-1. Shaving cream mornings have my hands running swirls sloping small hills turn to froth and my face becomes obscured.
Hot water razor blades sliding as black specks and lines descend exclamation points edited from the manuscript of an overenthused writer. These are the routines I have, everyday, I start with a ritual a shower, no breakfast, a shave if needed, touch up on the hair and in the shower, I continue free association of my dreams. Lately; the shower is silent running water streaming into water, closed eyes presenting nothing more but black black and rain, darkness and heat on my back- when droplets reach the tip of my nose, my knees tremble but not today. Instead, it is the noise and no sight, and my knees don't tremble, like they did, last thursday. Today in the mirror, my fingers driving dollops into froth I am staring at the mirror and I am wondering how to get back to zero. 1. I am racing circles around my palm with foam I should be delighted and I stare feeling nothing but the obligation to feel. I am dancing around zero and it is easy to do with its circles and loops its infinite repeating its always coming back to the same point its never ending spinning with us never knowing if it is spinning or still. I want to be inside where the white is inside of a bath instead of a shower. 2. I think about how so much of identity is tied to memory and how much of memory is linked to pain, and how much of pain is linked to memory and how this is our real identity and I wonder why anyone chooses to remember anything at all, why we can not always come back to zero, upon waking when I stare at foam why must I know I have seen it before when I am wet why must I know the droplet from my forehead will streak to the tip of my nose and send my knees into a buckle because when I know I always wipe it away- but I want my knees to buckle like they did last thursday and I don't want to remember how they buckled, or why I cannot hear a word you say through the persisting rain and darkness of our memories. 3. There is a difference between the inside of zero and the inside of nothing. I remember as a kid I had tormented my parents with a sound I had just learned (the sound of an umlaut) a "u" spoken with your mouth in the shape of an "o." It's not so amusing anymore everything gets so faded once you do it too many times and this comes down to becoming nothing, slowly erasing newness by gaining all this knowledge, the faucet is turned on as we walk out of the womb the ground turns into mud and the books of ourselves sink our feet just inches into muck, but of course we are all learning how to survive as adults by sinking deeper into nothing. 3b. Hold on to yourself so tightly that no one else can get thier arms around you, alone and afraid but you hold on to yourself so tightly, and all the books of what we've learned weigh so heavy that we can't walk in this rain storm coming through the showerhead. 3c. Cats love tuna fish, Cats are terrified of water. 3d. Sometimes we compress the information from one book down into a few pages and we say that we have let go of the book. Then we just add more and more information about how life is, to all these books, and when the mud is up to our necks, we close our eyes and remember what we wrote and we call that "something" as if it was any kind of reality at all, refusing to see this mud coming up to our mouths until we can't even speak without letting all this nothing in- projecting our lucidity pretending it is communication and never letting anyone see that our arms are always trying to flail - //when we aren't holding ourselves so tightly as if our insides were about to explode.\\ 4. Oh, zero! I could give you a thousand poems, and you would multiply it by yourself and I would have no poems- or could I multiply my poems by you, and have so many poems I just couldn't count them? There is a difference between zero and nothing; a difference between empty, and hollow. To be hollow is to wait for filling, and to be filled is to sink deeper into nothing- the blank stares into space, the dazed stare at the mysterious utterences of children; the ignoring of the jays and the snow angels lining streets, the confusion at some forms of hope we mistake for threats. Oh, but zero, there's nothing I can't grasp with you within me; the freedom to see the continuous doldrums of history is a suicidal lie, developed by men to feel better about death. The future is only influenced by the past because we choose to remember it. But oh, shaving cream, I can't forget you, and let myself discover your texture as if I didn't know already...maybe you are really marshmallow, or maybe you are really best used as a toothpaste why do I have to know it isn't true? So I don't consume you and make myself sick? But remembering is a sickness. How sick I am of knowing; I think diarhhea would be preferable, anyway. 5. Yeah, remembering is a sickness. Sometimes you get wounded and you have this sense that your heart is dented and bruised, but really it beats as it always has. 6. It's so easy in words but so hard, really- everything we do is what we learn at the most arbitrary moment- From: I'm 9 and I have a swimming pool and the girl laughs because I don't have a shirt on, and so I never swim again even though no one wears shirts when they swim- To: a girl I like takes a pile of pills when I am fifteen and now I am afraid that everyone will go away, someday and just maybe it has something to do with something I said. Oh, zero. I want you to descend on my mind like the giant eraser that you are. I want to be empty again. I want to forget all this weight! But zero, do you know? How do amnesiacs survive? 7. What if the shower instead of drowning me actually washes away the layers of grime accumulated from all the sleepwalking? Will I remember why I cared so much about you and me, in the parking lot of a fast food chain when we were 17? You know what? I forget why we were there how we got there why we chose to sit where we sat that's how it goes I guess; but I remember knowing that you saw the same things the same way and I remember I knew you were important to me for as long as I could trust you to see that. If we start from zero how do we know that these showers will make these roots intertwine again? 8. And then we dropped bombs. I want the bombs dropped to total zero, I want the landscape repaired, the grass to grow over the craters we excavated like whatever came out of those intertwined roots looked sideways instead of up at each other instead of reaching for the sun, side by side instead of welcoming rain we set loose a barrage of explosions and detonations to get craters deep enough to pick those roots out move to seperate continents I was sure I would never have water again, without you. Were you so sure? Can we look at each other yet? Is the sky still think with smoke or can we grow together towards the sun, like plants do wrapping around the fencepost? Are we on different lawns now, have the craters rearranged our roots into a mess we can't untangle, can we grow back the parts that burned off, the bits that got mangled, the hope that got so worthless? I want that to be zero. I want the questions to be zero, I want that number 8 up there to be zero, for this section of this poem to cease existing. But it is impossible to subtract anything by zero; and computers explode when you divide by zero; and when you add zero to the number, it stays the same. 9. I think all we can do is take what we have and multiply it by zero. I want to take zero and I want to have you and I want them together and I want to multiply you by two blank slates and have zero over both of us I want to look at you and at the shaving cream as if I don't know what you are for, as if I don't know what will happen when I shave, or when I see you, as if there is real possibility in something even if I feel it is as certain as getting sick if I eat shaving cream but this is the kind of insanity that would make me afraid of cool whip. 10. That's right, I ended this poem with "cool whip." -e. _______________________________________________ Five7Five mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/five7five
