Then Came Sunday (J.H. Barton)

Then Came Sunday

J. H. Barton

GENED 1001, December 2019

Two-Paragraph Comment:

I would like to first extend my greatest thanks for all those that have been patient with this product, especially Shan. As sickness required this extension, I hope that the work can still be regarded well and read to its fullest extent – even now, as it can best be considered a first draft for anything else in future consideration. This project draws on two major course thematic elements, primarily the use of Christian eschatological themes and the postmodern idea of an apocalypse of self, or an individual apocalypse. Christian references are made especially later in the piece, especially on the 13^th September entry, where the question of God as a creation of self is articulated, and revisited in the final entry as a discussion over the capacity of God to, in essence, witness the sort of discourse that Alex suggests must occur – in this, making specific references to Genesis, the Revelation of John, and even the Requiem as Alex recounts the nature of his own self-destruction.  

However, the more crucial, and certainly less subtle themes, explored in this project are those regarding the self, solipsism, and in the final two entries especially, Czeslaw Milosz’s poem “A Song on the End of the World”. Beyond subtle factors within the poetry, Milosz’s reverence of the end of the world as “no other end” deeply inspire the lens I attempt to articulate through Alex – one which regards the end as coming in fragments, often dislocated, without any clear narrative, and for Alex, existing as an internal apocalypse all at once. Specific lines are also used to make this relationship clear to Alex’s own internal apocalypse, especially the lines “And those who expected lightning and thunder / Are disappointed,” and “There will be no other end of the world.” These lines, as I hope Alex interacts with them, are meant to offer a self-destructive view of this Miloszian apocalypse, which betrays expectation and comes first to the individual. However, because of the nature of this individual-level apocalypse, I eventually decided to omit the motifs of external apocalypse, especially agent-centered apocalypses, from this piece, notably the cases of the sci-fi alien/zombie apocalypses. As these apocalypses draw on major, systemic change at the fantastical level, Then Came Sunday is rather meant to artfully demonstrate the final thoughts of a man as his own world ends – from love, to the value of language, to the ending of “all things.”

To Shan Wu and Stories from the End of the World, for art, kind words, and joy.

6^th September

My Name is Alex Voskresen.

I live in a house on 112^th Street – 112^th Street, Queens.

I am dying. Dying Slowly. I am dying.

I lived humbly, sometimes triumphantly. I was a man, of all parts and components. I stayed once in Cancún, was born in Austin, loved T.S. Eliot. Then, now, I am dying – my complete person, fading away.

Today, the 6^th of September, I have picked up a journal – I got it as a gift from a friend on my birthday in June, my 58^th one. I am dying of some late stage leukemia, I suppose, chronic lymphocytic leukemia. I’ve seen a doctor many times, alone the keto and the chemo, the works. It did not work, so I am dying. So, today, my nephew - my care-taker - Milo said to catalogue some part of myself here in these pages. Sometimes, the writing scratches when my arms start hurting. But here I am writing, lacking words to say.

I am unsure of what life was or became. I lived many lives, I think some robust, professional – for 3 years, the best tax lawyer in northern Queens. Some insane, some brutish. Some merely angsty, meaningless. So, Milo – the young fellow who brings me my water – to write now, on my life, as an exercise.

                        Which?

In starting a journal, you are first posed with the challenge of creating something to write about. To do this, it is advisable that your life had been an interesting one, so as to make your journalistic debut – your autobiography – gripping with stakes, stories of love and romance, chaos and decay. I have no such stories. I have lived in this townhouse in Queens for 30 years. That was all there was – but I did have ideas – oh yes, good ideas. Flowing with novelty and creativity, all sorts of things to do. But then age came and took them. So they are gone.

But this is such a pity – such a marvelous pity.

What thoughts have been lost to entropy in this great dance – the random slew of inventions, and poems, and lyrics that did not meet paper or sequence but were lost as fragments in empty space, reverberating with vibrations, once full of meaning, that have escaped as heated impulses – emanating from my skull into the broader universe of Things, which has seemingly lost touch, and reason, and capability.

Here, I feel parched. Perhaps it is the heat escaping from my lungs as deep and moaning breath, but here maybe it is the inevitability of my own creative demise. Drying my throat, pushing up phlegm from the pharynx, making my muteness hoarse. My eyes, too, dried by gestures of my mind, refusing to blink without combat, scratching at the back of my corneas and stealing from the pupil its color.

What awesome things I could have made! Whatever I could have posited as for the common good of some human enterprise which I created for my self-obsession! Machines of importance. Ideas in books and writing which would have represented the glory of my own enterprise – the glory of these ideas, objects locked away in materials and patterns and shapes – all gone, lost to the wind, in blows of sheer essence.

Milo brings me water. He sets it on the desk next to the bed, and as it braces impact with the oak it shakes its way, ripples cascading from outside to inside, over and over again, preparing tiny waves for infinite crashes at the center of the glass. Its slight tick is heard in a sharp unison with the infinite quiet of the suite, only accompanied in pianissimo the roaring of the ceiling fan.

Where, then, do ideas go? What has been lost to space in all of this anxious time as waves of scattered noise? Can I retrieve it? Shall I retrieve it?

                        To reach out with my hands, in whatever strength they still possess.

                        To quiver in anticipation as I brace for their warmth –

                        Will I touch them? Hold them again until I can fit them back into their mind?

                        My mind – in this – storing them against the gradient of billions of cells in scurry.

                        Where ought they go? Who shall direct them to their compartments?

                        Will I feel comparatively warmer? Can I ease the chokehold of this blanket?

Milo pushes me to actually drink the water. He has a frank habit of pushing me into things – the physiological labors, per se. It is, in this way, laborious to lift my head from the pillow, feeling the sweat on the back of my neck be greeted by cool air, feeling the strain in my vertebrae as I push my head back up against the bedframe. The glass is frigid, and clashes with my teeth to make another such tick – alas, then, gravity works, the glass is tilted as it pours out its waves, and Milo speaks to me as a child,

“Drink up, yes… yes, that’s good. Drink up.”

I have been good, then. But I still have not grabbed at my ideas. No matter how hard I reach, they are always peculiarly out of distance. I am comparatively colder. Maybe they have snuck into the fabric of my blanket, possessing themselves with my warmth as they mature on their own. I’m still parched.

***

Too often, I think, I think of Order. When Milo can turn the keys into the house lock and it orderly open, its mechanisms yielding to that which is to be expected. The ringing of ambulances and police as they maintain a fragile, separate peace. All the sorts of things that come and go and should do so in some way.

 The particular sounds it embraces – stillness in the days, birds singing ridiculous songs, cars emitting foreign gases into the airs, pages of books turning, wafting air, people laughing in street corners and going to bars and clanging glasses upon tables and other glasses and nonchalant whispers – Order, ordering things in fashionable places and demanding reasonable noises, never to disturb but play pretense, expectation, avert attention and occupy space as notes to the Orderly nature of actions.

But, too, I imagine the sounds of disorder. I cannot hear them too often from 112^th Street, but I imagine them as much as I can. But I do not hear disorder – no yelling, nor screaming, or ruckus. It seems so orderly. The dissonance of disagreements and dialogue, the far away burning and fanning of flames, the pitter-patter of gunshots, so far in the distance they imitate birds – what makes it so different? What objects procure the nature of order before disorder, what peculiar aesthetic do they present – perhaps more colorful, or light in heart – but what in their wake makes them equally as peaceful?

Nearly a lullaby in each accord, these pitter-patters, and whispers, and resonant noises of the Earth, echoing from my imaginary 112^th Street, why am I lulled to sleep? Who owns this Order, too – and can tell me why sometimes I much prefer to sleep to the sounds of her chaos?

***

I once asked Milo to take the pictures off the nightstand in my room. He has yet to comply – these old photos of me and other people – particular other people. But death is no tome for nostalgia, so I ask him to remove the pictures, and he does not – but I shouldn’t remind him again, but instead wait patiently for the pictures, their frames, to remove themselves.

But in that meantime, they will always catch my eye. Those old summers, and dusty winters, and graduation caps for the nieces and nephews I never met.

But that one photo, which sits adjacent to my water glass each night – far too villainous. Created in vice.

Which has the semblance that echoes with all lustful things – who takes my breath away at every possible instance-

            It was Her.

The mellow joy she carried in her star-dewed eyes, which joy, uncompromising, never freed me from.

Ironically, it was with Her, only her, that I was voluntarily enslaved. Submitted to a bondage so sublime, so catering, that the triumph of her viciousness was merely a consequence that which was already possible, to me, in this state of forbiddingness, of lust, of bitter tranquility.

Alas, it was Her. In September 1983, on Long Beach – the manner by which the sun grabber her hair – echoed every semblance of her embrace. The most beautiful Polaroid photos ever taken – awesome, gravitating – standing above all things.

Then came 1984 – she was so quiet, so small, the black hair so much less black. Merely a year to rob the life of someone so tranquil, so visceral, so real. Whose eyes, once full of more life than had been anything ever, became dull and grayed, where my heart’s palpitations became of concern, anxiety and not what once was that of overwhelming joy, of excitement, to merely witness the spectacle that was Her. But who knows any better – the cruel visage of death – which invoked her unholy unto the nothing once again?

Then to be conscious, it is. As she returned to be what she was before: unknown, in the void, then brought to consciousness, alive and of flesh, yet only to dissipate again, to that merciless void, to never be seen again. So is this the cycle? For love to be able to exist, must we first be unknown to all – a naked child in sunlight – thus to be exposed to all things, all people, all reason? To only than love the Other’s vision, to become merely a figment, some tucked away memory to never be actualized. Is that love, then: that cruel mistress Love, who knows only to unknow.

Her, I guess, was simply my only experience with Love – perhaps others have felt different, or perhaps died before Love unknown came to pass, but it is the thing which feels so authentic to us that renders us so incomplete without them: this voluntary slavery, our servitude, which entitles us to the visions of ourselves so incapable of alterity.

Who then knows Love? Is it this void of meaninglessness, is it Milo’s calm stare into the peak of my water glass? Is it is Her only as sun strikes her hair/ Who then manifests that love, when all others are different, when hearts aspire to some punitive end? Who owns Her stare? Her Love, so pure, so sound?

Ought I reside myself in Milo’s slow words, slight and resounding, urging me to be patient with my own demise, or ought I break some illusion into play, take with myself all forgotten items, whose lost essence can come only in chunks – infinite, gentle vibrations into the whole which is myself? Order, then that cave – who ought know that any ending comes first, as all do, with knowing, and then with merely being.

Love, came, then, in 1984. As whole, direct entity, comprised to the vulnerable weight of knowing – Her shrunk eyelids, and petty whispers, and nose kisses – washed away at the Shore, lost so virtuously to the Ocean.

                       

                        Bright.

                        Warm.

                        Whole – and ever so whole again.

Her stile all things – maniacally and earnestly stole all things.

How might I come to know again? When that sweet sublime is lost to toes in sand, crushing through the weight of bones and joints, running towards wakes that constantly recede back into that golden horizon – always lost, retreating, yet only to come back triumphantly to only be forgotten again.

1984, 1984, always.

***

I hear Milo open the cupboard – he opens it frequently, making himself busy, as if opening again after minute intervals should expose something he hadn’t yet seen – some novel thing, which, as the cupboard became so familiar, stuck our serendipitously, asking for his attention.

The ruckus of all sounds one witnesses when immobilized! Every pipe creaking and tree branch posturing – serenaded by Milo’s dances in the kitchen.

            How sweet it is to simply, thus, be the spectator –

            Just to look up to the nothing around one’s self and become subjected

            to the expanse of all messages – all sounds – all colors.

That Pyrrhic trek to one’s self, then, covered in bliss and agony. When that particular world ends, that sweet year spent in sand, who reclaims you? Who might you whisper to again? Who should kiss your nose and make you breakfast? Call you ‘baby’, just as synecdoche?

Perhaps, once or all at once, it is yourself. Sitting in a matted queen bed, echoing in the nostalgia of things past and gone, that serves you best:

            Whom takes the sands, the joints of whatever past,

            And calls each eave – commanding, domineering

            To witness you again – watch you toil with your bedsheets

            And create one powerful wave, which climbs up that sand

            And forces its way up that barged

            To meet your feet – cold and earnest

            To never be forgotten – never again.

            So sweet is such a message – slowly, surely as sublime. Calmly caressing of all compassions – the mere You which is capable of all things – even if in silent, hazy dreams.

            Should we, then, abandon all prior conceptions? Forbid not knowing as, at least, we are competent enough to always know ourselves, at least in large chunks?

            Why bother with the meaningless marches on beaches who never consent to emphatic, real embrace? Who procure images of love and desire yet to never remove the empty distance between characters – tell a Wittgenstein to a man, marvelous in all ways except by the manner of our senses – to never be felt but by perspective; why feel, know which is always peculiarly out of distance? Who knows Her then? Some wave, tranquil yet alarming – revealing only fizz and solitude towards that which may never be touched, spoken to with authentic words – performance as our sanctity?

            Bother – bother loudly! I have not yet kissed myself, waited anxiously at the door for myself, fallen in love with my own skin and hair.

                        There perhaps can be no authentic heart – authentic whisper – no stare.

                        Yet each look, each marvelous gesture, becomes whole within itself –

                        as to all things, mysterious and divine.

                        Alas, I will take no frank wave –

                        Give me that current, that coming and going of time,

                        Because that should make me smile –

As cupboards close and cars trod down streets and chimney smoke blesses arrogant air:

Give me billions of waves, always retracting, never still

And it is I which will surf with the sand.

13^th September

For what it’s worth, the journal does well – a departure of a week, merely as I was incapacitated. I was expected to die the 11^th, this past Monday. Fluid came and went into the world and thus through me – it is now the 13^th.

For now, I think on what it is to meditate on these things, anyway – what ought to correspond with that desperate peace on grueling nights like the 11^th, when you should die but you live?

For simple pleasures, alas. Time ticking, good food, a cigarette when Milo bends to my wishes because I’m dying, and he ought to listen to a dead man. Those simple, all-too-often joys that make me smile when circumstance should have me frown – little joy.

6:00 PM – dinner time, for the last month and three weeks. Milo comes in at 5:30 PM each day, prepares some quick meal – some beans and rice, crackers and tomato soup, simple things – and is here, to me, at 6:00 PM – or 6:02 PM, 6:04 PM, 6:03 PM and 30 seconds – as things go.

I wait then, otherwise, from 3:00 PM to 6:00 PM each day, equipped with fluids and my small necklace, at its base this Red Button, which ought to save me if Milo – in flesh and blood – is somewhere else, gone to the wind as I stir in covers and kick books from my bed as I stretch my feet and curl my back to the sky.

So, come 6:00 PM.

***

5:37 PM is far too late for Milo’s arrival – it has never been so late before. September 13^th, 5:37 PM should be no different than 5:37 PM on September 12^th, or 11^th, or 10^th. Where he is, I don’t know: stuck on a bridge, in traffic, in death? Wherever may he be, so late to curse 7 minutes past his genuine arrival – as things should be.

7 minutes. 7 minutes. … He should be okay, surely.

***

6:04 PM – does he know where he is? Where he is – where it is? Milo, betrodden and beaten by the – Milo, lost to Earth – Milo in the world I cannot peer at – that nothing which surrounds me and betrays my vision – where it is … 6:06 PM … 6:10 PM … Lord, bless him … 6:13 PM, lost as the minutes – minutes that should be gone. Pavlovian grumbles in my chest, so wrought in worry. For sake, Milo!

***

6:17 PM, Milo came in as I had done with all my force to work out of my bed, to peer from my window, escape the chains of my sheets, to peer – to witness his black truck ascend from the darkness that is all else – moving, steadily, harshly, he opened my door:

“Alex!” He shrieked. “No, no! Sit down … Lay-lay down!”

Some peace.

“Traffic off 87 was horrible – some accident,” he says, routinely tossing his overciat to the chair in the corner of my room. “Lay down, I’ll start dinner. Lay down.”

Peace, then.

***

Dinner today was as always – baked pot-pie, obviously frozen so as to eat before my 7 PM regiment of pills – “Take after food.” Per usual. Usual. Usual.

                        Usual.

How frank the panic was in just those few minutes – a half hour between usual and other-worldly – the places my mind went! His death, his car ablaze in Queens, his grimace as a face which forgot his parking, which even chose to forget.

To feel displaced – forgotten – abandoned. As waste in filler, as all things lost to the – to die. Effectively before death, alas. That windowsill, 3 feet from my bedside which became impossible to approach – which hurried behind the impossible simply to become alienated from me, stifled just by carpet, but also each arduous movement:

            Each joint to coalesce into some free structure

            To jive me forward, for my mind, alone to command.

            To grapple with myself, as I assert myself out of bed:

            Alas, to grab at nothing –

            To “lay down”

To not see any truck over the townhouse – to see myself, struggling to climb to the window, shaken and disturbed.

6:17 PM as all 6:17 PMs – a time, some rigid thing – perhaps even a different time, the face of that pinned up analog clock deceitful, raising me to only realize Milo came as always – by ferocity – frantically jumping from my bedside to face the Earth. Then, at 6:17 PM, I locked myself away – as object, creature, divine, to such a number – a disruption in the quotidian effect – lost to me, frankly … Counting minutes as each came and went, so peacefully, no ruckus about them. To feel myself displaced, lost to the march of time itself:

                        Was that peace?

                        To be settled; Milo, to arrive?

                        Or was that merely my performance –

                        A creative, fragile dance from my bedside to look at nothing

                        To see his face expectedly, as usual, behind schedule.

                        A schedule of my own device – my expectation

                        To fulfill me – satisfy what should be known?

            To fear so desperately the comfort of the known:

                        as the world so gleefully ends – to breathe, soak in the anxiety of it.

                        To realize only that it was paranoia which woke you from your bed.

                        And that the world continued to breathe without your approval.

            To actually dislocate – so to speak:

Would Milo be rushing? Coming to comfort my vision’s decay of all reason? Or did Milo navigate slowly down 87 – ducking his head and briefly driving.

As he approached my door – maybe with a whistle or a smile –

To know above him the world was ending? That no fire or atom bomb could have done any better?

Milo – driving patiently, frustrated as so many breaking red lights filled his vision – to deliver upon some strange cement driveway the Good Word – Gospel – that there was Hope? Indeed, that not all was lost?

To expect those small repeatable behaviors – action to action, word to word: again, place the water glass on the bedside table, turn the ceiling fan on a medium setting so as not to disrupt a pleasurable aroma which begs to be perceived, to give me something, object, to then sit on the chair where he keeps his coat, read some book or gaze at the paper – to watch me, laugh with me, cry with me.

            Is there anything more, but the routine, all the inevitable?

            Cars moving at similar paces, asses in the same chairs –

            All coherent, natural, expected:

                        That, when threatened,

                        A clock ticking for far too long –

                        Becomes alone, against the gradient of time:

                        Where all things end – reluctantly struggling

                        Breathing, croaking

                        To be sand again – heroically?

                        Maniacally?

                        Deceivingly?

Forget me, then, too – as each marches along in the world: so good, and real. So, that march of Time and her madness can use its disruption – some tiny fragments, vibrating, locked away to the End.

***

            Temporal joys and severed flows – Milo downstairs, per usual, me, awake, to cringe:

The pain in my right side continually gets worse. At its best, like a narrow pen being jabbed into myself, at worst as if mice are crawling out from me – replacing their host with one less defunct.

            The bedframe still sets itself so close – now feeling as though it is to tempt me.

The water glass sits beside me, still and accepting of reflections from cloudy moonlight, unmoving and tranquil – insofar as such a quality can exist.

Bedframe to man, man to windowsill, windowsill to world – incomplete, incapable of being reconciled with broken joints and the dying man – far too incomplete, far too gone.

Milo – a director for the world which exists. No other single world – but this type, fill of the randomness of all things, and routines, and whispers – the steward of chaos from the break in my windowsill.

That’s the thought that sticks with me now. 2 floors – a staircase. One world parallel to the other – a stroll inside a familiar house a half hour past usual – and one world gone, dislocating and breaking from the seams as I stand to face the apocalypse from a glossy window. So, worlds – incomplete and disillusioned.

To, then, exist in such a familiar world – unhinged from all else as its own – of its own essence, and color, and crisis. To be rewarded by Space – always encroaching, beckoning exploration – miles reduced to feet, nations into rooms with hanging clocks and carpet floors and ugly chair braced by coats.

Writing a Requiem for myself, and only myself, alas.

The notes stretching from my hands so soundly, loosening into spaces

I should never see again.

Sleeping softly into the fabric of made-up worlds I cannot sense –

Some dimensions – Milo’s, the mailman’s, the works.

All so gone from my own – ending and beginning all at once.

To speak so quietly at these little realizations in my head as I sit in this dusty, rancid room – laugh so quietly – just giggle. Spectator and creator of my own, which on one else can hear or see – Alex’s own little world, tucked away at 84 112^th Street, laughing at his Requiem and ending his thought all at the same time – one and one only.

            To end one’s world – die, succumb to the crisis of the End. To submit to that eager sublime, and rest with it! To meet no windowsill, but curse as the world collapse: Gabriel descends, the Trumpets of New Jerusalem in Queens, honoring the end of Alex Voskresen – to be arrogantly at the center of all things – for, it was this sight, my watching on it, which produced these things - those beautiful smiles and tax documents and starry nights – eye on the rest of all things which beckons only self-knowing, and ironically, knowing of all else.

            Alex Voskresen, on 112^th Street, whispering the end of all things, the prophetic vision of the final moments, because he is dying. Dying indeed!

            God – as your creation, and you as mine! The instruments to a world which can only be my own – all stored away, exposing itself above a circus of demands at my whim – all to die with me, into that void, from which all things came and never quite left – apparitions, ghosts of the real!

            God, boundless yet bounded by what I can see – magnificence of creation outside of windows as faint giggles, but not the God of I-87, not the God of the closet behind me, not Milo’s God: but the God which exists, then ceases to exist, only yet to exist again, asserting itself always upon demand.

            Then death, perhaps, such a schizophrenic dream takes root in the soul – my soul at least:

                        To wonder at the immensity of all things –

                        As breath is stolen from one’s own lungs

                        To marvel at a world – which?

To spread words and dreams over years, to be remembered vaguely when asked so much later:

                        “What ever happened to ––––––?”

                        “How did –––––– go?”

                        “Who became Alex Voskresen?”

                        Who became Alex Voskresen?

                        From what did he become?

The broader world, so full of things, that lost its touch – where news became fantastical, where all occurrences fell beyond a windowsill, to leave one in a room – a room where all things happen, where all has ever happened:

                        in the mind of Alex Voskresen –

            knowing and simultaneously unknowing –

            Thank him! Thank him! That’s where we descend

            Merely to repeat ourselves, to fade from the real,

            To close one’s eyes, and say, too:

            “Alex Voskresen does not exist.”

            He never needed to, anyway.

That is a beautiful sentiment to hold:

It is, at least, relying to know constantly

Create all things –

            but never is my Requiem alone.

Real by other eyes, embraced by soft whispers and crossed eyes

Which are never my own,

Yet are always so peculiarly out of focus

Bending the lens – peering from the windowsill just to look

Back again.

To assert to me: you are not alone, Alex.

You are surrounded by all other things –

Your Gabriel is downstairs on the couch –

Your Jerusalem us not here for the mailman.

That you, Alex, are wasting away –

Yet the world breathes, and as you pass,

So will all things – but in the other direction.

            Never reversing, never idle.

            But marching past you – scattering your giggles in the air.

            Marching forward past your analog clock forever and always.

            Leaving you

                        You alone, Alex

            To finish your Requiem.

So sleep Alex,

And as all things recede into the void

So do you – and they, mockingly, will ascend from it again.

14^th September

Waking up, creaking in bed and back – the best way to wake up.

Usual as usual. Coffee roasting, but never for me – I can’t drink coffee.

Milo, speaking on the phone, laughing, sometimes to such an extent he sounds stern – perhaps, actually, speaking to different people.

He always laughs so bright, hurries in his cyclical steps to straighten the blankets in my room, when his wife is on the phone. They have been married something like 4 years – my niece-in-law and Milo. She’s beautiful, and she’s never met me. She won’t.

Who else Milo speaks to – unknown, as many other things. But he does in a deeper voice – stern, like I said, proper. His boss? A friend? Maybe me, masked by a phone to cover his venting.

Breaths heavier – so much more air, than when he is on the phone with his wife – who I imagine breathes similarly, mocks his giggles, flutters her eyelashes though Milo can’t see them.

Then, Milo leaves – outside, picks up the paper, watches the dew melt the September grass, walking back in to then feed my carcass, and then leaves again – for much longer, to his car – descends to whatever else is outside this room.

Then walks Milo – away from the Utopia of expectation, Alex’s New Jerusalem, to the Real – a wife’s eyes, a stern voice from his throat, away from these things. Wishing away, to return at 5:30 PM, or so. Hopefully so.

Dreaming away as he walks each step – each triumphant step, each mournful step towards the door from which he both ascends and descends – always from me.

Around my neck, solid and turned, black wire and an insurmountable red button –

            A lifeline to a voice so far away,

            Faceless,

to rescue me, if, for some reason, my world is to collapse, and Milo cannot bring his trumpets.

***

I cannot catch my breath.

It is escaping me – I cannot breathe.

I am writing – furiously, then pen cannot help cannot help.

I cannot breathe.

Resisting that red button – claiming myself – no Milo will come I cannot breathe.

            To not click it – to connect with some vague voice

            Across rivers and roads and foreheads

            To resist Milo crawling from the orifice of The World,

I can’t fucking breathe!

            I can’t fucking breathe!

***

3:27 PM has passed – it is now 4:42 PM. I can breathe – I laid down, cocked my head back to Heaven, where it ought to have came from, and told myself to breathe – I breathed.

There was that red button – damn it to hell. Medical device, telecommunicate to everywhere. Helpful. To be then resisted – to be told to just shut the fuck up.

The lure- which commands complacency, asks you for sure:

            “Alex, for your health.”

            So as to protect your death – you suffering – restore the breath

            To your lungs as gulps of novelty, to ground you again in yourself.

Myself it is.

To sink away into these gestures – to press a button and ride away

From my home – this particular Jerusalem – to a new space, a room

to be generated at whim – to cry loudly in the night that the world is ending;

that Alex Voskresen lives as man, his soul someplace in Queens.

Rejecting such an advance – choking on my spit and throwing myself to Heaven –

Refuge in that final plea, to cry out that this is Alex as he should be.

To be in this body – wholly flesh, blood phlegm.

To cry into the wilderness of a house in Queens – plea for life.

When it is being robbed of you – to be to maneuver away from that

Red Button, who should call your soul a coroner, and save you

So far that your phlegm can be saved. Your soul, buried.

I cannot say why that Red Button ostracized me – became wholly alien, Other to me in all ways:

                        That which begged me for sanctity

                        Which contained in it my sanity

                        Milo’s wishes as he paraded the paranoid World

                        To be resisted at all costs – to become a foe to the Soul.

He which promised that the good hearted would remove me –

Alas, from this rancid room –

But then of whispers, of turned-over coats,

To take the soul of the World

To the bridge of Earth –

and throw me off, a castaway

to the mud, to this World,

to let one die surrounded by white walls and blue masks.

Forever aloft, peaking from my window as some fantastical place

Where men

Where Alex Voskresen

Goes, humbly, to die.

In this body, then,

Full of spirit, to wash away = some road that is not this one

And with it, wash away me,

Blood from bone alike

To Death – who ought not to come soon, yet cannot come soon enough –

And with it take my body, piece by piece, away from me

Creaking silently at the windowsill

So that it, too, can die

And this time, die evermore.

Sweetly with that Red Button –

I have yet decided to keep my head to Heaven

And plead for air

As it all leaves my lungs

To traverse forward – and march so with time

That even I too get caught in its friction.

***

Today, Milo, per request, a more difficult request than usual – more so than the crackers and turned on fans – brought to me a relic of the world long ago, dead in my attic, dust unturned to his virgin nostrils which he had not yet sensed before. He sneezed reluctantly at my joy, a cardboard box crudely marked by old, dense marker ink – “Class of 1982”.

What it was to exist in 1982 – full of color and TV and the bombastic nature of everything – so reluctantly decaying today, but doing so reverently, never out of style. In 1982, to wear Crimson and read Nietzsche and watch the world spin on some interminable axis.

To visit an old box that was a good idea – originally to house the moments of joy when jolly college friends went on little retreats, to marvel at these good things together again– aye, these naïve times, where life emptied itself happily on our bosoms.

Such a good idea was never used. Today, my ’82 box becomes a death box – a memento, alas, but a memento of those final moments, back to Genesis, when Light was given to Earth and life was made monotonous and full.

Rigid packing tape at every corner – obviously over-sealed. I cannot be trusted with a boxcutter as much as I should be trusted with a pen … Milo, graciously undoing the dust, cutting at forlorn edges … Flapping open Creation! Polaroid, frame, bent baseball cap.

            Gloriously bringing back what once was.

The contents of the ’82 box was as one should expect: pictures, friends huddling together in camaraderie and in anticipation of incoming frostbite, whose names have been forever lost but whose faces still ring with color, with voice, with bass and viola. Those earnest objects – a million words too short.

            Other junk, too. Maps which put Russia in a Soviet Union, which united a certain Sudan. Defeated, broken Sox hats. Expired – far expired – candy. The works of a silly memento box, which unfortunately today became a gravedigger.

            But what a thing it is to see those faces with names that still exist. To recall Vodka slipping down your throat as a boisterous laugh filled the room – “За здоровье!” To beckon out windows and watch drama unfold as the charade of all groups – spectacles of the sweet modern. To remember names of lives, long departed, and maybe, like Alex Voskresen, dead.

            Those vivacious moments – picket signs, socialist rallies, all her Reagan’s communism and all their Carterian blueness. That existence, so in itself revolutionary as to evade politics, too; indeed, to evade so as to avoid confrontation.

            The old designation: the naïve college student, buckled by the Western canon and cognac, marching down the avenue to the drum of a socialite, a Jacobin masked by a red tie and a smile, who stared at the peering ladies and flustered his eyebrows at the men. Who could wave a flag as elegantly as anyone with a wrist, who could reign peace on Earth.

            The old mafia of political existence – the sexy stare of the reformist and the ballot box who so far today could come into a box from 1982 and echo in voice with the other descendants of the abstract – those pretty and solemn choirs.

I ought to remember standing outside Hollis Hall, watching his hands tucked in a winter coat, whose breath stuck out as fire in the frost of 3:00 AM December nights, who recounted Foucault, who knew Lebanon, which fells always in love again – which watched the world tick away in analog clocks and still felt Revolution beat in his heart, so fully as to propel snow in infinite directions and make room for snow angels whose snow snuck in boots and then heated, then evaporated.

To remember the names of those faces – whose eyes tare behind glasses on a dirty Polaroid – an ancient relic alive in Queens.

To depart, topo – to have went somewhere, done something. Hired, promoted, murdered. Merciless, across states and in SUVs and fucking wives – whose face became immortalized – a sacrament in a box scratched in 1982 with intentions that died with the box inevitably shut.

Whose face was it, then? The queer smirk, the one which stared at you – or, conversely, the face which peered back? The one which brought the Guillotine, the one which went to State Law and learned the tax codes, the one which shaved his beard and showered? The one that made you laugh until you cried, or cried until you laughed? The one which pressured you to fly a Tibetan flag? The one that rode the subway and tripped over shoelaces on the routine bumps?

There are only 3 pictures in the box. Only 5 people.

But some have names – narrative, anxious names

            Which now reside in the mountains of decadence,

            Which forgot the utter consistency of your Union proposals,

            Which secluded back into the mountain

            And assured you of the naïveté of feeling anything

            Of everything in that broader world –

            Outside of the windowsill

            On sandy ground

            Which now lay suffocated in concrete.

***

Milo decided, and decided well, not to put the box back in the attic. Perhaps this was because of the cathartic joy it brought me, but maybe also because it would just be an extra box to clear out when 84 112^th Street is vacant and haunted by an old, dead man.

Haunting, indeed. As he should be. Watching his box and eating his crackers and sipping tomato soup.

Another thing was found in my box earlier – a novelty thing. My blood – from my throat – then and there.

So should I haunt this place again? Call on the mortally feeblish to realize my whispers aren’t cracks in the walls, Alex. They aren’t creaks in the floorboards, Alex. Your house is haunted, Alex.

Milo appreciates it. Leaving the box down, I mean. Dispel me with the crucifix of my own creation: broken, shitty baseball caps.

I don’t feel hungry anymore.

I still love Her, too.

I think I am dying.

***

It is 11:37 PM and I will turn to you.

I shan’t live any longer.

Othello, crying. I have stabbed Polonius.

But what should I do when I die?

Christ – have me on a plate –

Devour me, of essence and my deserved tranquility

I cannot speak. I find the pen hard.

Too hard, it is, to die.

When your throat closes and roads are still open, passing their monsters around –

Living anciently to evolve again so you, Alex, may die.

To give your poetry a eulogy.

To order – order your death.

What night sweats hit so you cannot stay true to your 10:00 PM sleep schedule!

So should you wake up at 11:37 PM as that clock tells you what time it is – and should you sleep, to be woken by Death.

Her unveiling, her patient Dasein, which should promise you redemption, so far as you listen to the floorboards and find which one you must jump through.

So that you can sing Chopin to yourself as you wither away.

So that, Alex, no light is found at the end of your tunnel vision. So that Kerouac can spit on you as you as you slam your head into the floor looking for your undoing!

Which, Alex,

Was at your shoelaces, tucking itself into your Spirit.

So that you may die,

So that your heart’s intent on love, reason, your vacant Christmas parties aren’t so lonely, because Alex, you are dying with yourself:

Holding your own hand into the infinity again –

Watching you dismount into incorporeal space.

Who should finally quench your thirst!

But my water glass isn’t here. Fuck, Milo forgot.

16^th September

            15^th September passed. I did not write. I couldn’t think of anything but Death and bored myself to spoil the prize.

            Milo is an earnest reviewer. A New York Times which lays on a black leather couch and is awoken by the roar of the fridge making ice.

            He does not know what I mean by saying I will die, so be it, he cannot read 14^th September ever again – so is my will.

            My feuding and feeble will – which ought to tell you, Alex, how to think.

            Should say for so many words something valuable about yourself, and not be so lost,

            Alex.

Walking through the forest, Alex!

No one sees the trees, Alex!

He can park his car and make dinner and not whine about my thoughts – he is young.

            So what is to be understood being understood at all?

            Spectating the tax codes, again, so that you shouldn’t be sued.

            Not so much the taste of an old man.

Milo has begun bringing the evening paper – it’s shit. Always shit.

Words on pages which mean nothing but instead have pictures which are so much more honest – look at that man’s face, read his palm, but desert his discourse.

But what is it to say something in words?

When I can draw so much of everything?

Stare at my face, I’m Alex.

And my words are prunes in minds irrigable

Which deems judgment unnecessary

Which taps – taps at the water glass.

And so far moves his way with the world.

Which takes – looks! At the world!

Who stares and reads words, all alike –

            No madness

            But the peace of knowing

I have authentically spoken to you time and time again

Joined you, Guy Debord,

So that we can Revolutionize and make messes that we can stare at.

I have spoken to you, Alex – not Milo.

Whose spleen cannot ache like yours

            Which has never had a knife in the kitchen

            Which bleeds him of Lust

            And carries him to Jerusalem

            So that he may make amends with your Spirit.

And so does Alex – but Milo, thanks.

I have smiled at you on so many pages.

But should not here say any more in words –

Mechanisms of meaning,

of Desire,

Which fall short of the grave, which cannot free me from the shackles of sheets –

But can sit and laugh at the End of the World

Manning themselves up, Alex!

Milo

So that the world can end

And we can smile – politely.

As a white-haired old man,

Speaking to his tomatoes (which cannot hear him)

But see – see his face.

Where there will be no other end of the World –

and Milo, it should wait for you outside Queens.

That’s the eulogy – but, oh, you cannot read it.

Remember, Milo. I forbade you. Back to soup and crackers.

***

            I am but Milo in this person.

            As I am all people

            Reaching for the windowsill and sitting still.

            To wait for another water glass at 7:27 PM –

            Which cannot come fast enough.

            But I am but Milo, so I have to forget what I said.

            Because, as you know, Milo can’t read any of this.

            So it is forgotten, so it is that way.

            As it goes.

But I am Milo – wrapped in sun and comfort – but just wishing, wafting.

Just catching breath – cannot breathe usually.

But Milo does not carry a Red Button

His subject – the Milo-Subject

Which hath descendeth from Jerusalem to Queens,

The canon, you know.

Jumping out of the sea – I am a turtle, too,

Making my way in lines of sand,

And watchfully minding the hawk

So that he can see me and I can die

And spread some sand and leave a divet.

But Milo – Alex,

Should not have died a martyr, obviously.

He didn’t die for anything, really.

            But did leave in the trek Milo – begotten on a couch and also in the brain.

Because I can’t remember Milo when I am dead –

Or anything, really –

Or scratch my thigh –

When I am dead –

Or so I am told.

By Alex, who ought to have control over this, anyway.

I was certainly direct, Milo. Don’t read the words, they’re inadequate, I went over this.

Look at my pictures so that that can dance and tell me about you, Milo.

I am leaving to nothing no one and everyone!

Just to be confusing for the will people

Just to piss you off, Milo.

Just so you can close my box and hang up a Polaroid by my vase – where I reckon I will be if I die.

Should I die? Become person – not ever. That be all there is to it, then. Working in sad and tiresome whispers, Milo.

Do not press my Red Button when I die. Don’t read my words. Just wait for the pictures to take you because my throat is dry and it is 4:32 PM and I have no water to tap and drink and watch fold in on itself millions of times until it finds itself anew.

I shouldn’t see lighting and thunder.

I’ll be disappointed

Because my end is happening, Milo – Alex.

And it is my letter to you to watch yourself each day as you walk from my house –

to tie your shoelaces

Because otherwise, you may trip.

And only God knows what you should hit on the floorboard, or worse, the cement.

***

            11:47 PM and I died. Sudden atrial strike, the fibrillation or something too intense, the works.

            I don’t speak to you as a Ghost.

But walking from Hollis Hall – and the Long Beach – and the windowsills of 112^th Street in Queens.

So that you might take space and time as these sorts of qualities you should have.

I am no Ghost.

But am watching from evert fiber of my being my own dislocation

A sudden rush of blood to the head – a marvel at the works on the horizon.

I am but breathing.

Just watching as it fades away – to black, then back again.

To my vision – watching slowly

            As Alex Voskresen breaths in and out

            Surrounded by himself – shattered permanently.

Breathing calmly as did his whispers – some from mediation never in words but in heart silences and howls at the New England Moon.

But Alex Voskresen is no ghost – no discontinuity.

But writes to inform you of his death.

And signs the letter to commemorate and honor your actions – your patronage of Death.

Who still breathes as the clock ticks further into 11:00 PM,

Into Midnight, Sunday, September 17^th.

To be called by men who represent the Red Button.

To tag and replace his clothing with dead rags.

To speak solemnly into the vision of all things, again,

Which ironically die just before you stare and turn towards them.

So that his existence be taken from him before 11:47 PM

But that he may die – and so share with you his last words.

Spill water on himself from a hawking water class

Who now dreams about jungle trees and his 2004 trip to The Bahamas.

Who begs you not to speak while he decomposes.

Who, you know, struggles for air – his death raddling, loudly.

Unbeknownst to you, Alex had an idea to end his journal:

            To put it away,

            Think several hours on a clever joke

            And then suddenly pass before the punchline.

And from his hand comes plague:

            Tickling down his IV,

            His naïveté

            Which is bringing to him the Revelation of John and keeping him sturdy.

And from his head is spilling the excess of existence:

            As tired waters and sands,

            And broken baseball caps,

            And the sort.

And his breath is breaking.

And it is 11:47 PM.

I am Alex Voskresen.

            I am Breathing.

I am Alex Voskresen.

            I am living, living on 112^th Street – Queens.

I am Alex Voskresen.

            Breathing.

I am Alex Voskresen, and I am dead.

Fin.