On the Tail of the Tail of a Tailspin
1.
I’ve never thought that a year would get by so fast, as if the register had a wrong index, the clock had mistimed its hands, but the foamy waves formed by moments unparticular swept away wistful expectancies, leaving no exertions of trying to outstay a year that is quickly dying. Now at the tail of things it sure feels cruel to count (or lose count of) the misgivings, to till the changed bodies, and to water the wishes in the dry well, knowing so fully that the passions, pieties, or affections once hoped for would make excellent fumes for tomorrow’s disappointments. Like last night – I dreamt about Jezebel and a diamond ring louder than a rooster (on fingers the ring never fits), but upon waking up I was torn and teased by self-begotten baby blues. That, of course, did not bother me – I was kitsch and mendacious in that regard. Tomorrow I’ll dream about pagan angels and fruit bats resting on an applecart, them choking on a compromise, with my evil eye watching the thieving corporate buzzard-lawyer wrought his lazard-aria.
2.
Sunday roses roll back their red flame lips rotting in unnamed ditches, slime grows with gooey pangs mousey curses against best wishes and the pig family looks back in their piss at the butcher’s soft returning: eventually all human activities will be shed of their intents, becoming as indiscriminate as the steeples and church bells, but occasionally the bog of extraneousness is interloped by flashes of joy, which conjure up the lovely and peculiar power to choose, and constitute every bit of order that stays against confusion. I remembered the golden linings inside my white chore jacket, gifted by the harvest sun on Inauguration Day; the happy drives to familiar homes, the mushy beans in a steak salad, the cloyingly sweet whiskey sour; and I sure remembered the reflection of myself in eyes of others. These memories had a soft claw and a gluey tentacle, nosing out the intelligence in my bone when my ugly senses got mislaid, and binding this drippy boggy body to more life like a resurrection fern. Those are memories that I choose to carry, and I keep them like folded scarves, wearing them like wet gloves.
3.
But the bog of pandemic did instill in me a kind of alterity, which, borne as a keepsake, has disallowed some good life fantasies and accommodated some unkind realizations. The past two years in semi-isolation have seen me in the cast of a revenant never returning from a drive to the interior, of a coy boy eager for release yet fearful of consequences, and of a half-ego wavering between the sustenance of secular affection, and the magnetism of mystical self-actualization. Or not. A twenty-year-old me may look to the divided self-images with divining eyes, banking on a myth that one day the mind and the medium may unite, and a “we” would lastly emerge to symbolize a grace that is quick and stable. Not yet. I watched the happy dottings of each memory wane as the billow of my alienage outgrows my productivity, aging confusions into contortions that harden themselves into a constancy to an ideal object, manifesting in audible resignation along the lines of “I love what I cannot control.”
(This soon-to-be last year is also the year of floating signifiers: hope; debt; bipartisanship; accountability; climate change; "clearly unconstitutional;" "we must do better." They have all surrendered their meanings to the underlying ontology of this world that is amnesia, malfeasant profit-seeking, and violence. Each year since I elected to walk the thin black line of law has been punctuated by the same torsions and same results. How did I end up like this? For whom and for what shall I work? For your smile, or for this bottomless hole in my heart? Who, by years of artful evasion and artful mendacity, have I turned into? What, after years of raking in relational repressions, situational anxieties, and emotional inhibitions, have I missed out on?)
No more can the promise of silence, exile and cunning fool me. If the water of wrong profits eats me, so be it – I’d gladly be neutered by Ernst & Young or a breed more rapacious, and be watered down if that’s what they see fit. And yet - I labor but I also grieve about the slew of lost possibilities; I grieve that the sheep could not defy the shepherd, that the living could not unlove the life he’s shown, and therefore I remember.
