A Partial History

Long after I stopped participating

Those images pursued me

I found myself turning from them

Even in the small light before dawn

To meet the face of my own body

Still taut and strong, almost too

Strong a house for so much shame

Not mine alone but also yours

And my brother’s, lots of people’s,

I know it was irrational, for whom I saw

Myself responsible and to whom

I wished to remain hospitable.

We had all been pursuing our own

Disintegration for so long by then

That by the time the other side

Began to raise a more coherent

Complaint against us we devolved

With such ease and swiftness it seemed

To alarm even our enemies. By then

Many of us had succumbed to quivering

Idiocy while others drew vitality from new

Careers as public scolds. Behind these

Middle-management professors were at pains

To display their faultless views lest they too

Find censure, infamy, unemployment and death

At the hands of an enraged public

Individuals in such pain and torment

And such confusion hardly anyone dared

Ask more of them than that they not shoot

And in fact many of us willed them to shoot

And some of us were the shooters

And shoot we did, and got us square

In the heart and in the face, which anyway

We had been preparing these long years

For bullets and explosions and whatever

Else. A vast unpaid army

Of self-destructors, false comrades, impotent

Brainiacs who wished to appear to be kind

Everything we did for our government

And the corporations that served it we did for free

In exchange for the privilege of watching one

Another break down. Sometimes we were the ones

Doing the breaking. We would comfort one another

Afterward, congratulating each other on the fortitude

It took to display such vulnerability. The demonstration

Of an infirmity followed by a self-justificatory recuperation

Of our own means and our own ends, in short, of ourselves

And our respect for ourselves—this amounted to the dominant

Rhetoric of the age, which some called sharing, which partook

Of modes of oratory and of polemic, of intimate

Journals and of statements from on high issued by public

Figures, whom at one time or another we all mistook ourselves for.

Anyway it wasn’t working. None of it was working.

Not our ostentation and not the uses we put our suffering

To, the guilt- and schadenfreude-based attention

We extracted from our friends and followers, and even the passing

Sensation of true sincerity, of actual truth, quickly emulsified

Into the great and the terrible metastasizing whole.

To the point it began to seem wisest to publish only

Within the confines of our own flesh, but our interiors

Had their biometrics too, and were functions not only

Of stardust, the universe as we now were prone to addressing

The godhead, but also of every mean and median of the selfsame

Vicious culture that drove us to retreat into the jail of our own bones

And the cramped confines of our swollen veins and ducts in the first place

Our skin was the same wall they talked about on the news

And our hearts were the bombs whose threat never withdrew

Images could drop from above like the pendulum in “The Pit

And the Pendulum” or killer drones to shatter the face of our lover

Into contemporaneous pasts, futures, celebrities, and other

Lovers all of whom our attention paid equally in confusion

And longing, and a fleeting sense like passing ghosts

Of a barely-remarked-upon catastrophe that was over

Both before and after it was too late. We were ancient

Creatures, built for love and war. Everything said so

And we could not face how abstract it was all becoming

Because it was also all the opposite of abstract, it was

Our flesh, our mother’s bloodied forehead

On the floor of Penn Station, and wherever we hid

Our face, amid a crowd of stars for example as Yeats

Once put it, and for stars insert celebrities

Or astrology here, your choice, and even when

We closed our eyes, all this was all we looked at

Every day all day. It was all we could see.

We were lost in a language of images.

It was growing difficult to speak. Yet talk

Was everywhere. Some of us still sought

To dominate one another intellectually

Others physically; still others psychically or some

Of all of the above, everything seeming to congeal

Into bad versions of sports by other means

And sports by that time was the only metaphor

Left that could acceptably be applied to anything.

The images gave us no rest yet failed over

And over despite the immensity

Of their realism to describe the world as we really

Knew it, and worse, as it knew us