after Ben Lerner

does the song really predate the people? I feel I have misunderstood something, like catching the light in heavy handfuls over the river thames, heaving with my back not my feet, watching you turn around from the crouching figure, the man illuminated by the headlight of the bike, accidentally sidestepping reality. in the desert that is the future, sadness has to come before life does, before the country bumpkins become a hole full of prescription drugs. a man shoves a bunch of leaves into his mouth, convincing us they are spearmint. in another time you would have been quarried down the hole, splashed in the construct. If this here is a system, imagine a circle. we are approaching the centre from opposing sides, but all I really wanted to know was whether our politics align. you might be the worst person to start a cult, or the best, because you wouldn’t start a cult. I’m speaking of not working, of loving a good brown piece of syntax, not tilling it, but letting it spiral. if someone gave me a hundred thou, I’m pretty sure I would become beautiful. look at the scarf of the man walking past us at the train station, it must have cost at least that. half of these people wouldn’t notice if we robbed them. should we? sometimes I steal things because I fundamentally disagree about their price. but most of your friends are dead or dying, at best marginalised. how do we steal their futures back? would you like to till the desert? you’re right, this anger must have predated the song, predated language, because why else would I frown all the way into my own centre trying to describe it, flatten it into a word like so much chucked-out bathwater. you say love doesn’t predate the song, doesn’t even predate word, but that we made it and can unmake it into fear, and that this is all about refusing power. how do you stay sane then? how do you know which sacrifices to make – there are two great love stories in your life, and you, knowing, can hold two contradicting thoughts in your mind, and they both become birds, not cute like sparrows, but ready to fight like swans. I’m ready to fight for the song, but not with violence. this anger, this song, it all predates at least some of that. predates violence. at least I think. you ask me if I’m ready to put the light down, and I ask why. you say to let it ripple off the water, to let it come after us.