Why This Life Is My Commercial


Everything is a commercial for everything.

 

            The guru says my language is toxic,
            tells me my language is black and white.
            I say then make gray with me here.

 

Fear wants to play games with me here.
Clearly the problem is a commercial and then the answer is a commercial
and the riddle keeping the answer warm is a commercial.

 

I am a commercial, guru, for everything I do. So are you. So bear with me here.

 

Guru, I see you dancing and picking your nose in public and shitting and singing
in the shower and I notice
you are a commercial.

 

And I am a guilty pleasure commercial for the grotesque, too:

            Feet. Snarls. Period blood. A face.
                                                            Oops.

I am a commercial for American words, including oops.
I am a commercial for attraction, for intuition, sixth senses and sweat.

 

            Guru, you
were once a commercial for sex
and engagement and marriage and family and old age
though you were a boy then. So maybe last week I took a road trip

to a black hole but kept just one fear all the while:
that I was guru-old, blankly senile and dying rapidly
but I didn’t know it.

 

            So maybe I don’t want to know it.

 

How destructively I bawled at the guru—I never want you to die!
—and like a child wasted hours wetting his sleeve with my fear.

 

Confusion is commercial fuel.
It’s a tool. It’s a weapon.
I am not confused

about my resentment for commercials.

 

            Commerce needs language; I hate that.

 

But love doesn’t need it! Love says fuck it, fuck that shit!

 

I am not confused about love.
I know that it rolls with the roaring force of ten hundred thousand steam engines in

the feather morning mist of ancient jungle days.

 

            We live in the drabbest apartment
which is a desert prairie and a now endangered forest and a volcano erupting
which is a commercial for apartments.

I am not confused about apartments
for I know this room like a fetus knows a womb.
I adapt. I live everything. Just ask the guru.

                                    Now even the commercials are commercials for commercials!

 

The guru will tell you
the problem with religion is it’s one giant commercial
across all our holy medias.

 

The problem with religion being a commercial is that
everyone should be writing her own Bible. Who doesn’t wonder how
else we’re stuck with all this great space yet still we live so much in our heads?

            The guru can sit still anywhere. All his life, he says, he sits still
            and never waits for one commercial.

There are more apartments, more webs, more friends,
more gods and things
                                                                        yet time is dwindling
                                                                                    exponentially, extravagant
                                                                                                as fireworks.

 

Recall dreams, the guru says, and pen them into poems

if you can feel them pure, even if only
to prove this reality is not necessarily
the only thing.

 

The guru can tell I quite like dreaming since
dreaming is not a commercial the way commercials will often be.

But of course they ask still
what every commercial means
because there have been a lot of commercials

            to watch

in the past. But think past—not of it! Think
dear head; dear, think ahead.
Think more steps ahead than the universe lets.

 

The guru calls it energy,
I call it an epiphany,
but there is a light on in my skull
and I follow it
to scribe it whole in earnest:

            We are alive
            simply for the challenge
            of living. For the love

            of the game.

 

It’s all play anyway, I say, and the guru shoos my words
away but mimes he likes their ring.
                                                            So then the silence must tell us, I decipher

from his broken hands. On the other side of the mirror, the darkness
will fulfill us, sustain us, grant us happiness
eventually. The solemn are not forgotten, the dead
                                                                                    not just dead, this universe

not our only drab apartment—and this life, my time,
not just this time but all time—for I’m after
the commercial for forever again, the commercial I can feel dead as bones,

the commercial I know with my eyes closed, the one
I pitched to the guru, barefoot and silent, just before he
showed me the exit, beaming.


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