Obviously, that's not how it works

After reading a lot of sensible poems, you know the ones where people are making meaning out of little descriptions of personal experiences, my head feels full and busy looking out at the picnic table under the canopy the old lilac makes in my yard. My. It’s cloudy today but I notice the sun’s shone through the picnic table’s clear Plexiglas and is burning the grass underneath. Note to self: move the table. Move the table move the table, like kicking dirty laundry around. 

Weirdly, I think these are examples of my brain working better, and that idea makes me want to put on some awful radio or trivial music (Marc remembered that Level 42 song “Something About You,” and now we’re both singing it everywhere we go) just to dull this enervation a bit. But I don’t. I like quiet and I keep it quiet, though it’s not really quiet—the dryer’s running, and the fridge, and the furnace fan—not the air, just the fan, which makes me think of the overlook above the bluff where people go to see the whole city, the whole river valley, five miles across, with all the backwaters and factories and ball fields and a thousand houses. That’s a kind of retrospection—looking back at what we are, the flow we’re born into, and I’m trying to imagine a retro-sonic experience, where we could overhear instead of oversee all the sounds across the valley at once. Not at a high volume—I don’t want to go insane and become a super-villain—but in an intricately woven pattern, so that I could turn my head and hear every individual sound in the web.

“Obviously, that’s not how it works,” could be a title for a history of human innovation, or is that too cynical. I don’t think anyone anymore believes that our species is going to carry on forever beyond the way that all matter carries on and is transformed forever as per the law of the conservation of matter and energy. Law. Eventually, the planet’s going to be human-free (like a packaging label!), and yet sound will continue, yes it will because even crickets use sound to carry out their little schemes. Little. And so I arrive at this image from a sci-fi movie of a pretty large meteor streaking across the sky, burning as it enters the atmosphere but not burning up, no, it’s big enough that it impacts the planet with an enormous boom that, in this mental movie, is cool because it’s the only sound. I’ve got this perspective where all I can hear is the impact, and the wave of destruction follows, but it’s not so bad because the planet’s already human-free.

There goes that Winnebago that’s been for sale for five years down my block. Someone must’ve bought it, or maybe the seller gave up and is just going to drive it into the river.

Remember learning how dinosaur evolution had become more and more baroque? The weird adaptations like multiple beaks and long necks and crazy armor and spikes proliferated over millions of uninterrupted years, and there was something moralistic about how this information was delivered, something like don’t fuck around too much because look what happened when the dinosaurs tried to get fancy, but obviously the dinosaurs were just unlucky, as everything is unlucky, in that their matter was organic and interactive and not something from some other universe of totally idealized eternal shit so eventually their nice little millions-of-years-long party was interrupted. As a result of all that evolution, we got the big lizards we use for B movies and also birds, which I personally love watching in my yard (my), as they make nests out of garbage and kill each other’s babies and have sex and hatch out of eggs all slimy and barely miss my head while learning to fly with an honestly scared look on their bird faces that’s like a cartoon—this is happening now: cartoons are seeming more real than Robins—and then finally leave my pretty good yard to winter in Florida like grandparents.

Maybe this is mental illness, referential mania. “Afraid of the wallpaper in the passage, afraid of a certain picture in a book, which merely showed an idyllic landscape with rocks on a hillside and an old cart wheel hanging from the one branch of a leafless tree.” There’s no way for me or any one person to end a piece of writing like this—the whole idea of writing it is absurd. I’d been reading a lot of sensible poems, the kind where people make meaning out of little descriptions of personal experience, and my head began to feel full and busy, looking out at the picnic table under the canopy the old lilac makes in my yard.