Thomas Lowe Taylor -- REFLECTION ON GLOSS

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Inside my wooden, replicant heart splits again; “oh, this again.” Like a dickwad spent on too many summer afternoons in the city where the lights go on and off like lights. Your own movies have crept aside into the clay and then moved too far to say stop and spin. I’d been at the longer scenes no patriot moons are called like the surface of your smile when you think I’m not wasting my time writing on the back of my hand until it’s full of scripts and sentences. And when Pip falls out of the boat as it makes its way back to the mother ship after the heroic fight with the white whale, he is left floating on the blue ocean under a cloudless, blue sky, and loses the horizon line, goes mad, floating in the midst of blue nothingness. We need that line across the empty mind, a fathom or two to the left and sends no other. No less a baby in the womb, but a seed in the winds across a vacant planetal spin and sag.
So too, the gloss of skin in the mind is a barrier against what we do not know, & since what we know is everything, the shiny surface of the paint on the floor is what gives it its depth, as if the flat, grainy surface of the photograph competes with the image (whatever that is) made up of its molecules and terms for what we define as solid in the mists of plenty, in the midst of suspicion about grids and screens defying the very flatness over which they superimpose themselves. You skated on the surface. You walked upon the ground. There was a you to walk with along the way so there was no loneliness. In the dream, recall figured among the trees along the road. Everything is you in the dream.
In the surficial, silence reigns its usual head and shoulders above every other facet of indignation. Silents rain unusual beads and boulders among never mother faces of obligation. Your angry tools are featherd on the board in the garage where the bent wires poke from holes on the beadboard façade which is painted with little faces smiling sly intonations of doubt you’d imagined received and plotted from the hours remaining in your life to fill with some substances drawn from the so-called ‘natural world’ as it comes to you in dreams which are not.
The music from the other room covers the football sounds to my right and the confuser-hum at the tower in between. No cats live here any more. The garden has gone into winter’s remission, leaning into the sporadic wind and rain from off the ocean further on the right hand side of the picture. We are in the middle of it all, smoothing the covers on the bed with right and left hands. The dog now has the chair all to herself, now that I am engaged here at the keyboard. At least there is location. Scan-dew. Fonterama from the skanking boo.
I’d seek no plento in the ark of shame; hear this lingo and slight the offers dune at a time, with a sack of spuds containing two bombs, left at the airport without a shipping tag. It is that uncertain now, and a massive paranoia becomes the realer real in between moments of panic and superstition. Surely, an ignorance subscribes to the sense that everything is out of control, even in the sentence, even in the moving hand that writes and then moves on. Even as love makes you lonely. How’d your ship run aground?
Well, it’s a sly dimension that marks your spot in silent disregard, nor evenings on the harker spud and plento, no mister in the monks and seasons where you’d cleaved her sudden wasps in senses muff’d and spun at showers held below the arms and snug. Park a due, loot a spider’s nests are stuck up under the overhang on the purple boards you painted not too long ago, an ark of stolen moments in the daily flame to mark the days and nights again you sing too loudly in the dark, staving off sensations of struggle and gasping for air as you march slowly slower stopped at the intersection of wait and walk.
The blank has no surface even in memory, even in time, as it were, not declared a definition nor a state’s estate for reclamation and fervor—yours in the unmentionable aspect derided into pressure or stance or humanity in errors of its own regard made impenetrable and indefinite, now fathom that. Like six feet under; and yet the glow of the mask lies between you and the reflection of your own face in the very mirror which makes the room seem to be twice as large as it is, even in the fading hours of the century which has only now begun to be borne among us, furious clatter of ignorant missives thrown around like lard, like broken, rubber hands holding hackeysack eyeballs to kick and spin around the room in another empty game.
Tough nuts in your loogie, the sheen of inattention recalls the form of the question in the back of your mind as if no other. The house rocks. The moon slides between you and it. Shiny and profound, a good idea only masks the questions which gave it rise in the mind’s eye and song with simplicity, with grandiose proportions which allow it distinction and implicit definitions on the face of it. Or are you reminded of something circular—ouroboric and distinct in competition with release and renewal. This would be it in the here and now of asking who you are tonight, sweet Marie. I played the record and sang the same words in the spaces between the words coming from the speaker, a duality and duet with the hidden singer in the electronic box. No one listened again. It was another day in another town, long ago and hopeless in retrospect to unleash the terms for relief you’d imagined somewhere out of town and up into the mountains now covered with ticky-tack housing and tip-up mall walls covering the valley with anonymous faces in the crowd, soot stained storefronts, smarmy longhair hippies stroking and holding onto each other at the end of the age, cozy in their victory over the forces they deride from the safety of their own empty lives, at least they’re together, you think, and drive out of town.
Microbial domain of surficial penetration of the gloss and the sheen, driven upward into view by the nothingness beneath it, shit floating to the top of the soup, if there’s a disease, you’ve got it. Behind the screen, the President strangles his generals and their children, smiling and stuttering in a language which makes you only laugh and gurgle in your own spastic fury at the denial it all represents for the hope that would have made it all bearable, beneficient, a future without fury or dread. Even that is denied you, even as it is sold at the mall in small doses and packages of convenient, personal size.
So the hour declines you and refuses to be interviewed without a witness present, not a lawyer but a savior. ‘Hah,’ you stutter and slide away into the shadows of a life you’ve retrieved from the machine at hand, in hand, out of hand, out of mind and off the page.