The City of Without
Joel Lane, “the City of Without”- a poem
“God, I’ve missed you. You don’t know....”
“I do,” he said, his mouth almost touching my ear. “Missing someone can be a place. The city of without.”
From Scar City (Short story collection) by Joel Lane
I adore the writing of the late Joel Lane. He was truly an exceptional author. Poetry in prose and prose studded with perfect poetry. Always weird, liminal and magical. Eternally heartbreaking. Infinitely re-read. Rent free in my head until death.
Martin Lewis’ “Glow of the City”(1929) MoMA
Edward Hopper
The Dreadful “Aesthetic Edward Hopper Canvas Wall Art for Living Room Poster Frame Busy People” A Strange piece of trash from Machines. Hopperesque piece found on eBay. AI atrocity presented as contrast to the real Art. Hoppers poignant themes combined wrong, but eerie and deeply disturbing at its false, insincere emulation of the themes in Hopper and the world of isolation, waiting, and longing in his work. A City of Without Skill and just reduced to prompts and a machine that analyzes art and plays artist.
In the City of Without
I feel mostly dead.
Lukewarm, pulse 45 BPM, and pressure crashing.
This is it. Departing this lonely land,
Swing low sweet chariot.
Untrue. No Code Blue.
Just the blues. Garden variety blues.
98.2 Fahrenheit, 58 pulse, 98 pulse ox.
Alive defiantly, somehow and just bone tired.
Just sitting here having another coffin nail.
Things happen, merely living,
simply here all alone.
I just keep slipping sideways.
“Missing someone can be a place.”
It’s “the city of without’”.
Been living here too long.
It’s a tale of two cities.
I miss you, and I hate myself for it.
I need to pick up the damn phone.
It feels like a solid beyond-lead brick of a star core density collapsed into itself.
It just never happens. Need more motivation.
Outta carrot and sticks karats and stakes
for my black dead heart.
I can still write in this claustrophobic small smoking room.
Address and scrawl a short message on the
back of a vintage postcard to you
from this minimally furnished strangely immense place.
These garish gutted Art Deco train station mausoleums
with their endless pews of wooden benches.
I hate these trains that never arrive on schedule.
They set out, even the countryside changes,
the view shifts through different industrial zones
into varying shades of rural empty pastoral emptinesses
but somehow we only ever stop back here.
Some railway roundhouse we sleep through the 180’s.
The City of No Escape, only Return.
They probably gas us in the passenger cars.
They deck-shot us each time we board
Once we reach the half way point elsewhere
we’re sleep slumped on the seats,
and routed back, knocked out cold.
Waking groggily as the next stop is called over the PA,
yet,we’re back right where we started.
We return to this same vast empty station
again and again and again and again.
“Dear D,
This is living alone.
Eating alone. Sleeping alone.
Joel was right, as always-
“Missing someone can be a place.”
I wish I was there/you here
inside my head/under the duvet/
sharing that queen bed.
I miss you.
The city of without just would
be more “______” /(City of With) with you”
Edward Hopper