where you were there were no final trains, the station
occupied by cruising thugs, a man with a big broom, a clock
you can hear ticking whenever there’s a hole in the noise,
the kind of place where there’s lots of pacing back and forth,
there’s a guy over in a corner throwing up, and you are
watching your hands, marveling at how still they are
when you are just quaking inside, and you look up and

see the dead friend you’ve seen several times since he died,
sometimes carrying a suitcase, just as he must have
on his way to that last plane, sometimes looking
straight at you, even smiling, before disappearing, crossing
a street you’re not crossing or getting on a train you’re
not getting on or just passing blithely by or through
someplace where you are like now, snap out of it

so which world was it you were in the night you unscrewed
the backs of every appliance in the apartment, only to discover
they had no inner workings, and that, moreover, electricity
was an illusion and small mammals were running all
major corporate-type entities– and it didn’t stop there,
the engine in your car was a cardboard mock-up
even a kid would find unconvincing

suddenly, there was no North Pole, a news flash that
disappeared into the flotsam and jetsam, news folk
reading tweets from all and sundry, the same tweets
a few beats ahead projected onto screens behind them and
also crawling across the bottom of the screen, like
maybe they’d mean something in triplicate, the world
contracted into a tiny place
where everything is exciting news, so nothing is exciting,
nothing is news, where all reference refers to itself,
where intention just gets worn out with iteration,
where anything not now this just doesn’t exist

and that’s not even to mention the funny fuel —you could
bathe in it and get high from it at the same time,
light your way down a hallway and torch your house,
such an all-purpose substance, making the stars all
wavy in the sky like that, so intoxicating you wanted
to become a machine just to have it inside you,
invisible too, woo

ok yeah, there were probably some things left in the world
to wonder or worry about, but we had ceased to care what they
might be which kept us safe from knowing what they were
in a way that not wanting to know would not have, since
not wanting to know things (as opposed to not giving a fuck)
always seems to bring them on, as if the emptiness of
the place where you could know things attracts anything that
will fill it up, and since good things skip through
your back yard or down your street only when
you are not home, what would probably fill up

that rather poorly patrolled place of not knowing would be
all kinds of random maybe even evil shit that you’d have to
leave the planet to get away from, or maybe even some random
something that you didn’t know you didn’t want to know
because you could not even imagine it or imagine what
not knowing it would involve because, for example, you are
now trekking or trudging or gliding on with it

yeah, getting away with it, something like life