I SING TO LOVE SINGING
Justin Marks

The portal to the world is birth and therefore a woman. Pitch black, then light. Somewhere a voice. You go searching. Enter and get kicked out of an abandoned school for wayward children. The internet glitches. A woman you once called step mother steals the entirety of your father’s estate. The way from despair is: come back! Watch these birds catch fish and steal them from each other. Petty and cruel. Natural. A light to live in. Broken bones set a little wrong.  

Someone dies. The relationship gets one-sided. A friend suggests I write more prose. I hear repeatedly as I drift to sleep on a bus traveling through New Jersey 

Wound
     factory 

Wound
     factory

Wound
     factory

I hear it sung, the singer absent. A distance I want to bridge. The gray ocean on a flat horizon. Consequences piling up.

Jack Spicer wanting “to write a poem as long as California.” I, too, want to write all the time, or as much time as it would take to write a poem as long as a state. As in, when I’m sleeping, I like to know I’m sleeping. My stride making strides in the distances I seek to explore. Shifting states of persistence. A light rain. I didn’t know that was supposed to happen but now it has and whatever knowledge I did or didn’t have is irrelevant. The direction is what makes the difference. The poem going on as long as it can go.

I don’t drink. An improbable series of events in a dream produces the sensation of a hangover. The narrative arc feels novel until I wake up. And so our sour state goes. Parents who were our whole worlds become average people who didn’t know any better, and whom we grieve. Rinse the bath scum of our former selves from the tub. Luxuriate in skincare rituals. Build strength not for power but endurance. Turn to our children and say, someday this will all be yours. 

Traveling on a train every run down little town we pass looks like a great place to live. Abandoned industrial buildings collapsing, lakes filled right up to the lip of the land. It makes you want to do the things country kids do–go fishing, ride BMX bikes down dusty roads to those abandoned buildings and throw rocks at what’s left of the glass in the windows. A nowhere world where we can lose ourselves in fleeting moments of presence. Clueless enthusiasm. Apocalypse no more. 

Now what. Someone I’m supposed to know is yelling at me about art I might use for a book I haven’t written. My true lover the phone gets up and turns itself on. I pick up a book by Etel Adnan called There and in it she says, “The ‘you’ is always the ‘I’ so we inhabit each other in our irremediable singleness.” The sound is accurate. Only my phone knows my true location, ethereal and lovelorn, floating across the moons of hell, nodding my head to an unheard rhythm, a beat I thought was only beating for me. It also beats for thee.

The units divide. There is only one unit. The pursuit of pleasure to the point of eradicating the self. I put on glasses to read, a new need. Bag of frozen peas on my swollen knee. The pursuit of simplicity, a life of satiety. Wicker basket, gingham liner. A dozen eggs balanced on top. Fairytales can only mean so much. Can only mean it all. Superstitions like throwing spilled salt over your shoulder to ward off bad luck. Sleeping on your right side to help your heart keep beating. Feedback we continually seek. A need to sever.

It’s very still. I’m not sure where I am. If you’ve seen these words before, others are likely to follow. I’m eating crumbs off dirty dishes in a sink. Galaxies made of green peas. It’s dusk. An ambulance many miles away is crossing the flat expanse of land between us. I see its red sirens turning. A disarming sight. Silence. Light coming into view then passing. My lack of location. Utterly alone and unafraid.

The title “I SING TO LOVE SINGING” comes from a line in Alice Notley’s poem “Five Ravishments” (Early Works, Fonograph 2023)