Up Down

Up down, up down, up down. Back and forth, curve, spin, unplug, lug to next room. Sometimes I feel like a vacuum is running in my head.

Today for the first time in sixty-seven years, a new planet was formed in our universe. Nobody could tell. It will be named SDSSp J984259.96-005064.1 whence discovered regardless of when ever that comes to pass, or who does so, on account of its interstellar coordinates.

They were selling books today on astrophysics, post world war one reconstruction of Europe, heroine abuse in Scotland, and the trials and tribulation of the rich and faithless (north easterly Americans) for 2$, 6$, 9$, and 4$ respectively. Large tomes, epic and brilliantly crafted they went unpurchased as crowds raced home to their beer, television, cheese, bravado and families.

I sit on a public toilet forcing out bran through my ass in abject uncomfort, alone, bored, confused, tired, unconfident, incompetent. ‘Mama Mia(!)’ rhymes exhaustively in the corridors of my conscience, it rains, darkens, drips, oozes, reaches a counter edge and spills, spreads, hardens, draws flies, catches cat hair, dust, lint, smells like stale egotism and ineffectual masturbation: a politician’s wet dream: easily drawn by bright lights and short vague all-concurring all-encompassing tag lines to watered down childhood memories of dogmatic ideals.

Forget eat, forget sleep, forget sex, remember some other tangible anything beyond just those three and love it and don’t apologize, second guess, or down grade metaphors for similes, pets for house plants, good friends for old acquaintances for forgotten faces for vague notions and distorted memories of chance encounters in embarrassing water holes replete with face-saving white lies. Dig in with forks in each hand and all the salt it will take to make it taste as best you like it no matter how quick and brutal the stopping of your ticker, however sooner that inevitable demise, will be.

Only for the ingenuity of clock face design – an invention we ignorantly cannot attribute to some long deceased troubled but humble genius – does the stopped clock still show the right time not once but twice daily; and on a crowded planet what else could one ask for from the depths of their anonymous grave as a fate so eternal as this. Strive not to feed the thump and bang and thump and bang and thump and bang in your chest, bogging yourself short-sightedly with lowly matters of the flesh, the here, the now, the everywhere, the inherent, the ignored,the forgotten, the irrelevant, the flat, the common; strive only to pre-empt your last cardiac implosion with a dream, a place, a thought, a shifting or unshifting coalescence of anything, hammered into permanence, which for its own sake will safely rest or rove upon this mantle to beat a tick or tock longer than your own lovely beautiful heart.

[Ed. Note: The trouble at times with the type of uncoalesced prosaic poetry tangentially attempted to be transcribed above is that it is uncontextualized mush. When great authors of great writing pump out the great mush –oft referred to with great affection as ‘hoopde-doodle’ – of a great, of a Steinbeck or a Woolf or of an Emilie Rose, waxing on as such, we follow along and string their ideas up on the narrative chain afore weaved, in say, Fitzgerald’s case, that crafted scaffolding includes West Egg, some still water reflecting a colourful light, a party, a drunk man in a mansion library reading “Ode to the Athenian Society”, a drunk damsel’s mechanistic man toiling in sweaty toil at a gas station service center – and we encapsulate all these data points into the mush and mush it together until mush it is no longer but instead a solid form, which reflects the light we might shine on it, and stands, of its own will, rising with a purpose, walking to its assigned chamber in our conscience, fitting the key it got from the concierge into the lock, and as we finish the final verse, taking up residence, ready to spring to its feet in stully simulacrity whenever the context demands it. That is literature.]

{PUBLISHER’S NOTE: I append this in response to what I believe is an incomplete submission on the part of my wayward and lost in digression, though essentialy correct in spirit, Editor, as a means of justifying the inclusion of this sketch in this volume. I advise the reader to use the sketch as a concluding note at the end of any book which pleases you but is found ‘light’ or ‘populous’ by more discerning eyes...something, let me say, “Not very literary”, if you will. Just read whatever that book may be, and enjoy it as if it were, absolutely and unquestionably ‘literary’ (again – if you will) and then read this sketch as if it were the last paragraph, inserted just after whatever that tawdry work’s author wrote last and just before “THE END”, and absorb in its message all the solace your intellect is capable of absorbing in anything. Clear?

So to recap –

1. read the trash lit book you like but don’t trust because it isn’t respected by ivory tower snobs or antisocial bibliophiliacs

2. then read this sketch (on that occasion feel free to bypass the Ed. Note. and PUBLISHER’S NOTE)

3. Be happy, feel smart, and go ahead and do whatever it is you do after reading a great book. Smile, I suppose.

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