How to write when completely distracted, burned out, the figure of time
as a perpetually lovestruck asshole who is largely unwilling to get shit
done yet carries on anyway, like the good time they are, begrimed with
experience and wonder that just won’t quit. I get it, you’re not wondering
how to approach the situation so much as wishing the situation didn’t exist.
I’m glad for existence, though, enough to feel like regret is still worth it,
still worth the weird energy that sparks between humans. I missed you,
friend, and panicked a little when I saw you again, something unearthed
from whichever part of my body stores lust and ambiguity, the part of
my soul that hovers just above myself and wonders what the hell I’m doing.
I missed you, too, city, in your springtime lushnesses and hive-causing pollen
wafting from the branches above, a dove cooing on my windowsill. I pitch
woo easily, especially while sneezing in spring, tits up, shoulders back as I
walk into the gallery, office, studio, bar to meet my friends, my beloveds,
all in my feelings, the day stacked with time (that asshole), as I stand by
hoping you’ll message me something witty instead of something polite
or something about what groceries we need, what becomes of us when we
work and parent only. But my desires are all mixed up. Exactly mixed up
in the right way. Every month I wonder what this month is. So what is April?
Just when we think we know the time it changes. They change, and whatever
wooing strategy long since messed up for good by what I’ve been told is an
intimidating enthusiasm. That you should be so lucky to have this poet’s
attention, and this poem’s attention, too. All the better to woo you with, syntax
undone and reformulated into something more interesting than our texts, eros is
waiting and they are both impatient but in it for the long game. When I’m 60,
70, 80, 90–you just wait, eros. I mean don’t wait. But also, wait! I do not miss
the particular way I was lost in my youth, but I do miss the way I could conduct
a campaign of soft attention or enter into a minor flirtation. I promise you,
I am a sincere man, woman, whatever. There are no palm trees where I come
from, and I am from no where, or else from an obscure province, one you’ve
been to on summer vacation if you’re kind of artsy. I become undone, thinking
of you. No seriously. The one you choose is not always the one you love, but I
don’t have that problem. I always choose the one I love for my sweet attention
and major flirtations and unexpected trajectories of encounter, even though
encounters are rarely unexpected and usually overdetermined. I compose with
divided intention. The grasses on our lawn grow at uneven rates and I love
unevenly and widely. Don’t keep this between us. Instead, let it be in the world.
Let it be with the ghosts of all our past loves and loves, appropriate and inappropriate,
and I won’t tell you which is which. Swirled terrible coffee and and tilted responses
to come ons. I’m doing my face with misaligned theory–lots of lust and pink,
I put my love in the poem, pitch woo to the poem, make my vows to the poem.
Where’s the bar and where are you? Where’s the conference and where are you?
What sonic aesthetics do you need for me to prove my devotion? Who is time
in your mythology? How do you align with the universe? Listen to me, listen to me.
