The Associated Tensions

that was the day I wrote What is Good.
at the time not much was good and
it seemed like a relevant question.
it was winter and Jim and I were trapped
in the mindset that poetic young men
fall into when the femme fatales they love
prove their identities as femme fatales
and leave their poetic young men alone
and hungry in the winter of two thousand and nine.

was it a cold winter? I could not tell you.
I left for a month, mid-way through,
and ambled through San Francisco and
Los Angeles, lost. I read two books by
J.D. Salinger in an attic in Portrero Hill.
I smoked cigarettes of short days
in that attic. I read a book by David Foster Wallace;
my favorite story was Octets because the narrator
addresses the reader, in theater called 'breaking the fourth wall,' which is a literary device I like much better
than meta-narration, which is when an author inserts him or herself in the story
that he or she is writing at the moment. I think it's easy and
an escape hatch that an old schizophrenic invented and used well
but now has been co-opted by semi-talented young people
like myself who don't know any better than to throw themselves
into the middle of a sword fight.

understand me here, the previous
stanza (?) is not to establish my qualifications as
a reader, always blooming with book.
or even if you've established that already,
it was not to tell you about who I read because we all know,
even if we resist the notion in conversation, that the implications of
a persons favorite authors says quite a bit about them.
you might have guessed that I am
concerned with the shredding edges of authenticity.
you would not be wrong about my associated tensions.
maybe you would say that I am wordy and I tend to
intellectualize things that need not be intellectualized.
foregoing my pride and self-image, you would not be wrong.

you may have ignored though,
in your quest to tear back my fourteen layers of skin
and reveal my plastic musculature,
the inherent mysticism in these works.
and now what?
you venture to ask me of god?
well.
this is where we end.