Handler's Remorse

A prose poem about strange musics, strange magic

Fondling his dick unabashedly beneath wrinkled, fuzzy, khakis, he follows me across the street and into the strip mall parking lot, one of the ones who knows I know he’s shady and behind me lurking in a sink of daylight, so I borrow Lot’s wife and look over my shoulder as if I might be the predator until he stumbles wide-eyed and backwards into the street and is hit like a bowling pin by a large black sedan with tinted windows. I keep walking in the direction of my destination, Hamlet’s Dry Cleaners, to drop off a green wool sweater with sunscreen staining the neckline, to feel the weight of an incomplete task leave my body and applaud like loud desert rain pelting the monotonous sand or mid-sized boxes thrown from delivery trucks onto the porch and left for dead. It’s hard for those who violate me to survive, even when I let them, warn them, offer them alibis and beds of roses with no thorns, even then— it starts with a minor and undetected misuse of the personal will and intensifies until the secret cruelty disguised as camaraderie they intended for me forces them to turn on themselves before they realize what’s happened.

By then I’m somewhere where the sun is indifferent to these consequences. Twenty-four hours earlier I’d dined with a friend of twenty years at La Pergoletta, a charming, run-down Italian restaurant on that same block. We drank espressos at the pace of children and discussed an argument he’d had with a lover over a night out at the strip club. He’d tried to leave her after days of circular debating about the laws and dignities of their relationship. She’d begged him to stay despite having berated him endlessly for the transgression of considering a lapdance. Now they’re in couples’ therapy and he’s trying out the keto diet. We parted ways and I met with an ex-rapper turned private driver to the stars who used to be the music director for Boondocks. He provided new lore about Diddy’s bodyguard and we discussed pseudo-militancy in mainstream culture. I declined his offer. He wanted to hire me to help him write something new. There’s nothing new to do there, I assured him, unless it’s reinventing the form. No more saint-making for born sinners. He walked away backwards after handing me his business card with a QR link to his reel on it. I don’t know how it happened. I used to try to save everyone, it was aggressive. I’d exert so much energy recommending remedies and mantras and variations of solitude and fasts and books and music and silence and ways of stretching—the body, the mind, the soul, the social contract— the latest biohacking devices, the vortex in Sedona, water laced with extra hydrogen, nightly mouth-taping, trigger warning, Psalm 91, the poem for black hearts, every elegy that leaks revenge on impersonations of the Godhead, refusal to associate with bureaucrats and sycophants and grifters. Then one day I caught my mother sobbing over an 8-track. She was listening to a tape of her and my father singing love songs to one another. She has dozens of tapes like this, more beautiful now from decades of distortion, some that I’d considered stealing and digitizing myself until this moment. He’d been dead for thirty years. The tragedy had turned to hysteria, then perversion, no provisions, then some, then obsession with provisions, heart-centered materialism, then the stagnant tribalism of survivors; we’re all we have. That inertia is a piece of glass stuck in the foot of runners, forever. Won’t bleed me, we scream, finally alone with our suffering and realizing it was a bluff, the misery of being seen as a golden child and punished for it again and again until you’d rather be a villain and hoard the gold for god. My God! The whole world is stumbling backwards into the road. Bowling balls collect the filth on other people’s fingers and transfer it to yours—mucus, fecal matter, rotting sugar, the residue of withheld tears that should have been cried in the club, the tears themselves, but the sound of those white ghosts collapsing onto the polished wood is gorgeous, we live for variations of it. I refuse to look over my shoulder

¹

1. Pianist Mal Waldron who played with Billie Holiday and Mingus, not looking over his shoulder