Heart In a Box

I don't know.


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I watched "Mindwalk" tonight. Yesterday I watched "Stranger Than Fiction" with my wife at the Downtown Cinema Center.


I am a huge sucker for the well-intentioned disassembly of the world. Making sense of it. Doing some kind of meditative, contemplative analysis of our condition.


Like a three year old, I still believe that sense can be made of our predicament.


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Today I tried to explain this idea I had to my wife. The idea, which I won't bore you with, seemed so full of resonance and beauty and love. But it fell flat with her. I thought, I don't know. I could change the world with it. I thought, if you heard it, you'd weep and laugh and say of course, of course.

And go do it.


And encourage everyone to do it.



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I'll probably do it anyway.



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One thing is, I love you. I think about you all the time. I don't say anything to anyone about it. I think Jack Gilbert has it pretty close to right. I don't know if there is anything more important to our happiness than poetry. Just think about Wallace Stevens. What music went on in his erudite head? And then we go on with the killing. With the machetes. In the night. With the terrible disassembly. Our fascination with blood.

My own.


My god, I've stood in the blood, in sticky puddles of it. Brains on a sidewalk, splattered on a wall, in a planter, in the bathroom sink of a hotel room, in a pot on a stove. In my own two hands. Making the pathologist say it again- 'here's the cerebellum.' 'this is the frontal lobe.' 'see that, there, that little nub that looks just like the clitoris? the pituitary.'

this one guy, he killed somebody. he went out to the koi pond in the middle of the night, tried to clean everything up in there.

seemed like a good idea.


but when we were all standing around the koi pond at nine o'clock in the morning, the pond looking like cherry kool-aid, it didn't seem like he'd thought it all the way through.


one time, looking through crime scene photos, I saw a picture of myself.

Squatting down, looking at some blood stains on a sidewalk.

I didn't know it was me at first. Just some guy.


But I thought-

that guy?


He's going to put a case down.


That guy's doing the job.




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I seen it was me, a second later?


It made me smile.



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What I do is to love this world.

And stand around in its guts, all the beauty of it running red and wet down some gutter, wasted.


Then I make a picture. Maybe
write a poem, a little
note.



Shake my head.



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Try to put it down.




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I know you are out there, waiting for me. I see your face. What he did to you. The way he left you.


I haven't figured it out yet.


I know you're still waiting.



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I haven't forgotten.





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