CONSEQUENCES

ROYGBIV, where art thou bloomings?

Detach and morose, I see your B/W stick carvings, feel them in the shin, peg-legged, futilely stabbing into sand like Poppy in the dementia ward grabbing at his fork, like the pen slipping through Mom’s fingers. And I knew she’d be gone soon. Death, please leave me alone for a minute. I’ve lost my touch, and color is tactile. I can’t enjoy anything anymore except pantomimes at playtime. I can’t look you in the eyes aside from conversation; my step wavers, halts, errs to the side. I only want to talk to the woman I can’t. I need her to tell me it’s all going to be all right. It takes hindsight’s slow burn to show us the ashes of our fallen idols. The blood of the gods flows the same in us as for Thucydides, Pericles, Sappho. Trite loses the blunt edge in the personal.

The gloom truck swells and ballooned just as the average American weight extends second-to-second, guts distended under slavering slackjowled & stripely starred worship. But, really, no. Nothing of the sort. Just another pillow, an anasthetized stitch in our collective battle to become singularly forgetful, treating our impulse instinct to be excellent, to work in a particular sort of borderline divine-endeavoring manner as a machine we collectively discover, create, unveil. Amurrrica, no longer a slur. You went through the opine disposal. Rendered inert, spineless. Screamed patriotically now. Fist high. Solo cup atilt. Pabst falling quietly on the sidewalk, an accidental eulogy. Culture as wood chipper, reforming criticism into a temple. Inadvertent is all that is manageable. Trying is too much pressure. I need this moment just as I don’t want it. I accept the quick snap. Memory’s hulking defense looms over the line -- I’m a known one play wonder; there is no surprise. There probably never was. Reputation travels in whispers when we’re not there, and I’m often here, rarely there.

But we roofie down in early July, celebrating what except the simple ability to celebrate contentlessly. We may have to be shoe horned out of this burrowing, friendly malaise. We are converging on a singularity: the merger of man and entertainment, the regression of something back into nothing, the annihilation of the human project, the murder of the long-standing human narrative imagining, assuming ourselves to be a lack of being in order that we might become unbored, meaningful, happy, becoming?