for Nada

Sounds to me like Nicanor Parra when what I really mean is more like
my coughing roommate's badgering me to admit in some poem
he didn't sleep with the Brooklyn "slut" you dreamed about I nodded assent
thoughts elsewhere specifically on the phone worried
someone I'd let down would call & berate me or beg me to do whatever

it is I was supposed to have done I realize everyone I know wants
something from me involving time or money neither of which I have
having "invested" it all in love last night fell asleep 7:30ish
early anyway & woke 11 hours later having dreamed I'd finished
every task I ever took on in life & was now vacationing along the Russian

River Larry Fagin had a TV show everyone was watching I could finally
see it 3:00-6:00 a.m. but it was purely slapstick skits ending in fisticuffs
bored of this I wandered out into a meadow where above me a huge balsa wood
airplane was brought down by someone's rubber band crashed into a tree
passengers leaping into chlorinated pool "they wanted to be relieved

of flight" I woke soon after thought to write it all down instead "found
myself" thinking of you "even the emanants I use have been given the semblance of the living
within and without the imaginary" as Alan writes
against "the common language of critique" which A claims never accounts
for daily human behavior for instance me lying in bed masturbating thinking

of one photo of you in particular taken recently perhaps not so beautiful
as others you've sent but how anyway I most remember you "the images
want to emerge" as tho we wrote any of us to render any elsewhere
like spirit world more authentic than doing breakfast dishes say shorts
cum-stained groggy pre-caffeinated Chris hacking away in other room checking

his email an hour later I'm on the F train reading the letters of Abelard
& Heloise which Douglas suggests are medieval forgery he spells it
"midevil" thick w/20th century bias it's odd to think anyone might prefer
one century to another academic specialists oddly dressed hunchbacked from
years of poring over primary secondary & tertiary texts I love that word

"tertiary" it looks like it should be a certain kind of bird maybe parrot-
green w/yellow orange red & blue markings I wonder why no theory
accounts for the odd hallucination any grouping of letters might make
manifest I'm probably just ignorant of it some French theorist no doubt
has written on this the impulse to write on everything over everything "the

primacy of writing" my co-worker Elizabeth arguing on the phone as I write
pisses me off can't hear myself think "tomorrow night I go out to
Long Island for the satyr" is that right she means something to do w/Passover
it sounded like "satyr" now she's rustling papers I'm seething she blurts
"whether I have money" most argument reducible to economics like how

class consumes the Buffalo Poetics List these days it's true if I had any
I wouldn't be here at work trying to ignore Elizabeth's kvetching I'd be
w/you in an inner tube on the Russian River or at least writing
more vividly about it or about you I'd rather write about you but it
exhausts me realizing we've another five days apart after six months after

our whole lives spent on with & through others "where have you
been all my life!" as tho it or anything mattered
in this world the world of writing world written into existence
out of its own absence "absent-mindedly" scrawled into this
notebook I'll close now having in your absence only everything still to say