I won’t feel anything, so goes my theory. If I don’t watch, then I won’t feel anything; my negotiation inspires a banal exhaustion. The devastating sun gawks over New York, in increasing degrees, down to the sidewalk. I feel nothing but heat. I feel the heat on my skin. If I don’t watch then I won’t feel anything, but the heat on my skin, my brown, browning, skin.
The autoplay internet is no good for me at this time, so I call upon prose until the narrative is massaged, made soft, pliant. In response to another killing, I could quote Rankine or Baldwin or Coates—a hard, honest quote. It would say everything I feel. But I could just as easily dangle a crippled iPhone cable pulled from a drawer of dead devices; it would say the same thing, so says the Black American.
I’m still reading The Book of Disquiet; it is a slog. It’s emotionally dense—I don’t know how else to describe it. The writing is too indulgent at times, the sign of a writer aware of his own awareness yet who foolishly believed he was clever enough to outwit himself—he was talented. The same objects appear throughout the narrative—a pack of cigarettes, a giant ledger, heat waves, farms, rain, a sad apartment—and he rings them out. I feel nothing while I read The Book of Disquiet. I don’t care, and neither do you.
The most oppressive summer heat occurs at night. For me, it’s psychological—the all-powerful sun is gone, but its heat remains behind, like a cop standing guard. The summer season expands in my mind into what my mind imagines as infinity. I open my windows for reprieve. In the darkened bedroom, I listen to the street; sunset was fifteen minutes ago; the street murmurs with its usual hum beneath human interference. I imagine my ear pressed to the asphalt, a policeman’s gun to my head, right as the bullet sears my skull.
I see the moon, full and new, up close and then, a sudden retreat into darkness, but I can still see, and think; I simply see nothing. This is, absent Heaven and Hell, my best approximation of the last second of a human life, what we have and will experience, each of us. I recall the seconds before the last second; if the loop never ends, then this is the afterlife, but this is guesswork. The last second of life is poetry’s event horizon—