Earliest Reality Television

The very perigord of gratuitous prattle,
the collapse of the Cartesian enterprise,
everything we could possibly wish not to be.

Revelations piled on like hemorrhoids,
titillating as the peeling of an artichoke.
In reverie, the petiole inviolate.

It’s all done with mirrors of imitation,
these vague intimations of humanity.
I am the simulacrum of a verisimilitude.

Authentic, original, living, or a thing?
Only bland degrees of uncertainty and
the imprecision of household names.

A medical drama, exercising demons.
Only debt and duty and fear of the world,
the sphinx-like dyad of mutual displeasure.

Like King Ludwig of Bavaria who affirmed
his own existence by beating his subjects,
shouting “Love me! I will make you love me!”

The unfaithful physics of forgetting:
relating to objects as to whole persons
is impossible for borderline characters.

Argue, badger, cajole, goad, and implore,
then simply endure season after season,
hoping neuroses yield to sheer fatigue.

I’m a broken record, a vessel for the
parsing and perusal of personhood.
I was once dumbfounded but now I’m lost.

I feel trespassed, traipsed upon, trampled.