by Shane Neilson

Spring starts when a heartbeat's poundin'
When the birds can be heard above the reckonin' carts doing some final accounting

He had the world, the world was his, he was of the world, he loved the professional sports players when they was they were in it to win it, in fact he kept repeating this mantra to himself, in it to win it, in it to win it, so intent that even the homeless men with their outstretched cups avoided asking him for change. He thought he had a poem in his head, but he often had a poem in his head, and he was not yet disciplined, he had no pen and paper, he was still young enough to think that poetry could be preserved through iteration, he tried to stop saying in it to win it, tried to repeat the snippets of his poem –he had a theory, that poems were comprised of snippets— but in it to win it kept forcing them out, and all he was left with was the mnemonic of image: a spring scene, the shopping carts dripping in an early morning mist, a pew pigeons on the carrels. He tried to hold onto this image but it was a long way home, he had to walk there through the pedestrian traffic and raucous beeping crosswalks, he had to avoid the death-traps, he had to keep a poem in his head and chant in it to win it. Who knows where the image came from? He had never seen such a thing before. He never used a shopping cart, just a plastic basket. He thought pigeons were shit birds. He was finished work and felt free, he was walking fast, hurrying, and the blood came, and somehow all the sex and money he didn’t have, and all the virile doubts he did, amounted to racing home and getting this image down, this image that was wordless except for a mindless sports psychology rhyme he heart on a highlights show and couldn’t shake. Another image: footballers in a sideline huddle, jumping up and down rhythmically, a guy in the centre screaming IN IT TO WIN IT. He knew what made a poem, what didn’t.

Don't tell me what the poets are doing
Don't tell me that they're talkin' tough
Don't tell me that they're anti-social
Somehow not anti-social enough, all right

He hit the walk-up to his hovel, his little paradise, with all the old furniture he bought second-hand and had friends help carry from the downtown Salvation Army, the furniture with its unrecoverable stains and burns, the wobbly chairs and ravaged, dented desks. The apartment had only enough light to see by; he had bought plug-in fixtures, but it wasn’t enough. He had to wait the minute until the computer screen was willing, and he surveyed all: the black-and-white television that received only air (Poets, he would tell the few who would visit, only watch in black and white) the dishes in the sink he kept wishing a servant would do, the corrugated carpet that flirted with his feet by giving them burns. And old accustoming to comfort urged him to move, but he thought this authentic, thought the walk authentic, thought the street on the fringe of respectability, and headed in the right direction (down). He thought of himself as a citizen, but knew not of what, and hadn’t voted in the one election he was eligible for. Outside he heard a drunk bawl up to his woman I want in but she said out the window Not until you get us some money and He cried off into the evening How do I do that. He heard the window shut after a time. Clearly she expected more conversation.

His word processor was the last vestige of home: what he had left of his parents, whom he had abandoned when he saw that he was their creation. In the early days, last year, all of his poems were dedicated to his father in the poetry of renunciation. His parents had never beat him, or withheld food or warmth; they enacted their quotients of love. They thought of him still, and would send him letters if they knew his address. What happened? He didn’t fall in with a religious sect whose basic strategy was to alienate him from all he knew. He had no alien abduction story. It was a quiet morning, an hour before school, and he simply checked his junk email. He clicked on one from a cell phone company that promised asterisked ridiculous rates. In the body of the email was the bold, immense font that said, You Must Change Your Life. He typed the phrase into a search engine, and the poem "Archaic Torso of Apollo" was the first entry. He read the poem, and the penultimate lines "for here there is no place that does not see you" seemed like a damnable judgement, he knew it to be true, and it ran through his head for the rest of that day, and the next, until he wanted to be free of all scrutiny, until he wanted to be cast off from the world, and dreams of college and success weren’t even sacrificed or lost, they were exchanged for this place, a place he laid careful plans for in the months before graduation, a place where all the people in his life and all the people who weren’t were a choice, even what he didn’t want to have was a choice.

He left his family with a handwritten copy of the poem that changed his life, and moved to a city that he had never visited, deliberately getting a job in the service industry because, he felt, irony was the only consolation of a poet. For that is what he would become.

While aiming at the archetypal father
He said with such broad and tentative swipes why do you even bother (yeeaaah)

When the friends he had acquired from work (they didn’t read poetry) and from the general tepid orbit of his life (they also didn’t read poetry) asked him where he came from, he felt unable to tell them. He couldn’t bring himself to name the small town, the frigid girlfriends; all of his experience was locked, locked by his decision; if he had to tell, that meant he was still beholden to it, that he hadn’t changed. And yet he didn’t want to supply his friends with lies, with tales of fabricated small-time conquests lived out in a predictable adolescence. He didn’t even want to mention some horrible secret so as to make them never ask again but to speculate wildly when they were away from him, something like incest or sexual abuse which he would intimate with a dark, pained look.

No, he took the poem he read seriously; he simply didn’t say. This annoyed his friends at first, they expected him to reciprocate with personal information when they bartered theirs. But when he told them the most important thing, when he looked at them with his only ambition and his only gravity, his only seriousness, and told them he wanted to be a poet, they forgave him his eccentricities, they assumed that all poets were like this (though they had never met one before) and as compensation they devised drinking games about his imaginary past (circus carny offspring raised by wolves! Gulp.) They respected him as a kind of Victorian vestige, as a monk who has taken a vow of silence.

The annoying part about renouncing the past is that it is still part of history, and when he thought of his father, who was now much like the image of the shopping cart and pigeons, just an image that stirred him, no matter how seriously he took Rilke, he thought of what his father might be doing at the moment: if his father had employed a private detective to find him, if his father was still counting down the days to retirement. His father had only shown him love with the usual impatience, there was not much to hate except the quiet conventionality. When he thought of his father, he started to wonder if the honesty of his current existence was fair, if he had chosen well, and he would sometimes look up at "Archaic Torso of Apollo," which was written longhand on the war-torn bulletin board above his writing station. He would reread the poem for hours, and then decide that a poem could only offer advice, not the justification for that advice, and he’d try to write a poem himself. But his experience was limited. The only remarkable thing he’d done with his life so far was a cruel refusal, and when he tried to write about his father, he found he could only write in the goodbye of elegy. Yet his day filled him with possibility, with image he wanted to record; he rushed to his computer after serving the sullen, thinking of the composition of life-changing lines that read like alabaster, but he was mostly denied and only found fluency when writing about his father, whom he had left with a vague resolution. He had written so many poems about his father, poems without perfection, that he began to wonder what the point of it was, but he found he could not change his subject like he could change his life.

Don't tell me what the poets are doing
Those Himalayas of the mind
Don't tell me what the poets been doing
In the long grasses over time

To rid himself, he began to think of his father viciously; he began to attribute thoughts to his father, thoughts that his father didn’t care where he was. He imagined what his father’s reaction would be if he knew that his son had foregone expectation and became an unpublished poet. He did indulge himself with a little smugness: he knew that his father had never read poetry, that the best his father could come up with at the wedding to his mother was a snippet of dialogue cribbed from Breakfast at Tiffany’s, their favourite movie. He imagined himself better than his father, moved by better things, suffused with the eternal, but the truth was the friends he had found in this new life never read poetry either, and though they viewed him as a curiosity they never expressed curiosity in his work, had never once asked to read it. No, what they were interested in was where he came from, and where he came from seemed to him to be an unwillingness to ask a question.

He had scores of books of poetry lining the apartment, books of heroes; it was part of his relentless pursuit that there was not a single book of fiction or non-fiction, not even a biography of his treasured poets. He did not seek a clue to life; he thought the poetry itself as the only clue, as the pounding heartbeat, and of course as a result he had no context and no perspective upon the heights he had been permitted to see; he understood the images, but he did not understand the words. He wrote some more to his father.

On the street and the epitome of vague
Don't tell me how the universe is altered
When you find out how he gets paid, all right
If there's nothing more that you need now

He had given over to not writing, to simply walking around the city, even late into the night, and sifting through its images. He had begun to not trust poetry, its representation, at least as he wrote it; he started out with an image, but it always kept coming back to feeling, and the feeling made him uncomfortable. He began to know that there is no wisdom in poetry except acquired wisdom, the poem is the vehicle, and he walked around hoping still to be a great poet, hoping to be a repository, hoping in terms of quiet desperation. He looked up at the sky when the city would not provide him with a captivating image, and always he met with the low cloud ceiling of this city, its refusal to offer him the stars. The homeless men would not ask him for change.

He was a server, his most frequent human interaction was providing change, and when he read his poetry he began to feel a yearning for the felt, the known. Poetry cannot supply feeling, it can only harness it; and so he walked on his Odyssey, he saw the humans walking past one another, glancing and fleeting, and he knew two things, that his life had changed but he didn’t yet know how, and that poetry had him but he did not have it. He walked to his apartment amidst the dissatisfaction and thwarting, he knew he would not write tonight, a night stretching back many months, but he felt good, like a reconciliation.