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Poetry • by John Luna
PLAY AUDIO VERSION: voice of John Luna
(Cooling bathwater)
Time is fake news. The stream of an eye follows its weight towards an uncertainty, with charcoal imagery rendered, erased and re-rendered, a vast memoirist’s membrane, addressing itself to nothing, almost nonsensical birdsong, all gathering a little equality, little else, to scatter into blank space beyond imposture in the corners. All life’s talking isn’t work, but luck, last aristocratic gasp of a blank, banqueted rage, film of un-life progressively peeled back from the surface of some midrange packaging. You ask me what we’re doing here in our imaginary safe house, in this safe house of safe houses: composing lonely messages to wanderlusts’ descendants.
You should worry when all those shy and quiet young people seem to belong to one shade, classical fasces improvised from within the hate-eating heart of the theatre of defeat. And isn’t that what we are now, wondering at how a misplaced piece of bad faith makes patronage for every awful art. Now the only craft worth practicing, in the grey-on-gay pale of studio walls, where the chair rooked there by its shadow is the S-curve spine of any question, is: skepticism; the kind one used to leverage truth with in cornered paces, circumspect of intelligence of any eventual exit. Being skeptical now just is practicing a kind of speculative good taste, just as taste of any kind makes its last-ditch stand.
In an alternate timeline: water wins, as while the tub keeps filling, I discreetly seize; another, mattegrey race of concrete steps rises up to meet me, smashing my face for a mirror; then I’d freeze, previously beautifully extra: sensually parsed, scarcely graced; now lying, floored with a scream someone might render taking their time as if impersonating a sunset, the mind a blitzed-out city, the body a zombie of some transistors’ agony. The glamour of harm’s soliloquy comprising a special school of art, fragmentary as that repeating gif of a ghost-son improvising his percussive shimmy shake at the bandstand, each time’s one & only player.
An otherworld, the mal defines all, carrying personality away as incidental carnage of collateral domain.
But I never witness its peak.
...
Instead, tonight, the water flows in shadowy anorectic/photogenic tableaux: a sculpture drenched in a circuit of ice, frozen fountain with analog light sloughing off; and can’t begin to explain how sorry I am, or how young to still be here.
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[Distillate © HA&L + John Luna | {from the Greek bios} -- the course of a life.]
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