reading proust and borges

your family has a frailty
about it that endears
it to all the girls who've thrown
their heads under the celestial
doona cover when your mother sobs
or your brother's anger rears up
like a cornered Huntsman -

the comparisons your father makes
between he and a young Sylvester Stallone
puts smiles on faces that subcultures coat
with taciturn dust - waxy apple skin
legs stuck to your thigh by sweat
at the knee pit start to pulse to the rhythm
of your mother's songs about your overweight
cat, Bee-Gees songs with 'Petey Petey Petey'
in lieu of the regular lyrics -

perfect dysfunction would, at least, have made
Borges bow his stately head for periodic
infinity - for you though, you for whom the pinwheels
of chance spun hardest between May 1988
and February 1989, they are simply your family,
they are of you - and when a multitude of souls
embodies a single being it is nothing
if not deified - you are a God and I worship accordingly.


...


she is crying fitfully, a baby who has yet to learn 
how to cry and breathe conterminously
but old enough to suffer incurable anxiety - why can't 
those maladies be resolved in reverse order?


why can't babies, as from the tit, 
be weaned from their manic depression and social phobias,
and the fear that life is lived
always on the cusp of tragedy?
then Lyotard wouldn't ache to be a child again - 


to know how to celebrate is to have
mastered mourning, and in the faces and objects
and areas which monster us with their beauty
there also dwells the monstrous - 


but  look at her, Panda-eyed,
tears blotting each eyelash 
like the bulb of the root in each pore, weeping
over nothing when everywhere
there are causes for joy!


I watch her and, as never before,
think that we are designed to suffer,
that the Epicurean opposites are
chemical inducements, that our inscrutable
purpose is really none too clear -
only problem is, if suffering is inborn,
why aren't there more babies on Prosac?

...


the fervour some need to write
is closer to a frezy - but Fyodor
Dostoyevski is more buck wild than the girl
I like who blusters her notepad around
the room, as though to consecrate
the emotional eddies on the page,
whose scornful hisses ward
off my feeble attempts to speak to her -
I am dating a prettier,
less talented, female Underground Man.


...


everything I have ever wanted to express
already resides in two places:
the Library of Babel and a book
called In Search of Lost Time -

subsequently my will to express it
has been nullified, effaced by the urge
to read it in a totality that I
would probably never have realised  -

what effect does that have on my worth
as an artist?
well, the Library's books never were furnished
with authors, but if we hold to the logic it seems
that they too should be infinite in number
and variance -

therefore, not only have I written all
that I'll ever write already,
I also wrote In Search of Lost Time
and every other book there was, or will be.
so did you.