Long after I stopped participating
I found myself turning from them
Even in the small light before dawn
To meet the face of my own body
Still taut and strong, almost too
Strong a house for so much shame
Not mine alone but also yours
And my brother’s, lots of people’s,
I know it was irrational, for whom I saw
Myself responsible and to whom
I wished to remain hospitable.
We had all been pursuing our own
Disintegration for so long by then
That by the time the other side
Began to raise a more coherent
Complaint against us we devolved
With such ease and swiftness it seemed
To alarm even our enemies. By then
Many of us had succumbed to quivering
Idiocy while others drew vitality from new
Careers as public scolds. Behind these
Middle-management professors were at pains
To display their faultless views lest they too
Find censure, infamy, unemployment and death
At the hands of an enraged public
Individuals in such pain and torment
And such confusion hardly anyone dared
Ask more of them than that they not shoot
And in fact many of us willed them to shoot
And some of us were the shooters
And shoot we did, and got us square
In the heart and in the face, which anyway
We had been preparing these long years
For bullets and explosions and whatever
Of self-destructors, false comrades, impotent
Brainiacs who wished to appear to be kind
Everything we did for our government
And the corporations that served it we did for free
In exchange for the privilege of watching one
Another break down. Sometimes we were the ones
Doing the breaking. We would comfort one another
Afterward, congratulating each other on the fortitude
It took to display such vulnerability. The demonstration
Of an infirmity followed by a self-justificatory recuperation
Of our own means and our own ends, in short, of ourselves
And our respect for ourselves—this amounted to the dominant
Rhetoric of the age, which some called sharing, which partook
Of modes of oratory and of polemic, of intimate
Journals and of statements from on high issued by public
Figures, whom at one time or another we all mistook ourselves for.
Anyway it wasn’t working. None of it was working.
Not our ostentation and not the uses we put our suffering
To, the guilt- and schadenfreude-based attention
We extracted from our friends and followers, and even the passing
Sensation of true sincerity, of actual truth, quickly emulsified
Into the great and the terrible metastasizing whole.
To the point it began to seem wisest to publish only
Within the confines of our own flesh, but our interiors
Had their biometrics too, and were functions not only
Of stardust, the universe as we now were prone to addressing
The godhead, but also of every mean and median of the selfsame
Vicious culture that drove us to retreat into the jail of our own bones
And the cramped confines of our swollen veins and ducts in the first place
Our skin was the same wall they talked about on the news
And our hearts were the bombs whose threat never withdrew
Images could drop from above like the pendulum in “The Pit
And the Pendulum” or killer drones to shatter the face of our lover
Into contemporaneous pasts, futures, celebrities, and other
Lovers all of whom our attention paid equally in confusion
And longing, and a fleeting sense like passing ghosts
Of a barely-remarked-upon catastrophe that was over
Both before and after it was too late. We were ancient
Creatures, built for love and war. Everything said so
And we could not face how abstract it was all becoming
Because it was also all the opposite of abstract, it was
Our flesh, our mother’s bloodied forehead
On the floor of Penn Station, and wherever we hid
Our face, amid a crowd of stars for example as Yeats
Once put it, and for stars insert celebrities
Or astrology here, your choice, and even when
We closed our eyes, all this was all we looked at
Every day all day. It was all we could see.
We were lost in a language of images.
It was growing difficult to speak. Yet talk
Was everywhere. Some of us still sought
To dominate one another intellectually
Others physically; still others psychically or some
Of all of the above, everything seeming to congeal
Into bad versions of sports by other means
And sports by that time was the only metaphor
Left that could acceptably be applied to anything.
The images gave us no rest yet failed over
And over despite the immensity
Of their realism to describe the world as we really
Knew it, and worse, as it knew us
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