WHAT TO MAKE OF IT?

(2/2)

I’m at a bar and we’ve decided that two types of art and two types of talking and they’re jokes and poetry. The joke cuts to the heart, forces a perspective on the intended audience. It almost startles you into agreeing. It’s sharp, on point. The platonic ideal of the joke is argumentatively bulletproof. Poetry, instead, is about nothing and everything and so cuts to the soul. Ambiguous, allowing projection from the recipient, interpretation, meandering. It opens a space, jokes slam the door. There’s a rhythm to the alternation. I decide that I’m not interested in funny these days, it feels cheap. It almost feels violent. But this opposite, the me in relation to her, it becomes the opposite of violence, it leaves you at the tip of a knife. Jokes are violent and poetry is surrender.

Remember your image from a minute ago? The game is to keep it on the back of your eyelids, burn it into the guard of your retinas, so that you can remember the feeling when you’re sober again. When there’s nothing in front of you, and you can only dimly feel the feelings you had just yesterday, when you called and said you needed to make something about everything that just happened. A few days later, those feelings are gone. You go out and produce new ones, but those previous ones get all swirled up, and instead of gestating, digesting, you’re left with new topsoil, totally inextricable. The old feelings are ahistorical, the new ones are infinitely complex, a ball of yarn mauled by a cat on acid. You’ll never untangle that yarn. It’s kinked beyond repair.

(<- last)