I pretend I don’t know how all this will end, how its final line will fall. Not
so much “story,” but a closure of sentiment, gesture to an imagined reader.
(Read: “me,” right.) I have always nursed a dislike of narrative in poems,
like I’ve always resisted knowing where my life was going. The end is in
the beginning & then I go on, sure. And despite me, my life has gone on.
And despite my petulance I, like a poem, create my own end. I’m spewing
“I”s again and again from my worry, pretending I’m not afraid I have somehow
already drafted an end. Now: Breathed the wrong air, touched the wrong
package. Does some figurative reader have an eyebrow cocked with
dramatic irony at my meantime dithering? Meantime: the chemical reaction
between angst and suspicion is a slow burn, I think, anger that I trust I can
wrestle down and subdue daily. But it can’t work forever. Watching a TV drama
I was desperately jealous of a character with a punching bag in his apartment.
Fuck the future, thwap. Fuck endings, I want to punch my finale, knock out my end.