Lost in Parallax
by Logo Wei
Sure, we could get away from here,
go to the ice cream social of the soul
as some alternative homeostasis
to the long and porky ennui life tends to serve up
to its hostage-folk. But what use is a mirage?
The water rises to meet whatever new bridge we build,
and the diopter of hindsight elucidates
the measure of the error. We end up sorely missing
what we squandered in the parallax. Yesterday,
my good friend wrote me. Yesterday,
The Paris Review tendered another rejection
of my manuscript. I replied to both,
but I suspect the addresses and letters
got confounded. That is to say, “Dear Jack.
I apprehend that you again misapprehend my earnest fable.
Rest assured, that notion is blooming
in a reciprocal light: your formulaic
communication I will be unable to include
in my future issues.” That is to say,
“Dear The Paris Review, I envy nothing about
your situation. Dire! Do write back to update. Best luck
as you try to escape the french press of your discontent.
P.S., Winter has given me a clean flat.
Ciao.” Jack hangs. What a strain it would be to hang,
professionally, that is, criminals for their acts.
In search of what? Always swinging the cross
like an ax. Set and spit-shine the scaffold beam,
the baffled old routine. Prep the perhaps blasé load
to pass into passé ice cream socials of the soul
with a heigh ho. Here we go. Up. Down.
Down. Heigh ho. Winter’s shrill cantos hiss
at my fingers. Naturally, I cuss out Ezra Pound.
Are fascist ghosts captive audiences?
A man leaving home with only one glove
is less a man than he is a goose, they say.
Always it goes this way—the slow pudding of morning
making me forget my things. My therapist suggests
that I am confabulating again. Psychopharmacology
is fascinating, demonstrably. But I’ve stopped
taking the mental rentals he advised, concurrent to
avoiding ice cream socials of the soul (see above).
He is a prime conversationalist. However,
he has miniscule eyes, he ignores
the greatest teachings of Baudrillard and de Beauvoir,
and enjoys critiquing my greatest endeavors—
“Capers.” Still, he is arch. And I appreciate the game.
Yet, I suppose we all have a Kurtz or two
in our lives we magnify a little unduly.
Heigh ho. Twice daily, I understand the door
to be knocked upon by some étranger,
but eternally find nobody there but the spiders
whose textiles I have declined to scour
going on some time now. My landlord
is displeased with my general hebetude.
But we share this world, with its no shortage
of testosterone and atrocity. So why now are we
so affronted it’s got up the grit to push back,
to liquidate what passes for good intentions?
I told him, “I just like how the spiders build their maps,”
right before the line went defunct. “Hello?”
He must have gotten lost in the parallax.
I did not hear his reply; no chance
to tell him that the truest answers lie in women,
about whom so little had been said.
