Cosmopoetica

It’s not just that the invisible man will never see what he looks like in sunglasses and that he knows everything better than the back of his own hand and that his invisible skin can sting with the indignity of sunburn.

It’s that every room he is in remains empty. It’s that closing his eyes is nothing of the sort and all of his seeing is a kind of peeping. The rules of invisibility are unclear and maddening. Why do his clothes disappear but not the walls he leans against to listen to slow breathing of each apartment’s occupants? Why invisible glasses but not the random car he sits in singing softly along with the radio? What if he wore a suit of armor?

It’s that his origins are as invisible as he is, as is his eventual end. Did he come from nothing and will he return there? Did he have invisible parents? A translucent dog whose barking took the shape of memory?

Once the invisible man excitedly stalked a set of wet footprints on the sidewalk until they disappeared, imagining they belonged to one of his kind, also wandering, but they came to nothing. Then he fell in love with a girl who roller-bladed to the park every day and sat at the table right by the bushes he dozed within, her crazy ringlet curls stuffed partially, awkwardly in her helmet. He read her journal silently over her shoulder and whispered in her ear exactly what she wished to hear until she started shaking her head, saying "no. no. no." and committed herself to a locked ward and regimented medications that even the invisible man couldn’t sneak through.

When the invisible man dances even he can’t be sure that his feet touch the ground. When he runs he is taken for the wind. When he stomps in a puddle everyone around instinctively looks up at the sky. In the water he is a hollow splash.

The invisible man is alone and loneliness, by its nature, walks unseen suffering no light from sun or star.

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Poem by poem in the order given

Ordered by the name of the journal in which the poems first appeared… and then the rest

In alphabetical order, by title

Poems that begin on even numbered pages first

Grouped by title and presumed theme: animal, mineral, vegetable; fire, water, earth, air; people, place, thing, event

Randomly, marking your progress carefully with small dots

From shortest poem to longest

From shortest title to longest

Skipping all but the well known poems so you can hold your own in coffee shop conversation

Slowly, savoring the weight of every word in your mouth and their taste on your tongue

Completely ignoring the line breaks

In order the poems would appear if you took the first letter of each interesting word in each poem and used them to spell a favorite word

Chronologically by date of composition, publication, or the author’s presumed satisfaction

Prose poems then formal poems then free verse… then any that are written as one but should have been another

Poem by poem, one each night, out loud, a prayer

Poem by poem each morning, an absolution

In a stolen hour when you should be working

In one sitting regardless of size like any bowl of ice cream

Tearing each page out as you finish it and optionally playing trash can basketball

With your tongue, licking line by line

In a whisper into the ear of someone you love, or hope to love, or once did

Through a PA system, shaking the walls and vibrating the windows behind which an aging dictator sits with his hands over his ears, his lucky string of the dried ears of enemies forgotten

While simultaneously performing a translation into another tongue, real or imagined

Skimming, hoping to catch someone’s attention… anyone

On public transportation, tucked inside a People magazine, the National Inquirer, or the Wall Street Journal

As if your life depended on it

As if it were your last

While studiously ignoring the thermometer edging towards 457 degrees Fahrenheit

Closely, very closely, watching for anagrams, ciphers, or microdots

In disbelief

While pretending the author is dead

Enviously, with a clenched fist

Greedily, mouthing the words

Haphazardly, but without malice

With a pencil, a highlighter, or a vintage fountain pen filled with azure blue ink

With a thick chisel-tipped marker labelled ‘The Redactor’

In the illumination of a flashlight under the covers, a lantern in a tent, or the last slanted sunlight streaming through the barred window

(and each way in reverse)

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Another Sunday, another disconnected day contemplating what is and what should be. The shambles that is my life and whether there is any hope in it. Thoughts of killing myself (let’s be honest, though I admit I am drawn to the gentle euphemisms and slippery, soft phrases “move on” and “end it” and “take my own life” as if it were something that could be taken and if taken could be held) are followed instantly– even faster than instantly since they interrupt the first thoughts– with hopeful ideas. Tactics to avoid losing it all when the truth of what I am finally becomes clear to everyone around me. The pragmatism of assuming that the past really is past and I can start by doing just a few things better and it will work out. The momentarily calming consideration that there is no self and at any rate my existence is but a spark spawned from a lightning strike deep in an unexplored wood, a tiny fire that never caught flame.

Another day of checklists and checkmarks, to-dos and to-be-dones. Bullet lists of minimal existence, spars of a half-done, undone ship.

The catalog of interventions taking notice of every misstep, every moment of wrong mind and wrong thought, would be infinite. A classic regressive loop like the diarist intent on logging every moment of every day including the act of logging the tiny moments itself.

And to what end? I’m drunk with the random broken firings of synaptic chaos, collections and connections. I can follow the line for a moment, remember the flash of insight that lead me to break the neck of the bottle and drink in the first place, but in a moment I’m back in the blackout where everything is as electrified and bright now as it will be invisible later, leaving only after images that don’t quite cohere.

Even as I write these words I wonder why I do. Who will read them? Not me; not likely. Until someday they burn, slowly and with the feeble flame of stacked paper. Probably not even on purpose, not even as a gesture of defiance or willful amnesia, but one more forgotten thing weighing down one more old box that smolders for a day or a week, buried in the consumer discards, the microwave crisping sleeves and sodden diapers, the empty cans and carefully torn junk mail.

It will be lost as surely as the dinosaurs that lumbered against each other. Lost as surely as proto-islands and protozoa. Lost as surely as the note I folded carefully and passed, trembling, to Tracy, who sat in front of me in 8th grade, begging her to tell me if she felt like I did because time seemed to stop when she wasn’t around and (I was proud of this next bit) every sound of the stars was contained in her name and they were one to me when I spoke it. Tracy. Stars.

As lost as the note she held unopened in her perfect palm until it disappeared like the conjurer’s proffered coin, here but not here, and I with it.

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Stars, inter-stellar light, quantum entanglement, the sound leaves make in the dark as night sets in, the small hollow at the base of a woman’s neck, hip bones, ruins of Roman coliseums, emotion expressed in the eyes, emerald flaws, solipsism, recurrence, multiple infinities, infinity plus one, ruined and abandoned places I once inhabited, the gathering of dew, the perfect arch of an ecstatic back, monkeys, the rare knowledge that something is happening for the last time when it is happening, stone, the quiet moments after, missing teeth, fine blond hair on tan thighs, the sound keyboards make in the movies, decaying flowers, walking in the pitch-black dark, my biological father’s face, epitaphs, dark matter, the technological singularity, Rothko canvases in the right light, caves, the sound of the sea in shells, forgotten ideas, the flow of auroral light, moonlight reflected on the wind-blown sea.

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Situation

A man is sealed inside a windowless elevator and either suspended above the ground by a crane or towed through deep space at a constant acceleration of approximately 32 feet per second per second. There is no way for the man inside to know the difference. If he were to drop a penny from his pocket it would fall exactly as it would fall if he were to drop the same penny while standing on the earth. He might actually be on the ground. He will just have to take our word for it.

Clarification

The windowless elevator is not unlike a diving bell (more…)

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I seek change and I fear it. I feel alone and worry about losing friends. I’m tired of the entanglements of so many things while knowing I’ve come this far and gained almost nothing along the way. I know my own insufficiencies intimately. There’s a kind of comfort in them as there is in the rattle of useless cans in a grocery bag, as there is in the book I keep filled with the fading photos of smiling people whose faces and happy laughter I’ve long since forgotten.

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