From the Archives : The Invalid (Dec. 2011)

I stop listening to the music because, don’t you know, the music is fake.

I don’t want to type words here because you won’t — no, not what I mean

or what it feels like (I, too, am just guessing at whatever it was that was

meant) everywhere and already dust. Toiletries. I never had and continue

to not have the luxury of being optimistic, only what I’ve tricked myself into

a few eyelashes long — and goodnight, neither do you. O surgeon God,

the decision was made to have one grown in place, a spine, and then

again, these prosthetics of spirit that blur MRI imaging. So I hope I never

get stomach cancer or bleed internally. Schools of avant-garde physicians

publishing manifestoes against each other in every patient — one novel

cure at a time. Your genius my disability. Hapless prose of fate, I’m a natural

realist — really, all I do now is go lie down and watch too much YouTube

on the laptop on my chest — this infernal machine with the ultimate design

of toasting my nipple hairs. Wunderblock. One tool for making of money

and of poetry and masturbating with. Haunted by disgust as I am the idea

of my own skull. Actually, ghosts should be scared of me for there’s nothing

creepier than the living. Evil goobers. All those people you’ll never meet.

How beautiful (forget what I said and tell me you know what I’m talking about)

is the word Eternity — beautiful for all it gets so wrong, smoothbrains over

and spackles out. How you can say and feel the sound of you saying it

buzzing in your throat and head. How you can picture the word unwritten

in your head. Remember when people said it off-hand — this is taking forever

in your head. Beautiful. What does Death feel like in your head? Beautiful.

God, what I would if it weren’t for these old-timey bars my very attempt

to break out into the -nesslessness of space puts in place, sadly ridiculous

as was Rilke’s Panther — that’s pig iron words — I can’t play hoplochrism

no longer, only trope and cynicism, aberrations of course — but there is no

course (of course) so don’t call on me, please, Delusion, my Muse, I can’t

put makeup on the mannequin with my own face. But here — do take

some more fucking pixels, anything but the façade of the Villa Roseneck

sepulchral despite its pale Löwenzahn glow — conveying if anything

the banality of death for doctors, that place where I first learned by x-ray

how this was to be my life. And now again, today, that the prosthetic discs

have migrated out of place — like five-ton granite lids the puny archeologist

cracks off the sarcophagus. Thus the futility now of PT at the Waldfriede

Hospital where, funnily enough, I spent two weeks just as many years ago,

half those nights with fevers surpassing 41° C (105.8° F). Though it was later

determined I suffered from Mono., that was the Summer of the Swine Flu,

so they had me quarantined, soaking jaundiced with eyes swollen shut.

My parents were told it was not looking good — we have no clue what this is

despite our tests, his liver is close to failing. In my delirium still I managed

to mouth in my mind the poem I’d memorized earlier that Summer

and became my barometer of mental dissolution, prayer against death.

Rilke’s last notebook entry — no doubt massaged by himself the same as

by his editors into the shape of a poem — O come you, you last thing

we both acknowledge — our brains swollen with fever, his by tuberculosis

and mine this disease of youth. Though my situation was the opposite

of his admonition to himself in the final brackets as are usually included

with the poem. To not mix dying into this, in no shape or form abstract

what had once astonished him as a child. No, this was the child scheming

to dodge its end by rending the adult — reversing, erasing, pulling me

back into itself. This is who you stopped being, disappeared into the static

image of you at 20 years old. Every morning the sheets were changed

and empty glass liter bottles of water clinked away, as several times

the mattress was drenched through and switched out. Doctors, nurses

parents and girlfriend wore masks when visiting until they established

it wasn’t H1N1. I even recorded a goodbye message on my flip phone

on the balcony high in the pines, its area too narrow for a chair to fit.

I thought often of René — little older than me when he roomed in this

neighborhood at the Villa Waldfriede (now razed). Everywhere I look it’s

fucking Schmargendorf (and well doesn’t that name sound made-up?)

or some other kind of -dorf out where the Americans had their base

in West Berlin (the Berlin Brigade) — and where there’s an actual street

called Onkel-Tom-Straße. O brother, you were insufferable — though I fear

I am, too. Think of your self-inflicted legend. You said you picked a rose

and it pricked your finger and infected you — no earthly disease can kill

one of our ranks — so you died. And I will be dead, but not yet. And none

of this will matter. Though it did for a little while, to you and me. Reader,

so you want to know what it’s like? Look at this poem — all that’s not

it after its end. How far to keep reading until you begin again. To which

you respond no distance to speak of — once was more than enough.