A Farce
Haven’t we ever had a presentiment in the night, of expansion and contraction, wind stretching itself through leaves, an icicle fall, or the sound the air makes as it settles on the dust. And who’s to say that our life hasn’t led up to this barely noticed—barely created!—sound, the sound of a feeling.
In The Beginning
Park used to think that the development of one’s intellect mirrored his growing understanding of a city’s layout. That is, as the mind matured it gained a better sense of how faster to get where, which restaurants to frequent and the streets one ought to avoid after dark. The easy link between thought and action—as if the mind could be schematized and illuminated, filled in, like a map of the new world—this link and its fallacy wouldn’t dawn on him until much later. But at the time the image of a mind’s education mirroring its facility for navigating unfamiliar terrain seemed itself like a beacon, a waypoint to keep him on the right path of progress, like a grandly intelligent idea that only a grandly intelligent youth would harbor. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy if there ever were one, and its significance remained undiminished even as Park lost himself every time he tried his way around the city.
Like Reverb But More Heartbreaking
I one day left Albuquerque riding on a Greyhound bus. My expectations were unsatisfied. You’d think that it was an easy proposition—I’m riding on a cheap A to B vehicle, one out of many that happen to operate over a nation-wide network under a single corporate moniker, an aegis. But I had in mind a mythical animal. Not at all like the dogs inspiring the name; more like the associations around the dogs (which I hadn’t seen often but of which I knew the way people tend just to know things, like that New York City throbs with excitement while simultaneously it withers, decays). I thought it would be like a greyhound dog: fleet and lean. I thought riding the Greyhound would be capturing a little of the American Dream. Total freedom of movement. But it didn’t seem like the mythic vehicle of discovery that Maurice Kenny waxed poetic riding on. It wasn’t at all a vehicle of discovery. It was just a regular tour bus with the same patterned seats and narrow aisle with rubber piping that’re in all tour buses. The Albuquerque bus station foreshadowed this discovery, and I thought that it deserved its meager station, run down but not really seedy, it was small and sad.
Where We Compose A Poem In The Shower: Catastrophe
Apostrophe wouldn’t rhyme
With catastrophe if
Possession didn’t lead
To a ruinous end, and
Contraction weren’t a part
Wretchedly deserving.
