So Far
Once you’re fully inside the Constant Symbol and everywhere you look the synchronicities are increasing and accelerating you think oh no this must be death but maybe not so until you discover the source but now mathematics and physics look like the mere work of a factotum who can’t see anything. Well, you had no choice but to come along this way and look at several methods for thinking yourself out of it like the subjectivity of a purely personal multiverse— like social media from Erebus— and then you ask Chief where’s the internet and he surprises you and says North or South Carolina or something which is just a metaphor for something much deeper and scarier and immaterial which involves Truth and Logic Deconstructed and so you say One Thing and you think your childhood church is going to put a hit on you— maybe one day I’ll wake up and be alive— like that summer at Mizzou studying French and popping Xanax outside Shattered and then drinking and dancing all night— and embrace all the forms so formerly thought to be so far apart. On the Steps Adam the Jeweler and I were sitting outside Starbucks listening to the beautiful muzak of an old rock legend around whom many people had passed. “Do you think he was jinxed,” I asked. Typically wise, Adam responded, “Aren’t we all?” Look, I’m trying to create a classification here. All sense and rhetoric are exterior. They had me see a shrink at NYU because of my voracious drinking and right away I knew he was cool because we both smoked in his office and once during a session as I was going on and on and mentioned that my father liked to tell stories he broke in and said, “So you’re telling me you’re a storyteller.” And when I asked him if he thought I should stop drinking he was pretty vague and noncommittal. Because he knew things had to run their course and that I was required to become fully daemonized. You know, it just occurred to me right now that I might have come so far that I could benefit from some assertive self-talk. I think it works once you’re coming out of purgatory. Maybe I’ll send this to the New Yorker. Don’t scoff! Oh frenemies, maybe I’ll place all this on the steps of Wash U.! To Whom it May Concern I cannot bear to bring my unconscious truth out into the light. I think people would think I looked like an asshole, a maniac. There is the sense, though, that I don’t know what I’m saying. When I was down at Mizzou making a feeble attempt at studying physics—I knew it was my last chance to fuck around—I was getting the answers egregiously wrong but I kept telling myself around that time that I was inside the primary process. Maybe the unconscious is bipolar and the conscious is paranoid persecution. Maybe I’ve created a new diagnosis. Oh, I’m renouncing everything. All that matters is the person to whom I’m addressing this. Upon Fame You’ve got to get to where you just don’t care if anyone’s listening. The strongest note is the one which was never sent. As for me and the Old Man—once I was hit with the spirit I quit listening to anything he’d ever said. Curiously, after Diana got with Red she asked me to write her a letter. All I can say on that subject is that the one she got was the seventeenth draft. Incredible Apologia One can’t help but feel after one’s written a pretty good poem that one’s gotten away with something. Like when I was on the 14th floor of Barnes-Jewish and sang out so loudly and then had to be given some Haldol and Ativan. So hard to sing at the very end of the world. And Lord, I wanted to be back in time but I didn’t want this. Bio: Matthew Freeman's seventh collection of poems, I Think I'd Rather Roar, was just published by Cerasus Poetry. He holds an MFA from the University of Missouri-St Louis.
Fevers of the Mind 