Tao Lin is one of the key 21st century poets singled out for attention in the last chapter of Jennifer Ashton's edited collection, The Cambridge Companion to American Poetry Since 1945 (2013). Tao Lin is the author of seven books of fiction/poetry. His third novel, Taipei, will be published early Jun 2013 by Vintage. He may be followed on Twitter here: http://twitter.com/tao_lin
i saw you on the
street
i went away
i saw other things
i went away some more
it rained
it did something else
it did almost all the
rest of it
it was a thing too and
it wanted to happen
‘i am bored,’ it said
‘tao,’ it said
i went away from it
i got away and stood
there
somewhere
i don’t know
there was nothing to do
i was far away from
things
but things were
everywhere
and i was a thing
anyway
a thousand pages of
reasons said i was just a thing
every reason was good
and supported by footnotes
the font was huge but
on each successive page the font got smaller
‘it would take a long
time to refute all that,’ i said
i sat down
it was raining
every five minutes the
thing nearest me changed into a mistake and disappeared
sometimes a beach ball
came from the darkness and i hit it back into the darkness
after a while someone
turned on all the lights
i was in a bright room
everyone was there
the person who i threw cherry tomatoes at the
library with from a balcony across the street in college was there
someone in back was saying, ‘i think i would
almost rather be unsuccessful and unhappy than successful and happy’
cake was coming
a human who looked
trustworthy said that you were looking for me
and gave me a beer
i cried
something good was
about to happen
i cried and the crying
made me sad
loneliness is just a word that means
you are feeling alone and depressed and starting to think about how difficult
and strangely impossible it is for you to be interested in the same people who
are interested in you and how if you don’t change your worldview and
personality soon then you will probably always feel alone and depressed because
you can’t remember a time when you haven’t felt alone and depressed but really
you can and that is when you were a small child but that small child seems like
a different person, really, than who you are right now and you can’t become a
different person anymore because you are over twenty years old and people this
age don’t change unless they fall off a barn and get a long metal rod through
their brain and then they change drastically and get studied by scientists and
never have to get a real job again but always look very alone and far away and
doomed on TV even if they and all their friends and family and an international
team of doctors, neural surgeons, and psychologists—cognitive, behavioral,
courtroom, and analytical—say that they aren’t at all
on the internet you say you hate people
i say i hate people a lot more than you do
we are at a restaurant
everyone is talking
i feel sad and frustrated
because that is how i feel when i am around
people
i hear you say that you hate people
i say that i hate people way more than you hate
people
in the train station you are talking
i move very close to you
i hug you a little while you are telling me
something
you laugh and twist away and take my banana and
throw it in the trash
on the train i put on sunglasses
i say i wear sunglasses all the time now
you ask why
i say so people can’t see the weakness in my
eyes
it is the next night and four in the morning
poem published online with permission of the author; copyright Tao Lin 2013.
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