We always send it to the wrong address
And now that buoys even our most impersonal days. Everyone is beautiful!
And then almost everyone. C’est cool-ça, the shift that enchants the world
Or at least the afternoon of the world before it’s off
To meet Chris and all at glimmering Colleen’s
Arriving southside early and so twenty min for Lyn’s The Fatalist
Amidst the superlit video store on the corner. It’s funnier
In French: superlit but not much else. One is haunted
By the suspicion that one is in a society
Composed of people one will never meet for example
The Society That Thinks About Someone Named Anne-Lise
Occasionally. So I walk back around and up
The stairs and Chris puts on either/or. Elliott Smith 20th Cen. American
Is nonetheless a star in the constellation
Our Romanticism and we have been hanging out
A lot there recently. A keener melancholy
About the music for a week or two afterward may be obvious
But something has to be done with the excess flowering inside death
Or is it just apotropaic? We’ll see. The most awful thing
About the phrase “Every Germinal must have its Thermidor”
Is that one never gets to say so anymore
And really mean it. We lie down in categories
And wake up in concepts but must there be so much of the day spent
Tracking stray remarks and others’ hearts
And maintaining a casual balance between OxyContin and “poetic prose”
So new sensations emerge? Meanwhile but I am happy
To see you! It’s enough but not of anything.

This poem is taken from Joshua Clover’s book The Totality for Kids (University of California Press, 2006). He is also is the author of Madonna anno domini (1997) and the book of film theory The Matrix (2005), as well as Associate Professor of Poetry and Poetics at the University of California, Davis. “Poem” was taken from the publisher’s website.