It Is Impossible to Be Private, Modernly
It amazes me the Midas hustle
to make anything a job
so long as you have the gumption
and by gumption I mean the means
my lover has a friend and by friend
I think he means a former lover
who was a phone sex operator
for men into tickle porn which I guess
means men who get off on the illusion
of the most primal laughter
I have a friend myself who writes
scene by scene synopses of films
like Cliffs Notes I guess for students
who don’t want to watch movies
but still need to know about them
it is counterintuitive to me
that in the age of mechanical reproduction
the reproduction would be words
neither comforting nor disturbing
I acknowledge that everything we have
is a simulation of something else
that most work is making content or a machine
or making other people work
last night we had dinner with an old friend
of my lover’s which I do mean here platonically
she is a woman newly engaged to another
woman who is rich enough that I knew
not to ask about her work
which is hard what else is there
to talk about with strangers
thank god all of us at least are gay
thank god the real friend could tell us about
her new enterprise as a lawyer
for a cannabis operation selling lollipops
and cookies and the very flower itself
we call it flower here I love it here
she says everything is legal and if I want
to be alone I go to the end of my block
and am alone
White Noise Machine
For several years, the years
immediately preceding instant even
dial-up connectivity, I would
nearly nightly tiger balm my feet
and walk upon my father’s back
to knead the knots left from his
workday, the many hours
he spent upright soldering switch
to wire to forge the guts
of air conditioners. Very rarely
in those years did I attend
to any artificial coolness
passing through a given room
and consider whether I had
my father to thank for that—
certainly I neglected the weak fan
of his childhood, a child then
myself, my curiosities selfish,
undistractable fixations,
digging around in solitude for years
at a rock I thought was not
a rock but a dinosaur fossil,
and when I found it was
(surprise) no bone, I felt the stone
fall through me, pointless crag
I spent recess roughly ages nine
to ten excavating. What passes,
passed? Friendship for one.
The countless occupations
of territories, our armament
and bombing of different
childhoods for another, where other
children, I imagine, were inventing
their own desires for both preciser
and more extravagant ways of looking,
though safety and unsafety, of course
make relative our notions
of extravagance and precision.
I think about my father as a boy
kicking takyan, a hackey-sack
of burlap sewn around old rice,
the oily rainbow of a rooster’s feather
fixed into the tip,
kicking, kicking, dreaming
about what I wonder,
while from my Lolo’s candy shop,
The Cascades are singing Listen
to the Rhythm of the Falling Rain,
American doo-wop that lands
in a Cebuano alley eight years
after climbing the U.S. charts,
Lola Rosie sipping Coca Cola
from the bottle. Meanwhile
in America, I’m pretty sure
we have arrived at the frontier
of I’d Like to Teach the World
to Sing, the horizon is a mountain
verdant and vaguely anywhere
from which what we call the West
begins. We begin with white women
joined eventually by a sea of others
who want to buy the world a Coke.
And who exactly is the world?
The multi-culti octave of a product
is somewhere I can go to now
immediately, if I am curious I simply
plunk the impulse into my
consciousness machine, the market,
the surveillance apparatus
I am each day tethered more
completely to. I paw and draw
my thumb down with desire
to know, because I want to
and I can, because information originates
with the skin’s encounter,
my father beneath my feet,
the rock I apprehended
with my hands to see the whole of,
the men I worshipped wandering
the Walmart underwear aisle as a boy,
my arm outstretched to them,
as if through a window on a roadtrip.
Sound, picture, feeling: the feeling
beneath the guzzling of a product
is the conviction of an elsewhere.
I don’t know how I got here,
I remember my father saying
once to me—we were together
on a porch swing in Virginia
at the lip of the house my family
has rented for two decades.
I was less a child then, my failures
by this point blinking into clarity,
like the fireflies we watched tessellate
the dusk, my father’s air conditioner
factory now a manufacturer for those
fan controls we use to cool computers.
What keeps the network breathing.
Who tells us it is healthy to desire
the mirage and not what is before us.
What do you think you want to be
when you grow up, my cousin asked me
the first time I visited the Philippines,
Archaeologist I said, what about you.
I think I’d like to be a receptionist
at a hotel in America, she said.
The border of the possible,
I can never fully understand,
is subject to conditions of who
vacations and who is vacationed upon,
the work and siege we do
or do not live in. I think about the places
I go I’m surely dusted after.
Who cleans, who eats, who manages
and who makes, who fabricates
the air conditioner, who daydreams
in its cool. What systems are in place,
my father’s tubes and breathbox,
for his apnea, for example,
made in China, where the company
sends him increasingly
to work now, because the cheaper
labor, where the parts
are made also for my own
white noise machine,
the little palace of artificial air,
or real air rather,
rendered artificially into sound.
The thing I have the luxury
of switching on to dream.
