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| Anna Moschovakis [CoffeeHousePress] |
[prologue]
The
problem is I don’t care whether I convince you or not
In a
perfect world I would be able to convince you of this
Everybody
should always have a position on everything
We
take our positions with us, like folding stools to the beach
The
stools, when we abandon them, fade to the same color
And I
will go with you to the end of this argument
As I
have gone with you to the beach
And
the man with the cooler will walk by selling streets
And we
will pick a street to carry us home
We’ll
pick the one with the best-loved name
A
flower or a state or October the 12th
Because
each date must be celebrated somewhere in this world
Each
moment of courage or loss or revolution
When
something pushed something and something fell down
The
Tragedy of Waste [excerpt]
Suppose
that instead of killing Germans
the
organization had been directed
to the
killing of malnutrition, slum dwelling,
shoddy
clothing, infant mortality, occupational disease, starved
opportunity,
illiteracy, and ignorance
for example
for example
Death
As a Way of Life [excerpt]
Man dies, that is nothing.
but
when
a woman sits on the edge of her bed, in front of a window, and lets
down her red silken hair, threading it through her delicate fingers
as it cascades in waves down her porcelain back, which reflects the
moon’s silvery mood, so that any man privileged enough to catch a
glimpse of her falls directly to his knees, blind, lost, panting for
breath, choking on words he can’t pronounce, starving for familiar
phrases he can no longer retrieve from their world of abstraction now
that the real thing is
manifest before him, so that he vomits up his lunch, his excellent
breakfast, and the previous night’s dinner, disgusted with anything
he saw fit to consume before setting sight on this morsel of
perfection, and lies there in half-crazed ecstasy for three days and
three long nights, without food or water, his senses damaged to the
point of extinction, until he is on the verge of death, and the
moon’s high silver has fallen to dust, and nobody can help him so
nobody tries, and the woman is gone, and her hair is gone, and her
porcelain back is gone, and her slender fingers, and even her image
is gone, and still he has no regrets, and he welcomes death, invites
it, knowing as he’s never known anything before that his life wants
for nothing
now
that is something
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