by Jeremy Schmall
Let me ask you a question, begin with a premise, underline a previous statement, footnote my next sentence. Okay, so if it isn’t what you’re after, then why continue this trembling on the canyon floor with answers protected by a gentle mouthful of spit? Loping across sad, brittle fields favoring my bad leg, composing an idiot dispatch to you in my head. Let’s consider the valuables we trampled on our march to power & the missing persons we’ve gaped at, gaping back at us from milk cartons in the bodega, which is the end of my patience, the beginning of my temper. What murders have we reasoned through, what apathy and distance, what a great time to sit on a sunny curb sipping an iced Coke. I sin deep into a Saturday night, then peer into the thin print on a page of news. Necessities impale the next day & waterways mucked with New York sewage linger through my downtime. When you failed to call me those four days I was overwhelmed with desire. Biting into a palmfull of cold turkey, thinking how the weather’s seasonal permutations somehow surprise & fail us. Now I’m slipping into a pair of sneakers and heading off. But beware: I am mindful of you pilfering our goodwill & how we live in a country that can’t decide to care is to retaliate with emotive hat wear. If you had the courage to provide me with answers, I could provide a number of questions. At a Korean restaurant near Union Square, sawing clean through established relations, thrust through an emergency exit downtown in an imaginary office building tumbling in an imagined emergency. Now when I hear sirens I turn away, I search the hot pavement for signs of life, I search the windows for significant others. I abandon the hope that I will succeed in halting the plans intended for me. I am only an administrator, absorbing the glare from an old computer screen, barking into a foul-smelling telephone, the day’s work stacked in piles around me.