Poem and Short Fiction

Poem for the Apocalypse

[wpaudio url=”/audio/6_13/Crandall.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″]

Everything’s cute these days
like that Liz Taylor stencil shirt
at Houston and Broadway I want

even though the artist has completely
disappeared, or like discovering Jack Spicer’s
detective novel in the library stacks

Why don’t you people tell me
about these things? Why can’t it all be
like Nadine and The Price of Salt?

She simply screamed the title, shrieking YOU HAVEN’T
READ THAT? in efficient lesbian musician pitch
(close to how people type in all caps these days)

For that, I was grateful. I wish reading still felt dangerous
and edgy (maybe it does) as in the next page could
change my life, catapult me off to a future

more invigorating. Lately the billboards (like Lee
Edelman) swear there is no future, that the whole world
is coming to an end. Their apocalypse is very cheap-font

doomsday precious to me, familiar how much we all just
want life to matter, or to go away. I still circle the days
I workout and X-out the days I work, as if

marks make the difference of a day, my modest code of
nominal production. I mean, what do I know about figures?
For instance, Diana hates how I both pay and don’t pay

the bills but she finds it charming when I’m fussy
It’s just cute how the world is ending, how it makes
everything funny, how it seems like this poem I’m writing

has already been written. Cute, how I wrote that
and thought, “been Waldmanned,” then “Ben Waldman.”
Lately I think I’m a man, or like I could be one

I just need to pick a surgery and stick to it
How Libran and conventional of me, I know
Let’s just say I have hope for the man in me yet

I’ve lived my whole life in signs and symbols
Hell, I’ve even been to lots of gay bars called “Heaven!”
I know for sure queers don’t have ends of the world

That’s too gloomy and we’re too cute,
like everything lately, I mean the rapture of things!

Last night the ceiling caved in by the back door
and my barefoot girlfriend stepped on a little moth
She dropped the seltzer and it sprayed high onto the kitchen wall

I’ll find anything amusing
It’s been raining for days
I won’t ever fix my car

maybe I’ve almost got it figured out
maybe I’ve almost collected the sacred set of keys
slayed all of the dragons made the most of

what I’ve got and got the least for my trouble
maybe I’ll bow out now before the world
catches on fire and empties out, basically before it all
becomes so very dull and predictable, you know, “less cute”

AUTOPSY REPORT

We’re under attack. Well, technically you are. There’s been some raiding, some looting. I just didn’t want to alarm you. As a couple we don’t respond well to space invasions or boundary crossings. We’re different people after all, with our own lives, our own interests. Don’t forget how during each session, our Buddhist therapist praises us for our individual independence.

But about the robberies: it’s me. I’m the thief. I’ve been stealing right under your nose. I mean, are you even paying attention? You seem so blissfully unaware. It’s almost enviable. I know by the end I’ll be forced to tell you. I wish we could talk to our therapist about this.

Last Monday, he declared that I’m slowly overcoming my problem with shelving, a process he explains primarily through a quick series of fey gestures aimed at the bookshelf that houses his energy turtle. Usually I spend the session interpreting this seated tai chi and then, right before I cry, we all talk about how I nearly killed myself in self-defense, about how I need to address my destructive pattern of compartmentalizing traumatic life experiences. No matter how scripted all of this is, he’s right: in truth, I have overcome. Largely because I finally realized how ridiculous it all was, as if saving pain for later like slowly-rotting leftovers is some way to live.

To be fair, my recovery hasn’t exactly been easy, not a wholly triumphant recuperation. The more progress I make, the more I seem to ransack your mind. Frankly baby, I’m robbing you blind.

I only take the beautiful ones. My petty larceny is reserved for what pre-dates me, our meeting, our falling in love. I can’t help it, I’m forever pillaging what’s good in your memory. I’ve taken so much already: the daily vowel sounds of sexual harassment you inspired as a young North American barmaid in Greece. How to burn your leg on a motorcycle without flinching. Dramatic lesbian love triangles. What you’ve always known (and cleverly deduced) about Monika Treut. You, your first boyfriend, and the 8-hour Hamlet. I think you’d be impressed. Only someone who knows you as well as I do could curate such a breathtaking collection.

Over the past week, by reckless necessity, my stockpile has expanded into yet another storage space. I pinched San Francisco while you were in the shower Wednesday morning. And yesterday, I finally got my rope around that MG Midget the color of eggshells your Dad fixed up for you when you were seventeen. Oh, and I took your virginity, again. Well, you losing your virginity. I mean, how are we going to afford this is one question. Storage isn’t cheap.

I worry you might not forgive me for these last ones, but the problem is once they’re gone, they’re gone. You don’t even know you had them. Stealing from you is the slickest scam I’ve ever run. Don’t take this the wrong way, but you’re an easy mark. So easy, I’m hoping I’ll eventually get bored. I’m hoping I’ll leave you with something left to talk about. I’m hoping I can sit on my hands and resist the urge to take. But right now I really want that soulful discussion you had with Eileen Myles at the back of that bar.

Eventually I know I’ll want to come clean, to confess. I’m getting there, which is why I think our therapist can help. He’s said, “Release is relief.” Of course, you’ll understand why I had to take the time when we discovered someone had plagiarized that line of yours, when I said, “Only a monster would steal from you.” I didn’t really have a choice, for obvious reasons.

Yesterday I told you about the time I reread Delta of Venus while four of my closest friends embarked on a lazy, Sunday afternoon orgy. “It was the 90s after all,” I said in closing, like you would have said. Except that it was actually the time you reread Delta of Venus at the lazy fourway you organized and then swiftly abandoned. This time you just laughed in agreement, saying, “In the 90s, everything was possible.” Then your eyes dulled for a minute, as if you wondered if you had any evidence at all for that kind of a statement.

I know at first I told our therapist that I felt like I didn’t have enough space in this relationship. That you’re older and have more life experience. That your personality takes up too much room. But now you’re becoming more and more reserved, so quiet. There’s no breathless monologue waiting for me when I get home from work. No more twenty-minute memories to make us late for dinner with friends-a dinner which in all honesty might become something I’ll want later, all to myself. Let’s face it, who’s to say I won’t start grabbing things right after they happen? And then what? Our days will simply become a matter of subtraction-of loss-and everything we do will just be another theft waiting to happen, more temptations drawing me out and into the moment. Baby, I do. I worry I’ll forget you.

Truth is, stealing’s not so wrong. It’s just one way to get closer, an understandable byproduct of my somewhat unconventional drive toward intimacy. That’s what you always said you wanted, remember? For me to get up on the autopsy table and bare it all, let you sift through it. The autopsy table was our gruesome metaphor for a while, for our proud, self-aware venture into complete vulnerability, openness, surrender. It was such an unnatural struggle at first, but now we share everything and the incisions don’t sting as much, don’t make me want to hide.

Don’t you remember about the autopsy? Baby, don’t you remember?