Everyone wants to be heard, even me. Nobody wants to listen, even me. Everyone wants change, even me. Nobody wants to change, even me, but I will as needed to go on just to see how it all plays out though I already know. I am redundant except to pay, my audience gone, my knowledge old, dustbinned by new that recycles yet again, its drama riveting, the same suspense intact, pyramids ever built up as ever they crumble, linear thrusting of insect minds, of viral compulsion, detached blind in a field of light unseen. Watts happening? Refrigerate the drought to dry ice? Compress it to stone?, to diamonds? Sublimate it once again in viral aspirations?, pyramidal masturbation? Vanity dreaming its blackness mirrors light imagined endlessly returning. I watch. Symbolist Melville’s Moby-Dick turns once again ramming through our implacable fragility. Cold darkness rolls over the sinking wreck drowning all memories even God’s. I’ll go on. Failure is certain, Sam Barclay assures, but don’t quit. Just don’t say anything. It’s hopeless. Aye, O’Flahertie, the only worthwhile company is oneself. Keep on talking to yourself. Someone might overhear and tell you to shut up. Success! This castaway Ismael floats on coffined history knowing no Rachel is destined to sail its white-winged grieving heart’s succor by. But at least I’ve seen, and know. That is all.
Phillip appeared:
I see you’re a modern married man.
How can you tell?
Your clothes are wrinkled.
That could be true for a bachelor.
No, they pay for wash-and-fold by the bag.
They could be poor.
No, vanity is totality, appearance obligation,
they laundromat it themselves,
you machine wash at home and get brainwiped from drying.
I hang it on a line outside.
Yes, except when you forget because listening is required,
you wear the wrinkled badge of courage
of the modern feminist man.
Sometimes I rebel.
Harmlessly, when your socks mismatch.
What should I do?
As you are, why add more suffering?
I see: say nothing and drink alone unseen.
Its best, love disguised as peace.
The indeterminate illusion of eternity is finite
even when you see through it.
Enjoy, why not?
I want a dinner of sautéed mushrooms and Veuve Clicquot,
cioppino and Pouilly-Fuissé,
Renoir and Chateau Margaux,
Mozart at midnight.
Breakfast eggs fried over bacon at dawn’s riverbank sandbar
campfire by the hauled out canoes,
fresh coolness beckoning another paddle
down the shimmering burbling ribbon to light’s wide horizon,
somewhere beyond nightfall,
behind the thrumming of crickets,
prophesying.