Chill

MY HELL

Is probably different than yours, as we keep
meeting for the first time, the exquisite
first, in the magazines aisle
of the drug store and we never speak
or even seem to notice each other,
at least you don’t, though I’m dressed
to be seen, rolled neck to knee
in duct tape and not because I love pain
or even like it but philosophically speaking
what does it matter to add more
to so much and, anyway, the idea
is visual, my pale flesh constrained
by the tape with which people’s voices are always blockaded
in movies, when Fate’s day calendar
suddenly pencils in bank robbery
or kidnapping or some other distasteful felony—
but I apologize, this has nothing
to do with anything, except maybe fear,
which is everything, the whip to the restive nerve,
and I’m reminded of horses racing,
when one’s leg explodes like an M-80
there in the midst of speed
and if the injury is too grievous
there in the dirt he’s put down
and everyone in the stands
must decide whether to weep or applaud
this newly dead thing
as though the noise, any noise, could ever be noble
and this seems like another
hell, a small one, maybe, conceptually fleeting,
not the one guttering
throughout a good chunk of Western civilization,
not to mention my apple-cheeked
childhood liberally salted
with fear, to taste, you might say
in a fit of cleansing pique,
this hell sold on TV by men
so powder-white, so gravely coiffed, so wholly lard,
it was a difficult thing
not to perversely love all that flash
flood of magma streaming
from the vents of their mouths,
difficult not to itemize so much
gnashing, wailing, darkness, damnation, et cetera,
on insurance forms or income
tax returns or handmade Valentines
or even the crappy Batman ones I bought you
here in this hoard
of condoms and laxatives
where I come to look on you like another thwarted urge.