Joshua Cohen - Witz

Forget it, he’s gone.

And so, nu: old, gutyellow wart draped with a flag repurposed to kerchief what must be a skull, do you think, peeking inflamed and plumped pussy from a gray dress trimmed in arachnoids of widowed lace also gray; she takes the papers from me and tosses them, filing them in the air, a wind’s document, the contract of clouds, mottled white slabs to flit amid the Market stalls then fall, to wet themselves into pave: apparently, I’m hers now, thanks to my signing or having failed to sign a brief counter, not sure, with Bobo getting his percent, if Bourgeois’s his middle name or last, if Boris and regardless of true patronym, hymn, he’ll identify himself as the agent involved upon the unlikelihood of any return, wherever he went and as what, even if. She leads me to a stall (at the Market, any stall’s as appropriate for any transaction as another, as long as everything’s kept official, which is approved only by ignorance, amid the tacit flux of the shade), walking me a step behind her, then two, on allfours with a leash cut of her hem cinched tight to pain at my neck. No deal, however, can be sealed for all of unutterable perpetuity — eventually, every resolution dissolves…like the paint from the prices, the dye from the uniform flags, the official kerchiefs and scarves in every color of blood. Soon she tires, loses interest, turns me loose, with the reminder, though, that she still owns me until someone, if ever, might own another ante up. Gets a better idea or its backing. Keep near. Stick around. It’s that I don’t have the resources with which to redeem myself. It’s not that I’m totally insolvent, no — I still have my youth…it’s that I never seem to have enough of such assets to better her bid, and if you can’t compete it’s a shanda of sorts but you’re over, you’re done with, you’ll be bought and sold at the whim of any interest with anymore of nothing to lose: how anyone can just stuff you down into the deepest stuff of their hind and so hiddenmost pocket, there to snout around for lint, dust, keys, or sweets, to hunt and gather for an offer ever greater. One day, though, or so goes the local lashon hara, gossip sold from mouth to ring in the ear as true as a shekel is true, as true as a shekel is said to be true: one day, is how it goes, and lo may it be soon though he tarries, a mensch will arrive here with a few new ideas, a handful of new dreams, and, profanely important, the wherewithal to holy them real…the mind, the will, what not — how we won’t miser away moneyed time anymore on this or that investment shortterm, the opportunity to make good on turnarounds in shortorder, thinksmall, no; this mensch He’ll go all out, forever, redeem not only everyone here, but also, in so doing, the Market itself, the entire street and its stalls, repave, revamp, remake its take, reimage the whole: out of pocket, He’ll bet out of the box, then shove it all down into a suitcase, take us with Him to ever newer, evermore innocent worlds.

Waiting I turn my eyes to the sky, its pouch turned again, For everything is in it …airing its lining of air, our last and faulty containment; imperfect in that its blackness is holed through with stars.

Here, where they fall, there…the setting for all revolution, perpetually revolting against even itself: party of the first part I haven’t met in a moon; party of the second part’s never invited. We turn. Everything here’s exclusive to how abject anyone’s able to get, privileged to the extent of how pitiful anyone’s willing to afford. Turn again. We’re drinking too much, smoking whatever will flare. Debates rebut into night, which is morning. Utopian ideals getting yelled down into insult, namecalling, and accusation: you stole my spoonbone, We Hereby Resolve you slept with my wife…keep your clause off her, be still; arguments sobering over what mud we call coffee, the ersatz thaw of the river steeped tea in our dirt. Place your dues in a bag, place the bag in a cup, by the time we’re done meeting it’s melted. Religions are founded, abandoned. Degenerate into governments imposed, then elected, forsaken. Constitutions cried in the sand. I’m keeping silent, how not to, but they think I’m withholding. It feels like we’re all in a search, but for what…even after what we’ve survived, especially after what we’ve survived — we want to keep faith, need belief…

On one hand —there’s serious worth going around, changing minds changing hands, circulations up & down, side-to-side.

On the other hand —everything seems foolish if you think about it enough, practically speaking, and even in thought, too, it’s hurtful, every proposal an impasse, any pronouncement’s tongue a deadend.

We’re all living too real, not really at all.

Two hands, I can count them on one — never mine.

I’m thinking: the nerve of those who’d confuse purpose for self, chutzpah I’m saying, mixing ideology with mensch — those who’d confound us with anything that isn’t an Eden elective. How it’s only a Market if you buy into it; it’s only capital if you’re able to capitalize, it’s only communal if you’re willing to share — and I’m not, either or both.

I’ll live without system or governance, without authority or Law — even our own, whose only purpose has ever been to destroy me, to drain us of blood and wringout the necks of our pockets, leaving our corpse for the auction-block, the prisonblock, for the flames of the oven…I’ll live. I leave on my own, as my own, quitting this veinvend, the frenzied flowed lode of this arterial art, wandering out from the Street: not past the moneyedhalls and hagglestalls, not following the swallowing around and again and engorging, but leaving it altogether, making a right or left, refuting the straightly narrowed, the giving take of moat’s icy margin to water, shattering under my step down and dispersing, feet smashing through into nothing deeper than a shallowness underlying, disappointment, wet heels — to earth if not perfect then mutual, or equal…I’m thinking, nothing but free.

I’m on one hand.

As far as hands go, it’s humungous, haired around the knuckles each the size of a house, its wrist and forearm ascending up to the heavens, to Heaven, piercing the bulge of the clouds — then out the stratosphere, unto what.

Mind the shvitz of the palm…to keep from falling, have to hold on with my own.

A day’s wander from the Market and I’m here at the edge of the known undecided: making my way up and over boulders and elbowy, shouldery cliffs, stepping steeply this road rising high between two valleys below that are hands. Twins on both sides, just over this dusksloppy raphe, descending from the sky, or ascending from the earth, God knows which with the weather, the smoke. All valleyed is marl, a bleached, bony whiteness washedout with gray at the edges, what I’m saying is, vain…how to remember, how it blurs with the clouds as if they’re the joints of lightning limbs, their snapping and pop with the thunder. It’s been told, in rumors, in gossipings heard as historical fact, as geography, too, let’s talk topos: all about the shoe mountain, say, or the hair-pike, I’ve been there, climbed that, horsts up from any ultima graben…the Hill of Glasses, and the Suitcase Peak, I’ve been around, made the grade, scaled the heights — tectonic remnants, artifacts of destruction past, the war’s spoilings the heaped remains of sacrifices comprising the altared cliffs upon which a future has to be founded. A nest, an egg hatched, halfshelled…but this. I descend again a valley, go on to the other hand — it’s hard to believe, even now.

Questions, count them up by the fingers. Who knows where such hands have been? I don’t, just fall myself down into their cup.