Anonymous
Well this is the weirdest and most incorrect comment ever.
(To be fair, only the second thing is actually not true. Poetry is pretty goddamn subjective)
I kept leaving my warm room to wander the streets as if something night happen that way. Nothing did, or many things did, and they slid right on past me like oily-scaled fish. The whole place, the day and the night, were like a dream. But not a good dream or a bad one—a confused and muffled type where you keep waking and then drifting back off, never sure where you are or what’s real.
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I saw men in their underwear dancing around in a circle, despite the unseasonably cold weather, sporadic rain. A crowd had gathered and was clapping. Just as I passed, all the men ripped down the last of their clothing and held their genitals happily, or let them spring out into the night. People screamed with delight. They had been waiting for this moment for a while, and I just chanced across while it was happening. For a moment I felt an odd kind of lucky. But I just kept moving.
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Everywhere around me, tongues uttered nonsense. That was the most dream-like quality of it all, the almost silence—noise without meaning. I can’t remember a word of French, not when I actually hear it. I can speak it sometimes, a few words here or there, but it’s desperate. A man pissing in the bushes on one well-lit stree kept saying “Sorry, sorry,” (“Desole,” I guess I know at least one word) and I said it was okay, no problem, in French—at least I think it came out French, I can’t remember now. I really wanted him to know I didn’t care, but I’m not sure why. He was drunk.
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Everywhere I went, I can’t emphasize enough, there were crowds and crowds of people, music from so many different locations. I couldn’t even follow any song to its source. And I seemed to be the only one alone—in face, maybe I was. There would be swarms of them—people, or something like people—and then suddenly nothing, long stretches of dark. But never another person alone.
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At one point, a car was backing slowly down a long drive littered with families. Everyone else was walking the opposite direction, swerving out of the way. I was following its path, so I was in no danger. I stayed with the car for a while, so that it felt as if its headlights were drawing me forward. When it finally found an exit, I was lonely and envious, betrayed.
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I stopped at many restaurants, but I couldn’t read the menus out front, so I wouldn’t go inside. But I paused to read each one carefully as if I were really considering it. I was so hungry, but not brave. Not ashamed to not be brave, though. No thoughts, not then, just muddled feelings in my brain.
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At the carnival, there were these booths for plucking stuffed animals with a giant claw. I wanted to stop, to have something to do, but that game is for children. I was good at it when I was young, the only game I was good at.
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I used to say: “The trick is to not want anything specific. You’ve just got to grab at whatever you can get.”
screw Paris and screw Israel, both for very different reasons but to the same degree of hatred.
with more than a full scholarship. Like, they’ll pay me.
New York versus St. Louis? Paying versus being paid?
Why am I having to make this decision?
