FAILED POET THEATER

You had never taken hallucinogens before. When you came back, you tried telling me that a word is many things, and it’s the sum of the many things, and it’s also not the many things combined. If the word is “beauty,” for example, it can become “beautiful.” Then it can become “beauteous.” Or “beautification.” I just sat in the window – two, three hours, just sat in silence, as if watching out for a black man running down the street in fear for his life.

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A ratty top hat, at least half a size too small, was balanced on your head at a treacherous angle. Your intense, even belligerent expression, might have come from having lived on the street or been tortured in some foreign jail for political crimes. These were the years you renamed yourself, smoked a white clay pipe, endured night sweats and empty thought bubbles. You just wished you could somehow be there if you ever attained the ironic glory of posthumous cult status.

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There are rooms that are sometimes forgotten. If you look under there, you’ll find them. All this time you thought you were moving away from something, but, actually, you were moving closer and closer toward it, and with a sound like the despondent tread of rain on the graves of loved ones and strangers.