Myself

We are doomed to act our self out in the physical world at all times and especially when alone. Other people will readily project some existing meme onto you, which you are free to inhabit and interpret without adding any particular content of your own. It is easy to make this comfortable bargain, hard and risky to break out of it, although we all have selves distinct from this sociability, if we haven't denied, distorted, neglected, or forgotten them. The dining room is full of memes at tables of four. You watch yourself from the inside while maintaining a suitable outside, in company and by yourself, beside yourself. You project perhaps an idiosyncratic idea of the prototype but not an entirely separate existence. One other person can make you feel objective. It may be counterfactual, but solitude feels like being more authentically yourself, more "real," existing in time alone. That isn't the whole story though. With luck you are also othered, part of a larger reality, connected on the soul level with in a circle of love, if you have sensibly made yourself lovable and given others the love and attention we all need

Revision

 such a special private pleasure
changing one word to another
slightly better more particular exact
meaning elusively in flight
 
anything is game you win
or lose the knotted thread
balks at the needle stuck
with what you started with
 
becoming alien diversity
yourself in lieu of anyone
other actually present
in the all-white dining room
 
the poem never ends you
wander into another dream
where no words rule or care
what you wanted to intend

The Chair

powerful gravity in this ugly chair
bought in Santa Barbara decades ago
for a play I produced at the Lobero
I finally escaped from happiness into this funky

void it must be adding several stone 
I wish my penis was interested in masturbation
idly fondled between my thinning thighs
it lengthens in my fond familiar other hand
I slide loose skin up and down the shaft
how long has it been a week at least
on a day like this  what else is there to do
it feels good if I let it and why should I not
no love sex left so I'm on my own

sultry air smoky sky no one here I'm so bored I
almost fall asleep dick shriveling in my hand
what little lust remains has waned

the chair still holds me in its vinyl grip 

gravity never sleeps
 
8/20/23 4:30 p.m. (revised)