Agoraphonia

Trying to read Bernadette Mayer’s surrealist Agoraphobia in a loud & crowded food court is like a holiday in schizophrenia. I don’t recommend surrealism for lunch. Try the Mexican instead. Just when I think I have the sense of it her sentences run like rivulets after a wave back into the ocean of voices echoing off the walls & I can no more get the gist of it than I can explain the mathematics of fractals or tell the tamale from the enchilada under all this salsa queso. I think I’ll wait for some foreign translation I don’t understand, Russian perhaps & take that down to lunch & admire the Cyrillic arabesques twisting like rivers viewed from the air, the droning voices like the subtle roar of engines at high altitudes & imagine myself bound somewhere other than back to my desk: anywhere, just so it is out of this whorl.

Cross-posted from Poems Before Breakfast, which is mildy ironic as this is what I spent lunch thinking about.

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