Fictive Fractal
Look here at this line,
how it gives way to smaller,
shorter, deeper lines, buried
by nib and ink and brush and oil.
Each loving tumor rendered
in light and shade is a piece
of resistance of pure aesthetics.
Each roll sings a song
of decay, a mourning wail
that sounds like a bird’s wing.
This is one story.
All of reality is the daydream of a fictional
boy on St. Elsewhere: every television
fiction is connected. Near every.
When Friends watches Laverne & Shirley,
in their combined universe,
is it reality TV? Are Laverne
and Shirley fictions of a fiction
of Friends? When Charles Grodin
plays Himself in 1981 and in 1995
Phoebe and Ross watch it, does that
crack reality and mean that
Ross and Phoebs are real or that we
are imaginary?
What about poor Charles Grodin?
This is a story, but whose?
When I set a line down,
is it my hand or yours?
Tommy Westphall is made up,
but I’ve also only ever heard
stories
about Rodin and Ivan Albright.
I cannot touch this painting
and don’t know if it’s
really real. The rules don’t let me.
There’s an alarm and everything.
Hypothalamus
I woke up from a dream
about the installation of the Panopticon
in my childhood home
and could only think about
the angle of your jawbone
under my tongue,
the way your neck smells behind your
earlobe, and the slight give
of your hip before it returns under
my grip.
The television, its old glass eye
replaced with crystal, sees
the memory of the time
you flipped a car three times,
or when I nearly died
crushed by a truck on the highway.
Here, in bed, you show me
the tattoos you regret next to those
you don’t, and I tell you a list
of my favorite words based
on how they feel on my teeth.
I’ve never put tape
over the camera on my laptop,
preferring to blindfold myself.
The guards in the tower
at the center of everything
will know soon enough
if we fuck; your roommate
has already told her husband
and it was on Facebook
before either of us came:
smut efficiency.
I used to think I was clever
in the way that I played with time.
I made today and tomorrow
and yesterday the same Now,
like a sort of dazzled
chronoflage, meant to hide
everything in static.
By compacting all time
into a singularity of memory and dream
I could render myself so tiny
as to be nonexistent.
Until I learned about parallax,
about the way resolution
is only a matter of position:
how you see me
from where you are
is more true than any god,
any fucked-up black swan exegesis.
