Prima 

Materia  

“My quietness has a man in it, 

he is transparent and carries me 

quietly, like a gondola through 

the streets.”   ~Frank O’Hara 

                                                   In Memory of My Feelings 

 

By day, I live my life. 

By night, my life lives me. 

How can they 

weigh the same? 

It would seem an absurdity. 

I dare to ask 

which is more true 

or any less fictitious, 

a life that lives itself 

or the one with 

self constrictions? 

 

Asleep I practice letting go. 

Surrendering to the silence, 

a dormant thing set afloat 

in a boat of mulch and ballast; 

a laid out Moses  

ferrying forth,  

whose finger steers 

its rudder North. 

 

Below are dangers no less real 

with dramas more deranged. 

Life on the surface no less 

more than surgery 

performed in a haze. 

 

Like Eliot said 

I go then like a patient 

etherized on a table 

the evening spread out 

before me, and myself 

a hapless fable. 

 

Tonight I may see

my mother wrapped in 

a snarling stole, 

beside her my twin brother 

clutching a shard of coal. 

Who will play my father 

is anybody’s guess 

seeing that he's 

long since gone, 

his memory 

put to rest. 

 

Still, that doesn't mean 

he'll be a no-show, 

as dreamland 

invites them all back

like a time machine 

beneath my bed sheets, 

fusing fictions with

the occasional fact.