Hit the bar running at the end of the working week,
found my spot at the corner like I find it every streak
of needing to not be wherever I was for the past five days —
the noise and the crowd and the beautiful amnesiac haze.
The bartender knows the order before I reach the stool,
which tells you something about the rhythm and the fool
that I’ve been making of the concept of variety —
I’ve been running the same program with the same propriety.
Numb at the speed of fun, moving through the loud,
numb at the speed of fun, beautiful in the crowd,
I look like I’m burning and I feel like I’m lit —
but the numb is the machine and I’m just running it.
The music’s got a pulse that passes through the floor,
the kind of beat that occupies the body at its core —
and I’ve learned to let the physics do the work of feeling,
let the frequency of speakers do the processing and the dealing
with the fact that underneath the noise there isn’t much to find
—
just the operational quiet of a temporarily occupied mind.
She came over with a look that had a temperature to it,
the kind of look that used to find a lever and then use it —
I gave her the portrait of me that I’ve learned to give in bars,
charming and attentive with a gravitational like-the-stars
pull of manufactured presence — and the portrait works just fine
for the purposes of evening and the purposes of wine,
but behind the manufactured presence, in the operational back —
the numb machine is running and the numb machine’s on track.
Three drinks in and the geometry of the room gets interesting —
the distances between the people and the listening
that happens in the noise, the private conversations
in the public space, the thousand simultaneous stations —
and I watch it all with the affection of a man who watches fish
moving in their tank, with the approximate half-wish
that he was swimming too
— but the tank is full and the water’s warm
and the man outside the tank has found his comfortable norm.
Last call comes the way last call always comes — unexpected,
anticipated, slightly sad in the way expected
endings always are — the house lights and the ordinary —
and the numb machine starts powering down to its default inventory.
Out into the street where the night is doing its night things,
the specific cool of three a.m. and what the city brings
when the parties have dispersed and the serious business of quiet
begins its overnight administration — no riot.
Walk home through the residue of the evening’s entertainment,
the man who came in numb and leaves in the containment
of a deeper numb, a layered numb, the numb of having tried
to feel something through the speed of fun
and found the numb inside.
The numb is not the tragedy it sounds like from the outside —
the numb is just the quiet at the center of the wild ride —
and the wild ride keeps on going and the numb keeps on receiving
—
and a man who’s numb and moving is a man who’s still believing.
At least in something — the ritual of going out,
the faithful repetition of the fun-shaped roundabout —
the numb man shows up every time because the showing up is all —
and the numb man in the crowd can’t hear the crowd’s call.
But he hears the low end, he hears the physical —
and the physical is enough when the metaphysical
has gone wherever those things go when they leave a man —
the numb at the speed of fun is the numb’s own plan.
The numb at the speed of fun is still a speed, still a motion —
and a man still moving has a kind of devotion
to the continuing, the forward, even empty and even numb —
the numb at the speed of fun, still on the run.