinegar doused,
tormented by the ferment in my gut, and clinging
because I am clipped to this chair and desk.
Pear
and cherry blossoms, last on my list, are so far
removed from the season that I crumple the proof with one
grasp of the flesh hanging over khaki waistline.
I
inherit ulcers passed from one patron of the work force
to another; I wear a navy blue blazer with a rip in the lining
and my high school’s crest over breast pocket.
My
stomach is a shot barrel and I still find the time
to mar the outward, the 50% polyester shirt that sells
itself as “stain proof” -- a retail human for wholesale
--
a joke, get it? -- rack of my side, a.k.a., crown roast
or rib chops, the juicy flavors of the once living.
You see, I
am an animal, the one out front, with my face
to a wall, bleating out one of those distressed sounds --
lamb to the slaughter, caught and quartered in corner.
Listen
to my liver and stomach and everything would be made
clearer: poisoned; what else could I be? especially when
what occurs is natural, reckless for a split second
collapse of view, prompted by a combustion of a dark kind.
Do I follow heavy lines that trace forest walls,
a mild hallucination or faint shock, gas induced?
Graphic tones, if possible, change, and leap in
description, stealing aural faults and visual stumbles –
I
fade
out.
Commands
are given, a divine logon:
mark, name, view, print, just get the job done.
I’d
rather be home smelling my fingers
and waiting for my life to return from work,
are you lost mister? but instead, I rub my swollen legs.
* * *
I am having a fit of seconds.
There isn’t
a lore of vice sheltered in the remains
of a room on a perfectly beautiful day.
I must find a receipt to be second in command --
more certified to be an addition of alternate
demi-deities that rule from smaller spaces.
From Adams
to Doby, seconds will have their day.
Look to the
Olympians -- the truth to being under
the surface of a plot lies in the bowels of timing.
Seconds are
seconds in time pronounced second
after its predecessor -- it is difficult to report
without a gossip-like inflection in a voice behind a mind.
*
* *
Pen the anger on the train and beat the moldy hell out
of beached memories, frustrated in the sand and the first
snowfall of this ridiculous, plain wander;
but this commentary on self means nothing.
* * *
The setting is underground:
travelers, revelers post-midnight,
stoic souls, sold for weight and wait, wanting
to go home to the marked magic of a new mutant.
But a violent
case comes aboard --
slack-jawed demon --
and he says, “I’m gonna break this homeless body,
crack it open -- tendons, spine, esophagus, throat, pulse
-- not a single song will pump through the mind.”
“What’s
the difference between prisons and cages?”
He
dances in spite and thinks poverty and wishes to suck
the cartilage out of book spines, dangling human spines.
He quits between
stations on the cross-town
and I return, dusty in dusk, wondering how to finish,
Ah, words, youth ripe.
*
* *
If not manufactured, pollution comes naturally like madness
and arthritis, or spent bones and tangled muscle.
Nothing infects
when it may already exist.
The gulls
are oil-soaked in six-pack plastic.
I am wet with
foreign rain and I am underground.
My remaining
connections are to flowers.
I
think about the spotty data: scientific news and April
showers converge in a mist of denim and faux fur.
Somebody
laughs in the back and I shoot for more than a
depression and dread the pastel line down my front.
I praise the
demon.
I will soon
take on a genderless life.
People catch
another number and I stand homeless,
deplete of shelter, food, and socks --
a vagrant of foul air.
I am weak
and I am down, and more than a part of me
wants to make this a "you" just to get away from me
and the cover of this weekly, “Pesticides on the Move.”
* * *
I’ve got this figured out; this I know:
I believe in the drunken spirit,
the cyst that is cupped in a stretched belly,
the terrible reflection of pinched glass,
and the flight of a frog to get some air;
all in a commercial plug, “forgive me.”
I swallow
the sewage, authorized
by the king and queen of New York City.
Offer me some donuts and lavish me with the dough.
I no longer find relief in leather.
I have no need to understand animal instincts.
“What is this chill?”
I die underground
in an ash of tumor --
“Screw the listeners in April ‘05,” --
because it grows and already makes
computer technology a mistake
and like I said, “this I know”
because I know the body rots
and still lives and takes the risks taken
that can no longer be found in a published text.
Where is Captain
America, or this Angel, this Storm?
I want to undress all the dolls and perform dances
but their clothing is in permanent plastic
and their limbs are bolted
and they lack the spring of a G.I. Joe.
* * *
1:58 PM, 1/19/01: We cannot find weight in a day
when every word is wasted
and someone lights a candle
to honor the death of a father.
I cannot push
an original thought --
the fucking lie is peeling a mask
and my dystrophy seems to translate into a failure to move.
Somewhere
in the biosphere Dido says,
“I fear death so much that I want
to die to conquer my fear” --
but she is only a cat.
Brian
P. Katz
© Brian
P. Katz 2006
Former
editor of the now defunct, _Big City Lit_, I'm now a father, farmer
and educator in Southern Vermont. This coming September I will
be dragging my little family across the Atlantic to do some research
in the UK. My most recent publication was a story in the last
issue of _Hayden's Ferry Review_. Aside from a debilitating bout
of self-doubt and pathogens, I am trying out some more experimental
(yet rooted) forms. HThe above is one: "Commentary on Self
as Someone Else."
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