48. Play and Play All Day

THE POET: 

Here, then, is this place – singular & banal

The last point now of where we are written to.

We are in a cafe, upstairs, in early spring rain. THE POET is trying to write, against a low volume of voices, a hum from various essential machines, & the irregular rhythms of newspaper pages turning & coffee spoons clinking. This is a common set of conditions, unmeant, unplanned, gently forceful - background contingency, like all geography.

CUSTOMERS:

Time to tell. Our movements are our own now

Moving in & out, Poet, from that universe

You write with.

                – But listen (we speak)

What mad, sad voices then are these?

A POET:

What is desired, for God’s sake?

ANOTHER POET:

What is to be made of your silence?

A THIRD POET:

What is worth being made memorable, and how do you get it?

A FOUTH POET, FROM A DISTANT TIME:

“Where are you taking me, and for what purpose?”

ALL FOUR POETS:

What you do, fails; what you don’t, fucks.

CUSTOMERS:

OK, true, let’s push this out then now –

If we’re ever to leave, you guys better

Stop licking each other’s pus, for what you’ve got

We’re told’s a privilege – then live it together now.

THE POET (BUT NOT IN OWN VOICE):

The very taking of chance

Inserts us into time – into

The present. To take a chance

Is to enter the moment in

Relation to it

               – it is, as

Musicians would say, a

Matter of getting in time, a

Matter of being with it.

FX: SOUND OF MOCKING LAUGHTER, FOLLOWED BY MISCELLANEOUS AND VARIED WATER SOUNDS INCREASING SLOWLY IN VOLUME THROUGHOUT UNTIL END

THE POET:

OK then this calls

For rapid improvisation

Out of the decaying categories of selfhood

Into constant fluid process

Escape now into the poem

Securing a non-delusory identity for ever.

A FOURTH POET:

“I can only say here

That a poem is never ‘THE’ poem

But only a small fragment

Of an infinite calculation.”