The Irrationality—LB Roland

Summer or exile, they seem to be the same to me this year
    Not so to any other person nor to me at any other time.

I wear this cold uniform in the south’s heat
    Perversely grinning as the primal sweat gathers beneath this veneer.
I sit in this empty room thirty minutes a day thinking of you
    Trying to bring my mind from the numbness with your face.

In the evenings I fall back with friends I no longer agree with
    They have not changed as you have changed me.
In cars with stereos blaring the music our parents knew
    We light up and scream the choruses and tell crude jokes.
The cool air of the vents, the dank air we exhale, and the thick night’s breeze
    Mingle about our flesh, letting us intone mankind, the devil, and mother earth.
I have leaned against a minifridge wearing a sombrero as bebemos
    Yelling `¡Soy Cubano!’ over the tremulous latin air a friend is plucking out.

Back in daylight standing motionless at the counter all day
    I ask myself the questions you asked me in spring. I will see you in fall.

The wrist is not a private place

To hide away your troubles
No matter how deep you dig
We can still see the raw places
Where the grass has grown back
But never the same hue as before
You may have been in the depth
Of a spiral of loneliness when
You sought your healing here
But the wrist is not a private place

Perhaps you succeeded burying
All your problems for a time,
But they remain forever known
To everyone who passes by
For the wrist is not a private place

And I can sympathise with you
You wanted to internalise your pain
Rather than destroy it, so
You could visit it like old friends
That you once put in the ground
And keep vigil there, but not alone
For the wrist is not a private place

Most of us can relate, and many
Have sought the same graveyard
Or gone somewhere else to dig
But you can’t tell, for we chose
Somewhere that is private
But the wrist is not a private place

Perhaps when we first bared
Our naked thighs unto our love
They saw the track of fresh dug dirt
And shared in an intimate place
But the wrist is not a private place

Any Dick or Jon on the bus
May drink in that stretch of land
And see how you have marred it
The wrist is not a private place

I’ve buried my worries somewhere
Someplace very private indeed
So much I poured into my core
The ground burst at it seems
So if someone glimpses
My secret valley, they will see
A myriad of trenches where
I buried all my troubles
But the wrist is not a private place

I don’t mean to shame you
Or even to advise against it
I simply seek to remind to you
And the world, something which is fact
So when they act, they think
And if they think, they might not
Do something that they wish to not
For you it is too late, but join me
To remind those children
With shovel in hand, that
The ground is a good place to hide
But the wrist is not a private place.

See the mountains kiss high Heaven
    And the waves clasp one another;
No sister-flower would be forgiven
    If it disdained its brother;
And the sunlight clasps the earth
    And the moonbeams kiss the sea:
What is all this sweet work worth
    If thou kiss not me?

Readers may notice the lack of my name,
But I assure down here we all look the same.
I simply wrote this to mark me as shameless
To not be confused with the honourable nameless.
Whose bodies are nowhere near to be found,
But memorial slabs are placed there in the ground.
Those blank stones have much more to state
Then every couplet I fit on this slate,
So once you’ve reached this poems end
I ask you in silence those souls to commend

Because all epitaphs have wrongfully led
You to think that from the grave they were said
‘Cause once these words have left your head
You shall hear the silence of the dead.

‘I am not a madman’ I shout into the night air.

A friend once told me a story about a man who woke up ever morning, threw open his window, and gave the world the middle finger— I forgot the punchline, but you get it. 

I once thought that man was me, I might be right. 

But I am like this every night, after my roommates are asleep. I don’t think I am a mad man; I’m fairly certain I’m sane.  Not normal though, I’m quite aware that most peoples’ rooms are silent when they are alone—that is when mine is most loud.  Every night I pace this 8x8 cell taking stand there by the fridge, or there in the bathroom, or there at the window, and while standing I address the empty dark.  

But no-one responds, nothing is their to echo back, and this is why I’m quite sure I’m well-minded.    There are no voices to accompany me when I am lonely, and sometimes I wish there were.  But I never speak like this in company because when I’m in company I am talking to them and them alone.  When I am like this, I mused, and I dictate my thoughts to all of creation via this proxy, the night air.  

I’ll admit I do throw open my window when the world has ceased making sense and shout ‘fuck you.’ But I don’t think I’m a joke.  And this, tonight’s musings, feels like it will be special.

What goes on at McCraken? The smoke is pouring forth even now. Pillars of smoke rising biblically into the night air, and I taste the fire and brimstone wafting in. There are dissidents daily filling the lawns on campus; they shout for the Earth which is dead or dying, and we have killed it or are killing it.  They go home each night and power their iPods, and McCraken exhales.  What goes on in McCraken?

Who is John Galt in that case? It is a question that has no answer because it is a question not asking for an answer.  It is just a question, and what is a question? That wide world I curse each morning, it is empty, empty save for one, she that I loved.  I will never see her again, and yet we might pass eachother every day on the street. What the fuck is with that? 

It’s the night before the first day of final’s week, and yet there are more windows still lit then dark. MIne is dark. New York is the city that doesn’t sleep, yes, because its persons circadian rhythms are so askew of each other, but here on campus a thousand cicadas chirp in unison into the night.  Youth is the city that doesn’t sleep.

There are words that always fill my head. “I AM BECOME A NAME” comes to mind tonight. It’s syntax is most troubling, especially now in the dark when I am become a name myself.  Ulysses was as mad as I; he sat on his searock at the sea watching set the sun and eked out that pentametrical farewell. He then plummeted into the sea.  Yes, I imagine Lord Tennyson is like me. Sitting in the dark scratching out his prophetic wisdom, but he accidentally got published; I won’t make that mistake.

I tell a story quite often. I was young, and for the first time saw that sleepless city, NY, the centre of the gyre, so perverse in it’s dadaistic parade. My family shacked in a cheap hotel on little brazil st. so the sound of samba filled the narrow streets of cobblestone. Our bathroom had a window.  Naked on the toilet I sat and looked at the magnificent grey, silver spears of sky scrapers obscured by the smokiness of the glass. I flew open that window and felt the cold, smokey air dance between my naked thighs. Twenty stories in each direction a vertical world stretched and a 19 blocks in each direction a horizontal world stretched. The cacophony of sounds and actions entered that cheap hotel room through that bathroom window and danced with me on the linoleum.  So free I ejaculated from 21 stories up hoping some passer by might join with me in my orgy of creation.  Who knows how many people saw a fat naked child masturbating out the window and were jealous? I tell that story as a joke, but that moment on the cold concrete ledge, as my hairless testicles contracted from the chill and the orgasm changed me forever; that day I lost my virginity to the largest city in the world, but I tell you she is no virgin. I am sure some abomination issued forth from my spilt seed, and it incubates in the daemon womb of manhattan. 

I do not masturbate out of windows as often as I once did because here there are screens in the way.  But McCraken has no problem cuming all over the velveteen, ebony face of the night, even into her one shining eye, so she must wink in vain at his itchy jizz. Nay, but it is at this window sill my free hand rests as I free my soul from heaven every night. 

There is no darkness in this technic age. Square, round, blinking, one, two, three dots, in red, green, yellow, and pulsing white each little living device must purr off excess photons in its sleep. Four computers, four printers, four cellphones, a microwave, two ipods, and some speakers wait idly for the morning sun so they may light in full use. The vagrants who are still in lit rooms may see me cast in this LED halo, but they cannot tell that I am flipping them off.  

There is a tower not as tall as my floor yet mightier.  Bell shaped cap just peering over the canopy not too far away. Well one night it was the focus of my nocturne soliloquy, and I begun to address it as the giant Briareus that Quixote saw in his satanic mills. I was convinced it would not leave me be following me wherever, and yet in the day when I ventured out I recognised not its foundation. It goes to show that no matter how well you’ve studied a head you do not know the ass.

It squeaks quite often around here. I tell you I’m in love with the girl next door. I tell the world now, but not her, she is involved.  Quite often I will be with her, discussing the weight of Shakespeare; I always put down the old fruit, and she defends him.  Well her boy will come over and replace my position; I am dismissed, and they go off to fuck.  But right next door I can her the squeaking of the bed, so I press my ears to the wall to hear her moans. I then go to bed. Tonight she went to his place, so the telltale squeak will not haunt me. If it squeaked into the late every night, I might be driven to madness. Perhaps thats what drives me to this late night silent discussions with myself.

What goes on in McCraken? What goes on in your life? I am become a name, I think. A name from an anonymously written joke; a name so old it may have once been founded in a real person, but that through time has changed letter at a time to what it is now.  There is no resolution to my discourse tonight, and I will go to bed thinking of her. And this window, my pulpit, I will leave behind with a still waiting audience, never to sleep. Perhaps I should give them a show like a gave New York; then they might turn away and put out those lights.  But there is no darkness in this future, so my sleep will come hard. McCraken will pour on. I will wake up early to see it, and it is then that the world is finally asleep.  So unseen I will slip my hand out that window and let the finger fly.  But I am not a madman, just a name from some old joke.

Old drawings I once made
I cast out like the trash they are.

My best of friends, when we first met,
I told him my love of life was to draw;
that has since changed.

Now it is poetry, and I have written
half as many lines as I have drawn.

Those pictures were horrible,
number two pencil on printer paper,
my subjects always cartoon characters.

Today I have found something:
three paper boxes filled with my old art.

I threw them out as I have said.
Then in ten more years
I read these boxes of poems, and—

Steel phallus thrusting
into the soft earth core 
leaving the world to bleed,
yet no one cries out rape?

Everyone needs
a set of words
that mean nothing
to any one at all;
these are mine.

None of this matters in the working day.
It’s only in the thoughtful hours
just before skiving off to bed
that poetry makes any sense;
in the thick of it, poetry
isn’t worth a damn thing.

I’m not sure what it is,
if it is an aspect of humanity or poetry,
but when we’re getting on like normal people
the two are disjoint.

Thus the poet cannot be normal. 

The grey dust of years
Now settles on the bottom
Rim of my Ray-Ban’s.