Blank Generation

This is a brief experiment in multi-media poetry. A thought I had regarding the future of publishing as E-readers and "apps" take over the market...

A generation past,

blank by choice,

unlike our current blankness,

one of circumstance.

How many before?

The wasteland gave way

to the roaring twenties,

a Great Depression,

and finally a world war,

at the end of which appeared

the beats.

A pause between wars,

where the American Dream

was not shared by all,

not by those that saw past it.

It was the hippies who took over,

during the next war,

and it was all on television.

They could promise that the revolution

would not be televised,

but it was too late for that:

the Civil Rights Act 
had been signed,

the war ended troop by troop

and that generation wasted away

or else got rich in the end

until the boom went bust.

The apocalypse, now,

a bang indeed:

the whimper in the response--

ours to clean up,

ours to grow old with,

ours to fret away,

anxious, sleepless nights,

wondering at tomorrow.

Memories I may have had (what's left behind)

Here's a revision of the story from earlier today; I realized I was trying to tell two stories. I think this works a little better.

The house across the way mirrored ours in nearly every respect, forgetting the minor details. It was undersized, like ours. Yellow, to our blue. Stood on the corner, across from us. We climbed on the couch and stood watch most nights, no one going in, and no one coming out.

On the other corner, other children did the same: watching us; we came on weekends--in the fall and winter--thanksgiving, twice. Nearly always for the Christmas tree lighting, never in January or February, when icicles grew from the eves, and fell shattering in the drive way. In the spring, we'd come back, resume our post on the couch. And in the summer we were a regular fixture in the neighborhood, riding our bikes, exploring the empty trailer at the dead end of our block, taking turns at the diving board of the local pool. There was life in the blue house, for a time.

My brother and I had decided the yellow house across from ours was empty, finally, after years of faithful watching. Sometimes we would cross the street, walk the perimeter, with long jeans, ever mindful of ticks hiding in the overgrown grass. I never got closer than that until one day my girlfriend was visiting and we decided to poke around, discovered the back door unlocked and walked in, just like that. The house was empty, but abandoned--the floors sagged under the weight of forgotten ephemera--comic books, combs, the shattered glass carafe of a coffee maker, its black, L-shaped electronic frame nearby. Upstairs, overturned mattresses and emptied closets--sheets and sheets. Twenty minutes we spent, indulging our secret intrusion into a forgotten life. And then we too left.

Later, in Centralia, Pennsylvania, we visited an entire town that had been abandoned--it was collapsing into itself, the town--a fire raged underneath, from coal that stretched for thousands of acres, sinkholes forming, swallowing townsfolk, steam rising out of cracks in the earth. And when the town was bought out, the moving vans weren't big enough for everything--hard choices were made and what didn't make the cut was thrown into a stretch of grassy road that used to lead somewhere.

We lie awake at night sometimes, a generation born of baby-boomers, talking and not talking, but always the same fear--our dubious inheritance, homes full of years of acquired souvenirs--books and videos, sculpture, painting, bolts and bolts and bolts of fabric, half re-finished chairs, basements overflowing. And when they're gone, us left to sift and sift, make the hard choices, the wheat from the chaff, and leave the rest behind.

Someday

What does it mean,

to you, she asks?

This reading into

you always do?

I've been obsessed

with eternal return:

ever since I got stoned one day,

and convinced that I had been there

but before I did enough googling

to find a word for what I'd seen.

What does it mean?

Why the pursuit?

It doesn't mean anything,

but mind games,

and perhaps a little comfort

before I go to bed at night,

like warm milk and valerian root

or the prayers I would say as a boy

to that bearded thing

and the ritual that went with it,

to fight off imagined hordes

of crawling insects

swelling up from the basement

racing towards my bedroom

to swallow me up and drag me

back with them, the rustling crunch

beneath me.

Just a little bit

before we sleep--

we see them everywhere,

the patterns that we want to,

and dismiss the data that doesn't fit.

She's ok with neurons and chemistry;

I need this sacred geometry:

imagined circles

upon circles,

looping ever forward:

an expanding universe,

collapsing into itself

to expand again,

and so it goes.

I jump in memory time

in backward loops

like Billy Pilgrim

only more mundane.

I have no other worlds to visit,

no future mes to see.

Only this life,

stretching backwards behind me,

a string from my birth,

I gather up from time to time,

and visit different spots along the way.

But more than that,

the chance to live again,

this self same life,

but better

bit by bit,

a little better.

I want to make a contribution

to the canon,

and someday will,

given my midnight

thought experiments.

But problems arise,

as they are wont--

if I improve,

wouldn't everyone else,

with more to give

and more to see?

The mystics and visionaries,

the prophets and poets

and painters and saints?

I don't have enough

vision for poem,

or toughness for prose.

But someday,

when Plath and Sexton

haven't killed themselves,

when Kurt doesn't put the gun in his mouth,

when Fitzgerald doesn't drink himself to death,

when Hitler is nothing but a doddering old man

in threadbare pajamas muttering absurdities

to anyone who would listen (but no one does),

maybe then I'll find the poem inside,

give voice to it,

set it free.

Rear Window

i woke in a flash, like i’d been drawn into my body from somewhere else,
like a tunnel that’s fast fast fast fast fast, tumbling, then light
and my eyes open as the scene focuses into view.

i move to the table, light candles, open a notebook
and stare at their laughter through the trees.
a dog is barking at some terrible distance.
the tea is on. she is sleeping.

there’s a candle across the way--
there’s laughter in the window.
they laugh so rarely.

i would see him some times, standing at the window, smoking.
before they put the shades in.
before the air conditioner,
which appeared only after we had watched them for nights,
watched them scream and yell and fight and cry--
they felt our eyes, saw us watching somehow,
and closed themselves against it.

the time before last, when they fought,
she screamed, “you’re disgusting.”
she screamed, “i hate you.”
she screamed, “i’m wasting my life with you.”
she tried her hardest to get him to hit her,
before collapsing, balled on the floor.
I stayed away from the window after that--
stayed where I couldn’t hear them.

“I remember when that apartment was gutted,” Kristina says.
you could hear them then, too, throwing things out the window,
crashing in to the courtyard.
“and now, some sad, lonely people live there.”
they’re laughing now.

she says beautiful things when she’s stoned.
terrible, beautiful things.
i listen to her and think, “how true.”
i listen to her and think, “i wish she’d stop talking now.”
i listen to her and think, “i love this woman.”
i listen to her and think, “who is this person that we’ve become?”

what does it look like to them, in the apartment across the courtyard,
through the budding tree?
there are plants in our window,
a jungle of plants stacked on shelves,
hanging from nails, crawling up the expanse of glass.
a lit candle
lots of tea and lots of nakedness
and writing at the table
and looking across, wondering,
do they feel this, too?

the fear and joy,
vacillating with infinite possibilities, infinite failures.
the cars in the street, the passing music.
the box fan’s shadow refracted from the other room,
into the corner.

i used to watch the sun rise--you should see it sometime.
everything’s changed. everything’s exactly the same.

enough already.
the sun comes up on four of us.
our candles go out.

Charles Imbelli 2010