Once fired, a bullet may lodge in the sinews, but we know from the spent cartridges most will succumb to gravity, no matter the skill or the gun’s calibration. A firearm is just one way to thin out a cafe, but the thought alone won’t break the skin or there’d be an ear on my plate and brains in my coffee.
I prefer a gap to the story, but a mind in freefall gathers no moss so it’s best I keep talking. Bob is dipping into his bag of platitudes to demonstrate his grasp of the poem Blanche is working on. Something about how everything is washed away by our inattention.
Bob elaborates, disagrees and finally concurs with the premise. Stacking is a good way to say nothing, so long as there’s a pause in between layers. Fortunately Blanche has no time for such tactics. Hold on to your hat for the inevitable wrangle. As for the conversation itself, I ignored it completely.
There are two doors here and no exits, but I don’t need a portal to rack up these absences. Bob and Blanche argue while I catch the show in the window. In medias res because the whole won’t fit the ambit. I wait for my friends to stop talking. One must be seen to be leaving, there can be no ebb without onlookers. Besides, I have nowhere to be and all of the numbers in my phone are wrong. I’m sure that’s coincidence.
Blanche likes to talk about poets, dead ones, or those who at least speak the language. Stubborn pricks who swim upstream while scholars, like whores on a sausage, pull up the river behind their beloved scribblers. A bard’s best hope is an echo, the dream as catastrophe, and some commit suicide.
Poets are like the last dinner guest whose parting is endless, since they must first plant and then grow their eminence. Unlike those dragons we talked about earlier, or the unicorn who caught a plane back to Jupiter. Kiki`s friends, now mine, embrace their invisibility and they don’t attend dinner parties.
For Celan it was the Seine that offered up the broader perspective, that’s why the bard said yes to the river. By my own hand, he whispered. But I still think his death came from Germany. Deaths, actually, so he may have checked out before he hit the water. As in a few decades prior when Jews were made to squat en masse to accommodate the arm’s natural extension.
Kneeling is fine, better than shooting fish in a barrel for your workaround genocide but, said Himmler, nothing scales like an oven. Sixty years later a priest wrote a book good enough to be a CBS documentary about the Reich’s fastidious tendencies. In contrast to the data, the lack thereof, coming out of Nevada. Thanks to American ingenuity we no longer need to log whom we’re killing.
We’re all poets, at least to the end of this sentence. Who hasn’t, in this day and age, gone to war with the language. Such were my thoughts from behind my line of sugar cubes. I also thought about parsley while Bob and Blanche discussed all things literary. What I liked most about their conversation is the dessert that came with it.