wish I had been self-possessed enough to read the poem without that shit-eating grin/wince (curse of self-consciousness)…
I respect film and can’t get enough of the sense of SIGHT– but hate BEING seen… which is why I always went to my room and wrote poems… I just want to say that despite all appearances I was actually interested in the struggle with breath, breath which we can barely GET and then are called upon to GIVE UP, the ghost of our own appearances… breath which is not only a measure of poetic flow and the etymological dig for an archaeology of spirit, but which is also — like any other love — an indispensability we’re born to lose… So I must beg: Forgive the grin. One jokes so as not to jump. (I was on a hotel’s high floor). My mother was about to enter hospice and many of us were agonized (in the blink of a televised eye) by hoodings done in our names… Grinning like that I will wind up inadvertently having more emphasized the ludicrousness of life-in-the-flesh than its belovedness… and will have fixed the gaze more shallowly than I should, on a quandary I didn’t so much mean to mean, as wound up way too meanly being: a volley of instrumental apparatuses that one is stuck with, sooner or later, for a while, whether sebastian-wise or star-crossed-arrowed-mooncalved baby, one and all… pulse in the wrist, ticker in the chest, face in the hands, heart in the throat).