poem || Lawrence Upton

Embarrassment of knowing

Embarrassment of knowing, restrictive passages; contentment flattened; choking, or starting to. This is no digression: it is a moment in a life.

Dull tiring existence, effects delayed. Photographs in envelopes. Living, dead.

Indirect knowledge in a mental notebook of relative luxury insolently admits everything; seizes a landscape of city, beginning to be cut off, continuing without observation.

Without an exit, someone had said, said it gently; with unquestioning loyalty to filling up silence.

Polymorphous laughing hugs and trances; the unpleasant thrill of flashbacks. Lascivious shadows cleaning the inside of each expression. Cornucopias of lewd-headed arguments transforming systems of conscious control; the pleasures of opportunity ecstatically sentimental.

An altered artificial form. Shattered shrieking, blood to blood, walls knocked down without meaning it. A condition of complete undress, oneself existing simultaneously, cumbersome, crucial.