mmmmcmxvi

The Embarrassment of Vulnerability

          Visions of a terrace with a cell phone ought to be engraved on the waiting
     skull, like Brahms.
        —John Ashbery (Was this a misreading?  I’m not embarrassed to include it.)

Doesn’t that just sound like the title of a piece
by yours truly?  Thinking of vulnerability, in
general, as a broadly realized topic.  Realized
as in I know it well.  (She’s decorating her home
with items she has picked up at a museum dedicated
to the works of Georgia O’Keefe.  Singing snippets of
popular songs from mostly bygone eras.  The 1970s.
The 1980s.  The 1990s.  Perhaps the 2000s.  Those
bygone eras.  She does seem to have gone through
some sort of an upgrade.  Taking on luxuries.  This,
an alternate apocalypse.)  But not vulnerability based
on being as embarrassing as I can be.  That’s a type.
A vulnerability concoction.  Sure.  But not that one.
Does it seem that I’m laying bare my soul here?  No. 

Between each of these snaggled sentences are many
others that are not written.  Never spoken.
The Paraguayan (am I dismantling that proper
signifier as well?) fingers La Virgen Del Carmen.
How holy is this intersection?  But there is no cross.
Only a depiction the size of thumb-able.  He is stoic,
but he has his own luxuries.  Has he reached The Baja?
Or is it just Baja?  Well of course it’s not The Baja.

This Is Embarrassing