by Josh Kleinberg
There is a time in the morning
where it feels impossible
to ever do anything you'll be proud of again.
I am having a rubber stamp made with the time.
I will stamp everything
I feel unworthy of,
starting with my sofa
and cat.
I will stamp the position
within an ownership society
that even allows for me
to call something "my."
I will stamp my blueberries,
one by one, and the tooth
I was going to eat them with.
I want a list, Goddammit,
of revolutionary thinkers
who spat in their beds
for the twist of the Earth,
for what prophet a man
to gain a worldview,
what profit the man
if the soul is a birch?
I give myself
x-odd number of days,
a vitamin regimen,
a bulletin board,
the puerile MacGyvering
of motion machines.
And machines to keep
the machines running.
And machines to keep
the machines running.
And machines to keep
the machines
One question no one is addressing
is what role authorial ownership plays
in your daughter's
unexplained night sweats.
I will stamp yellow,
and singing,
and sight,
and whosoever even
gets far enough out of bed
to get to the really nebulous stuff.
Hard enough to maintain
unpunctured gaze
with the violet-haired woman
on the bus.
It is this author's belief
that the very endeavor
to make sense of anything
is in fact disingenuous,
in that it comes
from the privileged position
of not being on fire.
I am stamping my genitals.
I am stamping my blood.
I am stamping all the books
in the world.
I would suck my thumb
if I thought it would help.
I would curl in a ball
in a laundry basket
wearing my mother's shoes,
my father's hat and winter coat,
if I thought that it would help,
and I would refuse to speak
a word, to anyone, for days.
I would listen to
a new and troubling crop of bands
and paint my hair all black—
I knew a girl who did this.
She set herself on fire last year
and now I can only remember
a single fit of tears from before,
and my unholy response.
I know that she has a separate story.
I know it is not fair—
in the great, big, nonchalant, everything sense—
to think of her as a subplot in mine,
but I guess it's only natural.
I guess I don't believe in God, but when
I hypnotize myself—with drugs
or only sleep—I begin to talk about
how much He must hate me.
Let's call this fact "1."
And all the other facts that there are
will be "2."
I am building a machine to keep
the sadness away, but
the trouble with machines
is that they only know themselves.
You can't bring a machine
to a party; can't make out with,
or insult a machine.
The fact of the matter is, I declare,
that what I want to say
is talk is just performance—
a gesture meant
to confirm the existence of—
and don't get me started
on typing or touch.
I am not sure
what to do with a poem,
or any such totalizing
scheme—
mathematics exist
so that spears can be built, and
my arms are lengths
of nervous meat.
They do not spiral
hermeneutically up,
but form useful geometries
for the eating of soups.
My bones are long rocks.
They are hoisted and curled,
and not by magic!
or shimmering cherubim!
and not even anything
that's any such hot shit
if you want to know the truth.
And have you ever seen a rainbow?
They're only as beautiful
as boxes of markers.
What a man believes
is less important than what he eats
(though I myself have never been a man,
of discerning taste), she said.
If I am a good student,
or well-fed or involved,
I must be a bad poet, and
I take my wish to be
interviewed by somebody
very seriously,
but every wish
is at odds with another.
Today, I wish for warm feet,
a walk to the corner,
a store on the corner,
wealth and renown and
eventual and complicated bliss
to be found in someone's
soft hand.
All these people with
very normal girlfriends,
very normal aspirations,
pictures of themselves
awake in the daytime,
could only have drawn
a critique for so long.
It's indicative of a "period"
—as in "comma blue."
And living is only
finding new periods
and naming the periods,
during walks to the corner.
When this month is up,
that's it.
I'm cutting the cable.
By the end of the year,
I'd better be famous.
I've started a diet,
I'm combing my hair,
I'm spending hours
and hours and hours
at work, but like
all of my poems,
I want to end this with
fuck,
or a question mark,
or with Pooh Bear,
or silence,
but it's not like it's
simple either, not like
dumb really is
the best thing to be—
a quarter on the thumb
or whatever you tried to
teach me.
Take this stanza, for example,
Take this dawning street.
A staggered procession
of '94 Camrys, motor whir
like a tide coming in.
The tip-tap-top-tip of the feet,
warming with morning.
And the jostle of the door,
and the bustle of inside,
the Zagat implications
of a room filled with mouths.
I order an éclair, and
eat it while walking
and smile—
something about the pudding
when it's refrigerator-cold,
or do you even need to know
what the smile's about?
At the coffee shop,
I drink a coffee
(a medium roast in
an unfurling cup).
Mayakovsky teaches me
nothing, banging around
on the page,
but I smile.
A poem, among other things,
is an "optical shift,"
(it says no no no no
that's not it, this is)
but call it a "rose," and it smells
just the same.
You see, category
is our only invention.
The orange peel falls
into "rubbish"
and "barrier,"
"spongy" and "ornament,"
"orange things," and "zesty"
and "plant life" and "fruit,"
but where could it fall
without us?
When my mother says "God,"
I accuse her of forgetting Africa,
but Australopithecus
is less real than church—
I can see one!
through the window!
Presbyterian, this one!—
and I too will die,
believing a lot that's not true.
There are two
types of something
in the world
where we live,
but it's like gnats
choosing football
towns
in the North.
The pluck or the pill?
The pull or the pull.
A sun to explode
or a sun?
Josh Kleinberg is an English student at Ohio State University. Other publications can be found at joshuakleinberg.com.