The symphony was a straitjacket
I must’ve needed. Need being relative—
the organ pipes (silver) looked like missiles,
that bright and tipped. The blue floodlights,
too, made paintings on the columns
but not of children dying, which would be
more accurate. My seatmate had lain her
jacket on the seat that was mine, a way
of marking what is whose and when.
Everywhere was genocide exploitation
genocide. Nowhere was not. Let them
call us what they will, then. Most of my life
has been spent seeming unmoved while
being displaced or unwritten. As usual,
most of me was absent from this particular
context, but the music was nice. I was
smiling/clapping but who knows if I meant
it. All this frequency in one space.
I was thinking about my friend Eileen again,
how much she loves Beethoven.
How she’d kept the letter I wrote her
when her father died. Love can be paper
like that: one of the lessons
of Immortal Beloved, her favorite movie
about Beethoven. Top that, I’d said
to him, triumphantly. Not Beethoven, but
a man in my life at that time. Then
the thwack of his hand on my ass,
which I barely felt, along an axis.
It’ll take more than that. Maybe a summit.
A summit might cure me. To sum it up:
I’ve been not bad at math. Good enough
to make a few lines count, at least that.

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