(no subject)
I remember this, sitting across from you,
a table strewn with newspapers, receipts.
Window shade pulled against dirty ashtrays,
wadded up tissues and orange peels.
I remember this, your eyes
narrowing, your fingers stretching
toward a dirty spoon. Your assertion,
calmly, grotesquely so:
Our modern man, our likely result
in mass-produced humanity --
meticulous you said. Dull as Molotov
and about as sensual as a mallet.
More Himmler than Hitler, you said,
more calculus than opera, rubbing
away the residue, seeking out
your reflection, feminine and distorted.
And at this table, and others and so on,
across the years of buried place
settings, a trajectory moving us through
wine glasses and salad forks --
order we could excavate beneath the
gum wrappers and unfolded laundry,
beneath the rotting, greasy paper plates
and sour, half-eaten bowls of cereal --
about this table, I want to tell you:
we have done our dumb beast best
to clean it up, to sort rubbish from food,
to strip it bare. To at least make piles.
About this table, I can say: we have surveyed
every inch, translated to scale in a series of
blueprints and exploded diagrams, have
inventoried its contents using technological
methods of indexing, have bought (and, in some
instances paid for) the services of the best analytical
minds of our generation (given the limitations of our
educational system). We have employed, even, higher math.
And still -- the more we try to order it, the filthier it gets.
a table strewn with newspapers, receipts.
Window shade pulled against dirty ashtrays,
wadded up tissues and orange peels.
I remember this, your eyes
narrowing, your fingers stretching
toward a dirty spoon. Your assertion,
calmly, grotesquely so:
Our modern man, our likely result
in mass-produced humanity --
meticulous you said. Dull as Molotov
and about as sensual as a mallet.
More Himmler than Hitler, you said,
more calculus than opera, rubbing
away the residue, seeking out
your reflection, feminine and distorted.
And at this table, and others and so on,
across the years of buried place
settings, a trajectory moving us through
wine glasses and salad forks --
order we could excavate beneath the
gum wrappers and unfolded laundry,
beneath the rotting, greasy paper plates
and sour, half-eaten bowls of cereal --
about this table, I want to tell you:
we have done our dumb beast best
to clean it up, to sort rubbish from food,
to strip it bare. To at least make piles.
About this table, I can say: we have surveyed
every inch, translated to scale in a series of
blueprints and exploded diagrams, have
inventoried its contents using technological
methods of indexing, have bought (and, in some
instances paid for) the services of the best analytical
minds of our generation (given the limitations of our
educational system). We have employed, even, higher math.
And still -- the more we try to order it, the filthier it gets.