You believed in experience, didn’t you?
You believed that experience would refine you,
Augment you, exalt, enlighten, enrich, liberate
You from your pathetic self, the over-sensitive
Sensualist, naked-woman obsessed
Ignorant boy with a bad complexion
And no social history.

To know work only as a means
To an abstraction of what work would be
If you were to become the work,
If the work accomplished you as much as you
It. You began to break rank with your childhood
Coterminous with your first, unexpected orgasm
Fantasies of heroic action, Odysseus, many minded,
Concept of pure science, and the scientist
Part Odysseus, part Oppenheimer, part Homer part
Mickey Mantle and part Don Juan but not Don Juan
Just a fantasized sexual encounter with virtually every
Female he ever met, because he was the great protector,
The hero, the champion whom they all wanted.
He read manuals to learn how to control his mind
But preferred the one he read about where one could
Absorb all knowledge while sleeping by placing books
Under the pillow. And then there were social contexts
For which he had no road map and, besides,
He was too tall and his face covered in boils
Even though he had been an almost pretty boy
Who undressed many girls just to look at them
Now became nervous, self-conscious, aware of
Limitations he hadn’t imagined before. So you strove
To imagine a time when you would no longer have to
Be you, where you could become a digger of fields,
Harvester, irrigationist, tractor driver, grunt
In a restaurant in a kitchen through the splattered
Food as dishwasher and splattering food as the cook
Then, as a waiter, carrying it back and forth as you became
Fascinated with factories, you could work in a fast
Hot kitchen on a couple of hits of acid, and got around by
Hitchhiking or driving or bus only to discover that his skin
Cleared up, it was the treatments that were prolonging
The problem with his face, but then got hit pretty hard
In the head, fracture of the temporal bone through
The ear, so that his eyes popped out (only one
With a damaged optic nerve) and the Vth facial nerve
Broke into mid-saggital paralysis with cerebro-
Skeletal fluid dripping out of a slightly damaged ear,
Which slowed him down, but as soon as he got out —

You remember, right?

–Of the hospital, when he should have still been resting
He got a job in a factory silk-screening substrates
For digital clock and watch faces. It wasn’t easy to
Get the job because of his out of phase look and his
Eyepatch, but he convinced them to give him a try and
They did so he worked as hard and fast as he could,
Tripling the output of the next-highest producer,
But it was only pride, and he didn’t really feel good about it,
He just felt that he needed to prove that he could
Do it but before that, as a young sophomore,
Sitting with a girl he just met in the back seat
Of a car while her sister drove he just put his arms
Around her and started kissing her as though they’d
Always been lovers, pulled her blouse up,
Unsnapped her bra, and licked and sucked
Her nipples on the way to his house after which
She was his girlfriend but he was afraid
To penetrate her with more than his fingers
Because he was sure she’d get pregnant so they
Wound up breaking up, but that didn’t stop him one day,
When a big-hipped blond girl smiled back
At him as he sat at a table in the strip mall
And he pushed a chair toward her with his foot
And told her to sit down, and she did.
The next day, with his cock inside of her he
Stopped and asked, “shouldn’t we use a condom?”
To which she replied, “don’t worry, it’ll be ok”
And getting it together for her to have an abortion
A month or so later, with much familial angst
And polarization, she lived with him later when
He made 12,000 watch faces a night at a
Pedal-operated machine and then lost focus
In an assembly plant after which he was hired
To work on pianos, disassemble them,
Repair them, refinish them, move them, pose
As the boss’ wife’s son to buy used ones
So they wouldn’t know she was a dealer.
When they said, “it took 5 big guys to move it”
How were you going to move it and she
Pointed to you they didn’t believe it until
You had it tipped up to drop onto the dolly
Rolled it out through the front door, tipped it up
Again, turned it to come down flat on the bed of
The pickup truck, then grab the bottom handle
And lift and heave ho to shove the upright piano
Up onto the truck and tie down…

[a temporary end. I’m not really sure where this is going. It wasn’t meant to be so linear. But this is how it came straight out. I had a ghost of a drift in mind but I’ve departed radically from it, may elaborate and return to the drift, may delete it all and start over]