Joseph Zitt

by Joseph Zitt (1995)

Objection: Emotion remains emotion.
The subject, obsessed, remains obsessed.

Here we now (random time arrow backward passage)
sense paradox, salute it, and travel on.

I stay: Plant self at staircase base
Brace feet catch those who see no stair there
Stop flame addressed to nonexistent cigarette
Keep those who cannot walk from reaching cars

And the angel circles, leaving (some say)
  streaks of stars:
"Cigarette? Water? Gum?"

MixedKahluaMan pulls me into corners
  Stabs me with confessions
  Gets my life all wrong and
  Claims himself a comrade
  Tells me of the sins long past committed
  Of the sins of which he dreams

And always at the end we know
  he stirs in too much cream

I lean into the corner
Want to kiss the person in it
(I cannot sense the gender, do not care)
Rattle on instead about the death of syntax

CD avalanche music stops stutters restarts
go over tell the teens again
You just can't mosh to a portable boombox

In the room of dark one who won't remember all
Loses dinner out the window one two many times
Spits catches his breath calls it religion

The one who would be Nicholson
Circles southward silently
Sees me by the door
Retreats
He won't be driving for a while

On the couch a pair
Younger than I ever was
Move together
I scurry past don't want to see if they're doing
What I'm dreaming they're doing

Another sits by the keyboard
Happily typing the letter
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

MixedKahluaMan tries to flag down a nubile
Face red neck red
Speaks lines of increasing uselessness
The lame preceding the inane

And I wonder if his 2 AM confessions
  count as secrets
And if I should tell someone
But his secrets may protect my own

And the angel powered by the cold the heat
Breathes a path through falling bodies
"Water? Gum?" her dark mystique
A blessing and a shield
Whatever fails tonight she stays unsinged

Mother-of-Robots (once an angel too)
Sits also at the foot of stairs
Speaks of this old house this very old house
Profound admissions I (as I write) cannot recall
Observes the angel watches me whispers
"She is not for you" I nod and follow anyway

Tiny King Cake baby
Rises out of womb of chocolate
Into mouth of her whom it has
Chosen next to celebrate

Stroke of midnight random kiss
Meets the one that I admire most
We ponder meaning then (flash forward:
To Indian dinner, tangled joke,
Blues Brothers meet Moses on the shore,
And she laughs and says: that's why
I love all of you)

Leather beer mug full of mead
Makes a path of drinking lips
If charted it would speak of tales
That Canterbury never dreamed

And I watch the slowly rising sun
Scare the gothboys off to sleep

And on the porch the hackers come and go
Asking if fourteen-four's too slow

And my brain sputters clicks and frays
I devolve to rhymes quotes and cliches

And the angel makes her final circuit
Inscribes a blessing on refrigerator doors
Takes my name my logon my number

Disappears

And only when I wake do I see
Ghost cars passing in the street
And decide the safest path:
To act like everything I see is real

And guess that I'd be judged insane
If I kissed everyone at Kerbey Lane

And sit at home and watch electrons flow
As on the screen the now dispersed
Collect again in amber type and
Try to piece together who did
What with whom and why
And grin released from shadows of regret

(Except for talk of MixedKahluaMan
  Who is dubbed jerk bogon creep and nimrod
  (The only man who truly fits
  The four major fool groups) and dismissed)

And I sink back and let the weekend
Blur into bright memory
For another night
Another day
Another descent to the mundane

Until I hear the telephone ring
And the voice of the angel
More human now

And I close my eyes and breathe

And remembering
Begin again