High-Tech Dual-Line Trick and Ballet Kites

(a Tetrad)

They occupy me so completely these days,
I no longer languish about through the summer,
and my ability to check self delusion
is in amazingly healthy decline. That’s right. Amazingly healthy decline.
Because I don’t wish to muck
about right now in self understanding, ok? Screw it. I want happiness.
Or maybe not happiness, which implies, I admit it,
real health, the sort that involves
having already faced and worked out
one’s banal and tiresome “issues.”
I want PLEASURE, alright.  Immediately.
Because there are certain kinds of things
which can be and even have been faced,
more or less, and however obliquely,

such as an idiotic body, ok,

but still never go away, never stop being
an absolute pain, never stop absconding
one’s metaphors and riddling one’s poems
and everything else for that matter
that one does or tries to do.
Why spend a life in grinding discomfort
and embarrassment? I need a little well-being,
however unearned and partial, however surely it will spiral,
being the wrong kind of well-being,
back into suffering…

So much for enhancement and obsolescence. What, precisely, is retrieved
in this odd and expensive, sentimental and narcotic
sport, or art, or whatever it is?
Sunlight and wind, their feel on our skin,
a view of the beautiful sky…

I know I know I know. These things were never
purely there, in some near or far away past.
We cannot actually recover them, cannot know them directly…
but I don’t care. If that feel on my skin is “just”
some socially constructed experience, then I will seek to recover
that socially constructed experience.
I so very truly love, ooo,
the smell of damp grass in warm sunlight.
I’m even pretty sure that it’s vitally important.

Of course there's the fetish factor also.
The thing retrieved, eventually, gets extended or enhanced
as McLuhan would say, to the point of reversal,
or to the point of disgustingness
in the case of such expensive
grown ups’ toys. Laminated mylar, yum,
adapted from sailboat technology;
good strong nylon, icorex and silky chicora,
spun black carbon tubes of many diameters,
strengths and resilience,
the arc of the wings, flatness or depth of sail…
though ownership's finally the thing
that becomes so obnoxious,
the obvious and never especially attractive
neediness crawling out of neurosis
and I can't help but imagine
the rather unpleasant scenario
of some of these hobbyists actually humping their kites.

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Nichols © 2003

Draft posted for temporary viewing.