“Try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms
and like books that are written in”
the
bloodstreams of paramedics •• at the 7-11 as they look out of the windshield
toward a cityscape •• near the waterfront •• of an alligator in a tweed suit ••
writing “Dear Diary” poetry full of Congressional Hearing jargon &
rhetorical questions •• why isn’t palindrome
spelled the same way backwards •• trying to forget skeletons in the closet
•• (i.e. youthful frottage w/ movie
studio glossies of Shirley Temple or flirting w/ a zebra mascot during a
K-Mart grand-opening weekend) •• the recollections uncovered ••
unpredictably •• like they were found in a pocket of a topcoat •• hung on a
wooden hanger that belies the snug harbour •• of disjointed lines •• in a
hypothetical poem called “doubting Joseph Burgess” •• it’s like Postmodernism
in reverse •• a semicolon is just a broken bone •• that limns the
tension w/in the lines •• so here we are concealing concessions •• “i plead the
3rd, senator” •• (as there’s no escaping this box w/ no sides) ••
how can we abdicate our dreams •• when there’s no shelter w/in the double-agent
charisma •• of a penguin martini-drunk & reading a first-edition Roget’s in
the back of an ambulance •• at the boat ramp •• tumbling for an answer •• w/
the tragic melancholy of a sterile white stretcher •• reframed as an analytical
question •• “what evidence can you list that wd substantiate the claim that ‘a
sterile white stretcher is tragically melancholic?’ •• each of us must have, at
one point, looked past these latent emergencies •• Aucun chemin de fleurs ne conduit a la gloire •• as the
synonyms inside a one-time pad •• start to hum an updated jazz standard •• (b/c
the idle time between calls of EMTs are like Salvation Army brass bands)
beginning a different set of surreally existential enquiries
