I’m spending my one holy life 12 floors up, amid the acronyms & neon. The first call of the morning comes at 9:05, from a woman who says she’ll kill herself if I don’t sort things out to her satisfaction, meaning: can I find a version of our lives in which we’re not having this conversation. If I had another life to live I’d roll over, cuff the alarm with a pillow, & reverie awhile longer of acreages vast, unpeopled. I’d elegise a seasonal creek that digresses over the alluvium of its untapped potential, watershed of a possessable real estate. Marginal country, I hear my father say. Life’s what goes on while you’re scrolling through the comments section. I tender a poem among friends: it’s workshopped & handed back, a l[o/i]velier thing. The mo[u]rning-after is an after-thought of bonfire smoke, a debonair blue jacket steeped in nostalgia. My advice? The kitchen sink is the Serengeti waterhole of the office. Don’t be a gazelle. My advice? Always match your cologne to the colour of the shirt you’re wearing, or its texture. If you’re considering a blue shirt, know where it lies on the spectrum between dawn cirrus & Jungian abyss. It’s a matter of intuitions, as all this is. A matter of daily addi[c]tions & [subtr]actions in equal me[as][u][r]e, an unintegrated redraft of [^your] one prec[oc]ious l[if]e. … Rows of Arial, 11 pt.: someone else’s calamity reduced to bullet-points. There’s not a serif to hang off or swing from, just euphemistic notations, indelible punctuations, a policy position on the dispersal of their worldly goods. Death is the poem I’m writing, bureaucratic, lean. What measure of us is in what we leave behind: our goods & chattels, our blood samples, our unaccounted-for dry cleaning? I’ve never slept for long enough to dream myself into my ideal day. I’ve never thought to splash myself about like a tin of ribald paint, & yet the days demand it, & yet it’s what I’m paid – & paying – for, by the hour. Light over the city is seasonal, affected: grey footpaths with coins of gum & rain. By the way, I’ve seen next week’s forecast: I emailed the Bureau to tell them I’m satisfied with their proposal. Go on, I wrote them, lock it in. A $4 coffee pays the rent on a streetside table for the hour it takes to write a line or two, to [define/divine] a deeper meaning. Who’s to say I’m not king of my own good morning!, a[n en]choiring mind, an elevator ride to the highest plateaus of Bus[y]ness Admin. That rarefied air. Cologne, & the waft of conversations: Friday night drinks with its pools & dessert islands. While you queued for your bus I was here like this, piecing this poem together, coupling it. Are you laying low, on the lowdown, or are you on the up & up?
This poem appeared in Volume II of Agony.