So what
if these were
notes not
for something more
finished, but for something more
like ruins, not Gothic
Revival Horace
Walpole fakes, not stonewashed
jeans, but real ruins, lived-in almost
to death, a little ruin
of a typewriter that bit rib-
bon ribbon ribbon
until each blackened tooth
smashed, guiding a whole polis
of letters into the sky or bouncing
in the backs of trucks, bags,
boxes? Say these ruins weren’t
like other ruins in
that they were (not actually)
invisible, as in, “invisible
to commodity,” like no one
would ever stand in front of them
in a photograph, or rub
one of their crumbly faces
into ghost, or point
at a dot on the crease of a cheap
map, but ruins only
accessible by stumble, a ruin you come
upon like someone else’s
life left between a stand
of hairy pines, and no one thought
to walk there again, it wasn’t
a way anyone going
somewhere would go, a huge fucking
mess, not left to someone
to deal with, but devastating
in its beauty
because it’s someone else’s so
gone you just know
you’ll never know anything
factual about it, or the person
whose life it was and now
only is, this gorgeous
nothing pointing
everywhere but at itself, this event
you (now) and only now (you)
are allowed to see, an event
that barely even unfolds, but just sits
there in all its inaccessibility
like a flood that isn’t
a real flood because it never moves
and it can’t be a real event
because there aren’t any streets
to walk home on, or string
to unravel, there is only this ruin
running in place, that no one
else will ever happen
across, that no one will ever not
miss, and in gaping before
it it turns
out you have missed something
else, everything, some fat
animal staring at a reason, a bear
bloated and furrowing, so soon
enough you don’t
even see this, this ruin, this impossible
strip of “life” that will
drift with other endless parts
of you you lost
along the way, over all
this time, will shift
and disappear like another
gleaming doorknob
in Brigadoon, so as always
to stay where you are
not, a great big floating thrift store
of late appendages
that orbits just
beyond your horizon
of consciousness, that leaves
you here, a fool in one
of Beckett's plays
fingering walnut shells
to remember the meat
