Nocturnal Decision

nocturnal decision
(nothing’s ever quite as evil as banality itself)


four or is it quarter past
I need my lenses in or that clock’s
this smudgy round thing hanging on the wall
Like five or ten after I can’t tell
you sure it’s four instead of three?
Yeah because
I can’t remember why exactly but
I know it’s way past three
That citronella candle
doesn’t smell like such a good idea
I mean it did before I’m tired of it now
It’s so light at least as far as I can tell
I hardly smell it
Maybe your deviated septum
I will say those fados numbers
get depressing hearing them all night
maybe I’m remembering that really sad time
I saw the guy used to clean here
who went home to belo horizonte
and it was all so far away and it’s stupid
I say that, far away from what,
he didn’t look unhappy, I just sank into
how old I’m getting and jealous of him
I don’t think now I’ll ever get away from here
at this point any place that isn’t in America
Tell me, every day it feels a little more like prison
My career if I can even call it that’s been
in the shit so long, and then one pretty fair
escape route opens up and closes fuck
let’s not get into that
They asked the Old Man somewhere
maybe just before he went, did
he have any regrets the way his life played out
he said I don’t have anything except regrets
The Old Man did a lot from just regretting everything
in my opinion, still
It’s nice like this just touching and not
working up to anything ambitious
Yeah. Used to be my favorite hour for it too
I think it’s better like just after five or six
all the daytime crap comes off you
I remember sad things too
but I can’t think about refusing
feelings like that any more, I did
Oh so did I but fuck it
face it
let’s not talk about it but--
So sad sometimes, I go from halfway
grateful I’m still breathing into
wishing that I wasn’t faster than—
You know something, fuck it, like you say
Things happen in dreams
sometimes more like, who is that director
from the time the Secret Speech what was it
1954 or 1956
I can spell it but I can’t pronounce it why
Last week I never had a dream
Oh yeah if I remember all that happened
in the 60s, I think he liked boys
He did like boys I know that much
but what they charged him with was called
‘incitement to suicide’
Never ever look for irony it just comes up
and hits you in the face
Monday teaching though,
lapsing off and almost had to slap myself
what you dream when you can’t stay awake
and I really wouldn’t care but if I fell asleep
enough that they could see it
You should let it go it’s human
Nothing bad would happen I know that
But let me ask you
why does being human still suggest that
human beings should be understood
like I should care if every one of them including me
all breathed in some type of cyanidic vapor
at the same time and cleared out all together
Where you really are and where your mind goes
gets all twined up when it fluctuates like that,
like when a kid has to sit through a Catholic mass
with all those fags up one aisle down the other
with the catamite swinging that tumor-looking
incense burner by a chain, you ever find yourself
I mean from ghoulish curiosity that made you peek in
not the mass, I’m thinking more those Madame Tussaut
figurines across the wall on one side that continue down
the other
Never really saw anything Catholic close up besides
a Catholic person coming out or going in some place called
Church of Saint No Vagina or something
All the women in those covens wear a wedding ring
it’s really taking mental illness to a majestic level
I know enough to know they say they’re all married to
the Savior some such shit, in which case—
Makes him worse than Joseph Smith except I don’t think
they think Jesus fucks them really what I started saying
Yeah, the little kid who’s passing out from all those incense fumes
A couple times, I had to take my aunt
Which aunt?
You say that like I have a warehouse of them, Sarah did you
I’ve forgotten who you met and who you didn’t
She’d croaked I’m almost sure by that time
I mean really, darling, she forget she was a Jew,
And furthermore a rich Jew and she gives it all away
To shack up with an entire nuthouse only dykes
dressed up like penguins get admitted, I mean with
only one exception, that’s the local—

up and can’t quite shake of dreamland
I had a kind of pineapple dream and how I got
to be in Abyssinia and lecturing on montesquieu
in pennsylvania at exactly the same time
the dream part never stayed in the place it started
or the next place that it went
it mixed up everything inside my head
you feel like a cigarette
we finished the last pack or else I’m mixing
up a dream the same way you did
so far down it feels like going for another one
it’s just behind that table near the blown up
stills but even pulling on a pair of pants
this pillow’s greasy from something wonder what
I know nothing I did since we put the new ones on
involved the use of lubricants you sleeping
still awake or what?
I’m almost in the place we just were speaking of
I closed my eyes a tiny beat too long
and started being here in bed and
dreaming about money back and forth
in money dreams I spend more than I ever really do
you want this light off? when I dream a dream that
has me in it which isn’t every time
I have no physical or moral defects I almost always
hate to listen to myself or anybody else describe their dreams
but I remember someone telling me
that everybody in a dream is you I mean not you or me
specifically but how would that be real and this be
something else unless the wiring behind a person’s forehead
is stronger than the world and that would mean
real life is more or less the way we’ve always wanted it
but all we recognize as real is what we turn it into
and really real is really some perfect incandescent place
so what we wish for when we dream is either what we really want
or everything we don’t believe we want at all
a kind of hell that’s always sickening but only on the verge
where it slips off sometimes into the unbearable
that’s the kind of thing none of us will ever know I hope
you realize that
of course I do
besides no matter if it’s perfect in our dreams
and really the inferno in a world we only say we’e sure
exists at all
or we’re so fucked up at birth that in the place
we think we’d like to be when we’re awake and
crave the hell we live in when we sleep or it’s the
other way around, there’s either way at least a small
inelegant eel or something like a coral snake that
slithers in the corners of our dreams and if we live
where we spend most time and frankly I feel certain
that the world exists and not a world inside our skulls
some little coy snake of la dolce vita
anyway let’s go to sleep now or wake up now if that’s
really what we do at almost five a.m.
I feel exhausted though I could just now be waking up
I never once expected happiness I’m even through
with wishing anything besides at least one can of Coca Cola
when I crawl out of bed tomorrow
or whatever awkward thing we all should say instead
when tomorrow disappeared at midnight and has been today
for hours
I try not to wish for anything myself right now though
I can’t help but wish
I’d gone downstairs for cigarettes before I ran
completely out of them and out of energy
I’m still awake enough to do it if you want me to
No, that’s like pressure if I say it that way
Just forget it while I throw at least a t-shirt and
a pair of shorts this minute I mean fuck
I want them just as bad as you.