Did I Eat the Delicious Banana? An Excerpt from Steven Zultanski

[Emerging from the deep place, Steven Zultanski. Here's a darkened video of the poet.]




from Hell


There’s a thousand
yous.
There’s only one
of me.

I take this to be
axiomatic.

The straight-up banality
of insight throws light onto that which had previously appeared
to be throwing light, but is clearly throwing something merely approximate
to light. Such is a shadow, the direct result
of a plausible future in which I am never new
and the president slips on a banana peel.
Did I eat the delicious banana? Yes,
I hope so, but that doesn’t mean I thought far enough ahead
to drop the peel.
I myself remained
inside the lines, and the lines themselves were long.

Unimpressive as I am as a person, I’m distinct enough
if you think of me as a predicament. Before creation,
there must have been only one age. Now I grow older right away.
But at least it’s always a new kind of old, and each new kind is immediately
overpowered by the different sides of the brain which drive
me out. Home is where what I think of as my heart is.
A cold, fully-automated cafeteria in the basement of a hotel.
The only place I’ve ever felt alone enough to engage in this activity
which we refer to as explicitly sexual is here, and the night when it’s out,
when the stars do slump through it. The force of nature is sexual too, but
when the stars do slump through it.

Finding out that your teenager is pregnant can be stressful.