Samuel Beckett, Murphy

*

Paranoid Delusions in the Age of Information

In my shivering legless bed

I hear them coming

Inflating me with dread

They, shouting,

Tear down windowshades

I hear them coming

Each drowning the other out

In diagonally-striped neckties

I hear them coming

Bass speakers, gas pumps

Rich men running in

Birthday suits: not a pound to spare

They’re coming.  I hear.

*

Poem Before Smoking Four More

I light the last one

of the night at (a.m.)

three: twenty-four(evermore)

*

Headline Exploitation

Looking around the room

for someone to talk to

(and with and hear from)—

Patchen?

War and 1940′s

dialogue a la

mode—

Joan?

Your sunny west

sends me yearning;

never mind the burn-out—

I can’t stand an

Accent

I can’t

Sleep as forty

Winks

Begin a dance

Again

In cans

Crammed with soft

Drinks—

Weekends

Just another

Word for delude—

And:

“Better luck next time,”

Bellows the ringing dinging song—

to convince me to brush twice

a day, ten St. Patty’s Days since

you dialed me on land-line to say

You’d had a nice time.  I was just

leaving for the show but I must

say: that two mile stroll to the el

was lighted, a lantern fallen down a well.

Jangling change in my pockets I

savored your few words, and why I’d

lit up like the barrels of a firing line.

“Jesus shitting hell motherfucking sonofabitch hell…”

“FUCK.  FUCK.  SHIT.  FUCK ME.  SHIT LIFE…”

Barreling down I-55 into Central Illinois.

Truck called Dillinger.  I drive.  Joey sits

Shotgun.  Coldest day of the early mid-winter.

We’d made our choice.  No heat.  Inhaling anti-

Freeze steam.  Cursing through clenched teeth.

Two pairs of socks each.  Four gloves.  Long johns.

Variously layered shuddering upper bodies.  On

A portable cassette player barely braying through

Are Versus God and Mass Romantic.  Gallows laughter.

Two hours from Chicago to Normal.  Somehow we didn’t

Break down.  Had we, we’d have murdered each other

On the road’s shoulder, beating hypothermia to the

Punches to one another’s hard, icy heads.  All for a

Bookcase and a desk.  Mike and Kristin sheltered us.

We’d make it back to the city, rearrange furniture.  Meet

Up with Frankie and sit in Billy Goat Tavern with coffee.

Warm as we read in the Sun-Times of an ungodly tsunami.

Mother’s Reaction to My Travel Plans

Gainesville!  It’s too bad your cousin is dead! 

“

-Lydia Davis, Varieties of Disturbance

A window ago

Home stole snow globes

Wino-style, dying on linoleum tile

Upturned lips in perturbed slips

Listless and

Undeserved

To the nines

and

I keep putting the song back together as it continues collapsing

Lately it’s been left on floors in dancehall mirrors drunk

On weekend leave after evacuating ships in cold whispers

Which reminds: let us find ways not to forget the treasure was never there.

Brass is too brash for this solemn, garish wake we’ve crashed.

One night Joe was at my door

On behalf of a national pizza chain

And as

Several deliverymen before him

He was struck somehow by the sense

I might be interested in listening

And asked about

The short novel I was reading

Displayed in its neglect on the coffee table

Itself

A bookcase face down in front of the couch

The room’s air dense with smoke

From cigarettes, and incandescent lights

And that season, in turn, he came into

My own workplace;

Several times I rang him up

For a thirty-six ounce cup of soda

Overweight; about my age

I could never remember

Any of those guys’ names

But recognized human in the other

And managed to get a handle on Joe

And the day or two after he’d

Delivered me pizza

I lent my friend that novel

I’d read it over weeks just as

The protaganist had lived it

And night drew on the walls in ink

Hard and dry and peppermint.

We sat on the rocks on the lake

Laughing in the moonless, absolute black.

-

No mistaking the tones of tuneful

Italian movies.  We didn’t talk much but

What did get said rang warm as walls

Under an overpass in a sacked August.

-

Almost in color and almost in time

Coasts on postcards almost in focus.

She sips a cold, coffee-based beverage through a chewed green straw.

Not doin’ anymore porn.  Shit fucked up the vocal cords.

Like a daquiri but with sugary syrups and cream.

Now I can’t even get a cup of water free.

We need one of those, whadda you call it, like The French Inquisition.

Off with her head and all, right.

Microbes in the chopped ice are less unaware of her than she is of them.

And this is significant or it isn’t.

I remember being downtown the day before and feeling very sinister energy.  I’m not saying it was a premonition; I sensed this sinister energy often back then, during the days I worked at Easter Seals, and it was coming from my own city and my fellow citizens, not from any terrorist threat.  Still, after the fact, reading through the oversized  journal I kept that year, I was at least amused at some of the things I’d written (since lost.)   The first quote, on the first page, said “This could all end in disaster.”  Norman Mailer said that, talking about the JFK assassination, and the mentality it instilled in Americans.  Full quote: “America never really quite recovered from the idea that ‘This could all end in disaster.’” 

Even in its original context it’s a fairly apt quote.  Better than apt, even.

Then there were the horrible, horrible poems.  I was indeed, in January of 2001, going through a bad time, psychologically, having anxiety attacks and such.  I repeatedly wrote about “a terror”, and “the terror.”  I was fixated on that word.  Terror was the most appropriate word for what I was feeling, and believe me, my word choice back then was often fucking silly. 

But anyway, the morning of, we were outside the building, waiting for the kids to get off the buses, when rumors began to buzz.  Some planes hit the World Trade Center.  The Pentagon.  The White House.  Etc.  I honestly didn’t know what the World Trade Center was; couldn’t picture it.  Now, of course, watching an old (ha) movie or TV show, I never miss it.  How could I?

I laughed nervously hearing the rumors.

That was a bit after 8 AM.  I didn’t see the footage until I got home at 6 PM.  Between then was conjecture, radio reports, pure and absolute shock and an inability to comprehend. 

I worked at 35th and State and lived near Touhy and Harlem.  On my way home, I got off the Green Line to get a cup of coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts before transferring to the Blue.  DD was the only place open that I could see.  It was like a ghost town, State and Lake, 5 PM on a Tuesday. 

I called Petrov, one of my best friends.  He was down at our apartment in Normal, IL, where I was scheduled to move a week hence. 

“Hey,” I said.  “How’s it…going?”

“Okay, Jones.  How are you?”

“Well, I’m downtown right now…”

I looked out the Dunkin’ Donuts window from the payphone.  City workers were loading newspaper dispensers onto a truck.

“…It’s dead.”

There’s no better way to divide people of all classes than down party lines.

The Shah drove people into mosques during his reign; the only remaining places to congregate and conversate.  Then came the Islamic revolution of 1979. 

America is driving me into a living room full of library books; all the smoke giving the room a cloudy sky.  Retreating back into imagination, exiled since 1979.

I don’t count the pages any more.