Existential Dusk at 10:53 A.M. on the Day After Thanksgiving

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Mrs. Jaypher

Mrs Jaypher said it's safer
If you've lemons in your head
First to eat a pound of meat
And then to go at once to bed.

Edward Lear

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It’s this time, now, that seems to her a vacancy –
this biologically indeterminate vague state
which she can’t placate through the prospects

of the usual availing means: when life appears
to want to feed on something far beyond its
generally applicable hungers, needs – no form

of sex or sleep or beans with rice or playing dice
or any of that strange fastidious decorum which
sometimes proceeds from heeding Schubert

or Vermeer or Bach or Edward Lear sufficiently entice:
no human agency at all can pay the price of stalling
this bright terrifying spiral into – well, she can’t quite

say “abyss,” but rather that enduring kiss of existential
dusk which neither wakes her up entirely nor
makes her comatose – amphetamines or heroin?:

is there a soul equivalent of these expedients
that might perform the right transforming trick?
She wants wants one or the other: quick.



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