I Smell Esther Williams

UNTITLED

Stalking from place mat to place mat in a livid dudgeon. A voice skating beneath the exposed heat units, the new architecture of relationships with its freed russet scaffolding and its exigent separations, halves across the continent, elastic couples with gummy attenuating arms reaching across the midwest, different weathers.

Last night was my best lie, integrity peeled like an adhesive price tag. Then there was a violently styled adjudication, a kind of slapstick justice. A trial by pies.

You’ll notice the foliage, the bus fumes, the heavy matronly arms reeling in the clothes-line of condoms. It’s so Secaucus-like. So unreal. So unpleasant. It’s impossible to prognosticate. The metastasis of feeling. The crossing of state lines. Apprehension finally.

It’ll be nice seeing you again. What’s passed. Tense is an inhalation that’s held and finally released into a moment that is itself a darkening ember. The tub is filled with passing ships, a horizon of canary towels. A mirage of hips, a series of cosmopolitan glyphs, a brush that needs brushing. Strawberries springing from the tile’s crevices where once only mouldy grout festered, and the ample closet space filled with its magazines and its ideas.

It’s three in the tire place across from the arena, lines of leaves divide the street, the schools are emptying out, you’re trying on boots and saying something and thinking of momentous things, the boots and boxes and stools and tissue paper, the offal of staunch consumerism, stores are closing early today, the proprietor plans on buying a can of fancy soup like oyster stew and a magnum of wine, you’re waiting for what, for who, the proprietor holds the door for you, you walk past the tire place and I knock against the glass, alerting squads of Cupids in the arena’s parapets, and the variety of twangs from their released bowstrings is like a sudden diapason of desire, and everything vanishes then but a feeling of regret about everything, the water cooler gurgles, lug wrenches and hubcaps enter the ark, closing time is upon the tired place. Outside is the world with its tremendous trap, that we ourselves, with unflagging industry, have baited. We catch ourselves thinking this way. Sitting nervously, thinking this way.