American Mandala (2009)

CIRCLE OF CONSUMPTION


SELF PORTRAIT

THE REMOTE

I came across a man who could not find his remote.
Nor could he approach his own TV
in vain he looked under sheets, couches, piles of coats,
in vain! in vain looked he.

I don't trust, he said, the laws of science.
There's many things it will not see
and in refusing to acknowledge blind spots,
no vision can be genuine;
it's all either waves or particles, depending on whom you ask,
and things disappear;
commercials are endured;
as the TV has no knobs to turn,
and the remote is lost, all lost, said he.

As he babbled he was lifting cushions all the while,
and I, so wearious of watching
his futile rummaging, did make to leave

and later in my pocket
found it.

I want to write about the illusion of control. That is one of my mind’s focuses. We’re trained by loud voices to respond. I’ve got a loud authoritative voice that gets results.
I can make words seem true the way I say them - they even sound true to me. My deep voice is like a big set of bellows powering an instrument vast and glorious and God- the devil that He is -- hath given me a tone-deaf ear and inclination towards laziness which prevents and prevented and will prevent me from bothering to examine and master the intricacies of this amazing instrument. I use it as infrequently as possible and it closes up on me in irked reprisal. When I, for example, finally speak during a day off from work, to the cashier at the drug store, my voice comes out as a surprise to us both. Where most voices come and go, like little chirps, my deep voice drops onto the floor with a flat slapping sound, staying there. All words tend to lose their meaning when I speak them. My voice is a needle that scratches each record it plays, morphing the singer’s voice into mine, riddling the once-clean margins with my random notations, my boredom, my longing, my sloth. I spit out the crumpled remains of tapes I’ve played, mixes for long drives back and forth to college upstate, blazing too much lazy herb, lots of b’s: burbbly, bubbly babble until I can’t understand my own voice when I hear it on someone else’s answering machine.