Modern Loser Poem by Jack Otterberg

I walked out past Lamar's Donuts,
holding my hands together in my
sweatshirt pocket, breath frothing
in the February air. walking as if dead,
as if walking through the terrain of
my threadbare soul— the streetlights
all the holes in the soul, the lampposts—
its voices. indeed, its many voices
crawled through my ears to see, perhaps,
a bubbling pond— a fronded hand, a
natural whisper, bending to the water
to, maybe, drink.
before restlessly stirring at that conflict,
that carnal beauty which leads me
to my own inevitability.
sometimes I wake up to find this motion
of the tattered soul
sputtering inside, like a wheel that runs in place. I have no face to meet in the mirror
that pleases me.
I insist on this perpetual yearning.
such a yearning one finds
in the crackheads grappling on the street
for money—
a yearning inherent to the threadbare soul.
to collapse out of it, to rise above it—
to accomplish that impossibly immortal feat
one may only scour for
in dreams.
yet I'd find more peace
if my hands weren't reddened in frost,
if I was inside, writing about flowers
and reading green fliers informing of the
Snack Party next week.
instead I'm here, walking to class,
walking on the teardrops of those
who weren't brave enough to suffer.

Andersen Hall— where the journalists
study to become succinct, before the
extinction of all words, all language
one cannot hide in. one may only
confide in
their secrets for so long
before the lights flick off in their glass-boxed prison
and they must sulk in the face of darkness
they were too petrified to meet.

I only wanted to escape the universe.
to wiggle out this vast cast and
slink across the infinities
with my potholed eyes
searching for something beyond me.

but I'm here, in Andersen Hall,
learning about tectonic plates and
continental crust, and how, the
environment too, will wilt because of me.
the lights are dim in the auditorium.
so dim, one may find them suitable
for soul-searching, that the pale yellow
bulbs interrogate the eyes (which themselves are windows) about
animal desires.

or how once in childhood I lied
about hitting a friend
smack in the face, and how that misdeed
has carried me to this place today.

its unfamiliarities collide and pit the
carnal body against the soul.
I trot along the cracked cement sidewalks,
peeking at the pale blue sky
whose tides of clouds
lap in and out, in a
continuous form I'm too tired to accept.
that earthen conflict, with the clouds and
sun,
doesn't ever cease, nor does it
begin to illuminate the one
between body and tattered soul.

that sound of wind slaps the balding
rooftops, cracking open as it did once
the mushed portal in my ears. the
black lampposts' voices, the soul's
voices, walk into my body again
to meet each impostor.

'I do not want to live in the plasticity of a thousand smiles.
I just want to know what carves them—
what inspires that curved mystery,
so different for each unitized soul, that one
may walk again to the bubbling pond
of his body
and see it in a darker shade
than yesterday.'

though the body's too afraid to respond.
he's never confronted something as
mighty, as greedy, as the soul.

——

I'm in my room now.

yes, even here, in the yellowing light of my inaction, I find my bed too comfortable to exist on. I rise out of the gray sheets spreading the mattress, and land on the damp green spinning chair I vomited all over the first week here.
it's silent in here— except for a droning hum
and that spastic blast of
air conditioning.
one must not be deceived by silence-
it writes its own words
on the invisible. it speaks to the
invisible.
but not here, on a Thursday evening,
when Lincoln towers underline the
yawning sunset.
today it is loud, it is banging on the
walls of the soul.
silence only ever made everything happen.

enough, at least, to avoid it— for
in its avoidance we don't combat the soul,
the soul that is nourished by silence.
it dangerously spurts
like ivy splintering brick facades,
or the freedom that comes with leaving sound behind.

I walk to Honest Abe's, in the cool silver
moonlight, and in my walking find
a streetlight flickering— that
snickering voice falls into my soul,
with an enviable incompleteness.
its blinking light emits a season of thought
I'd never considered:
that we are more formed by what we
don't have
than by what we do.

I cannot escape this— no matter how I
claw at the silence,
the red valleys of the soul— that
music which makes no sound
except to the body.

maybe that's it— maybe the soul
is constantly bargaining with the body.
perhaps they're friends by necessity—
the soul teaches the body how to live
and the body teaches the soul how
to die.

the body contains the soul
in its full-fleshed prison,
zipping it up and enshrining its
many lives, desires, voices.
though the soul may come to the body's
frothing pond,
begging out its chains—
the body knows wiser
to contain all that beauty
from a world that wants to devour it.