Machine Project

Joshua Beckman

Headlights in daylight.
Our first exchange was Arizona crossing California.
Pulling out the water, floating down the river,
whistling, disappointed and riverless.
Not caring for a new motorcycle and walking all the way back.
A bad meal at the house (they closed and wanted to go home)
and we wanted to go home and be with no one,
which turned out to be “not so good,”
unable to write or return to the bar.
God knows how I will explain this in forty years.
How empty I was and the place was
and we were like each other, which was good.
But it was the New Age with love and one consciousness.
It was the new way and we were not so comfortable with it yet.
But out of a hope for kindness we stopped in the garden
and dropped our guns and cigarettes.
The lizards ran out of the way and the garden grew tobacco.
The spirit of the place was unchanged by thousands of people moving there,
living there and leaving.
How can that be?
Lizard lizard go away, come again some other day.
I am fashioning the world’s largest sand garden, for pride,
for the respect of my family,
and for contemplation’s sake.
The moon will rise over it.
The old will crease it with their cadillacs.
The lizards, at night, will be entertained by my effort.
I will miss work and reproduce the feeling of driving alone.
I will rake without music.
I will ignore the military, their planes passing, and they will ignore me.
I will dream of romance and become disenchanted.
I will leave despite leaving the job unfinished.
I will sell the land to a family of four.
They will leave before leaving it to their children.
All will reach an age and then die at that age.

* * *

The swans were swimming in a pool in the park.
Stephanie was dead. Everyone was married,
and brought to see the swans and again to see the swans.
The city was finite and eternal. We were having dinner.
He was trying to tell me and not knowing how to put it.
I had become someone else, not the person we wanted me to be.
Dinner came. The day ended. Every sentence was punctuated perfectly.
I kept being with people and people kept not being right.
I was wrong, that was for certain. All I wanted was to write
a sentence so long even I couldn’t finish it. But I couldn’t.
Language was not my greatest asset and that was a problem.
Years passed. Can you say that in a poem. Years passed,
and someone without wanting to had gone away a dozen times or more.
They didn’t hate their jobs. They didn’t love their jobs.
I thought we were doing okay and it was wrong.
In the time that elapsed a dozen people came and went.
Knowing you should do anything would be better.
New cars hellish because of the debt they cause you
are only worth it when you crash them into telephone poles
and call from the police station stupid with your life
being treated like something you found.
The angels appeared for him and he embraced them.
Actually, the angels appeared in his life simply due to the fact
that he asked them to come and they came and what sort of lesson
should this teach us and what sort of lesson are we asking for these days,
to be our only lesson and is not. Why would you want angels.
That is the worst and most upsetting question.
Why would you not?
Again, questions are not for this sort of state.
Statements and curses.
I sentence you to die and the angel died.
That was appropriate.

* * *

Final poem for the gently sifting public begins on the streets,
the police turning corners, the people exact in their gates,
the all-knowing god existent in minds everywhere.
The shower running because I am sitting on the floor with a joint,
in my small book there is a story about this.
The crude protectiveness of one mistaken person seems too much.
The floor is rented.
The shower is rented.
The water is purchased almost unintentionally.
It is not memory that treats you this way,
you should know that by now.
Why is there no music in the house.
Why have you begun to set a record for dreariness,
may I ask you that.
Why can’t the cheverolet seem like a swan
when that is what I want.
Surrealism is old, so everyone should get some.
Why did the water disappear before the swan arrived.
Why did the swan disappear before the swan arrived.
Why won’t the poem write itself as I drift into the shower,
as I levitate above the yoga mat,
as I perform the perfect pose upon the yoga mat.
I ask little of the passing hand of mental celebrity.
I am not greedy.
I will do what I am told.
I will not attempt to create the eucalyptus tree
or steal the lines of other poets.
Oh Peter, I stole a tree from your poem
and now it is gone, and you at home
and me without your number.
Is it me crashing into the typewriter as waves?
Is it me exploding with letters that mean nothing?
Is it me moving about the city like a police car
not looking for trouble and not finding it?
No, it is the drink.
It is the days.
No, it is the passing.
Bakersfield, California cried out
and I said something like
“I cannot hear you above the crashing defense
of heaven and hell that goes on here.”
We were at the center of unimportant things that made noise.
They informed us of nothing.
If we were swept up in the high school students
going to get high, and we went with them to get high,
and they allowed us that when we brought the stuff,
and if they didn’t knock us into the river,
and if they didn’t secretly hate us,
and if they didn’t notice our brains fighting,
and if they were content and did not disown us for this fighting,
and if they secretly had wishes unrelated to us in our presence,
and if we babbled unmindfully and they said
“that dude is fucked up” so we could hear,
and if no one cared how we kept looking at them,
how our thoughts swirled around them,
and if they didn’t push us in the river,
but thought that is how you get when you get like this.
We would ask to pass the oxygen,
we would watch them leave,
we would say look out for the police,
they are moving in a grid,
they are carried by something greater than themselves,
they are in control of their cars but their cars are in control,
and this is not a paradox,
they are more afraid of you than you are of them,
they would say we know, fuck them,
and we would know what they meant,
that they meant no harm.