The redbuds bloom and my love is having pizza with a friend, Desmond
is home sick, and I am supposed to be editing a video but can’t bring
myself to open the file. Melissa texts to say she’s lying in the sun,
“behind the little gazebo,” she says. It is spring. Anything that can be
planted is planted. Axios says “consumers are in a foul, foul mood,”
and NPR says “Women are getting most of the new jobs. What is going
on with men?” Men don’t want to work in healthcare. I check the accrued
interest on my student loans, knowing I’ll never pay them back, knowing
money is real but also largely a collective act of imagination. I consider
a nap, read a little Maurice Blanchot, read some of E’s poems in translation,
do everything but work. I have not had Ritalin for two days. The hello kitty sticker
on my phone peels off. Elation at the thought of travelling alone. Small flirtations
and my pile of unpaired socks. Does Blanchot say anything about how close
or far away the disaster feels. There is no distance in the index, but: “Expression
of infinitude, expression of nothing: do these go together? Yes, but without
Agreement.” Consumers are morose and depressed, but I have the impression
that it will not impact our spending very much. The Uber driver tells me she was
over on Foxhall road the other day and gas was above six dollars a gallon.
It’s almost time to fill up. My boss says her power is out and I say, ‘oh no!
Good luck,” then wonder if that was a kind of faux pas. I should have said
“Hope it comes back on soon,” or something like that. The little talons of
baby bluebirds. Desmond gifts several brainrots to other Roblex players.
Hilton asks me to imagine a summer vacation where I relax in bed with a
lover and order room service. Desmond drank gallons of Gatorade yesterday
and I swear I heard a Charlie XCX song where she talks about being a demon
slayer but that was obviously wishful thinking. It’s the end of the world
in the film Sirāt, and one of the characters says that “It’s been the end of
the world for a long time,” but she says it in French or Spanish. Furled
sails bound securely to the spar. I have to look up what a spar is, and it seems
like a spar is just a generic word for mast, but a spar can be a boom, gaff,
yard or bowsprit, too. It’s been a while since I’ve read Moby Dick. Broken
spars. It’s the kind of material, fragmented vocabulary that fits the novels’
concern with bodies, objects and disassembly. A splintered spar is what
remains when systems fail. I’m at my desk in my bedroom, looking out
the window at my overwintered swiss chard. That’s the kind of life I’m
living. The whole family needs to get passport photos this weekend.
Booking the travel will be easy, but I’m afraid of the paperwork. I haven’t been
without a passport since I was a baby and I don’t intend for it to continue.
The neighbour blasts Go-Go music. Blanchot says that “We do not repel
the earth, to which, in any event, we belong; but we do not make of it a refuge…”
The designs for Trump’s stupid, fucking 250-foot arch here in D.C. have been
released, and it looks like a cheesy Arc De Triomphe, which kind of fits with
the architecture and layout of this city, but I hate it, of course. This is a no-win
situation. I want to call it quits. To dismiss these gestures as gestures, but it’s
all I can think about. I’m looking for a resolution, and there is none, but the poem
has to end. I pay my parking tickets. The cool breeze and ambient traffic noise
off Eastern Avenue come through my window. I want to undergo some kind of
radical transformation, but I’m fighting just to stay awake, just to write these words.
