III
Classes kill paper
paper paper
sheets
(his room covered),
classes kill trees,
eternities.
Piled, sucking
his pen dry,
thin sheets frailed
by time and spilled beer
hold his inky fear.
But classes! Professors
wash him
in their bleachy words;
he does not so much learn
as lose mass
like linens rinsed clean.
Picked up like dirty teeth, he
pulls up his paper,
pulls words out of
wet foot prints.
Notes prattle on
about Yeats' eternal anachronism
ever spinning,
about Native American
talking animals, translated,
lists of unrelated things,
flowers barely recognizable,
lightning lines
that strike margins,
boxes swallowing each other, spirals,
furious marks
banishing shameful bad-things
to blackness,
Fuck.
Where did it go?
Did rage or boredom
cross it out?
Which spiral bound wound
swallowed the syllabus?
Tyler will turn a page
and build a cage for memory,
but lost in each small age,
each frame of day,
cast slowly out to sea,
Oh let those imprisoned memories be!
Don't let him get below a C.
IV
Long lines
make old words older.
Bodies speak,
but who cares?
Tyler furrows
at normal inaneities
rolling through the college lounge,
Things heard
without context.
One remembers
getting marbles for picking up Spanish,
a vocabulary
paid in glass.
"I'm in a play for the German department
next Fall,
but we don't know what it is yet."
"Do you have any lines?"
"No, but
it's a very physical part."
Tyler doesn't understand
how she knows,
but he believes her.
V
Tyler thinks in abstraction,
bodiless bodies
twist through his small head.
Sometimes love lives in dread,
but it can't, of course, do that,
having no life
and being nothing at all.
Love's fear is his fear
transposed on a concept.
Dread blooms daintily
on the tip of his nose.
He doesn't see beauty, he
merely sees
and beauty evades his description
because he merely
describes.
His compunction, volition,
his unerring doom,
the sublime impressions
that don't actually exist,
the carpet, the footrest,
the linoleum floor,
the hardness beneath him
that he writes out of physical form,
the letters,
the language
clumsily hugged,
the words he depends on
to remake the world and impressions,
it all passes by him
and falls to the bin.
He lies down.
VI
Later, bleary Tyler
wakes up, eventually rises, eventually
does it again.
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