This is nothing like it was:

Perhaps it's that a malaise has set down over the city. Inside the cold-ridden fuselage bodies I pass on the street, an empty hunger imbues unsettled glances; and every mittened, umbrella-holding hand screams and seeks a match for the coming night. There is nothing to bite into; nothing to grasp; no greatness for which we can merely reach - the reaching itself somehow a question. No answers. We traipse around these bitten streets hoping for a turn somewhere to shave some semblance of a loss from our down-turned corners and unadorned visages. These are the kinds of days when streetlamps blink off unexpectedly as you pass under them, so many ha-ha jokes from so many supposed urban givens. And when phone calls come in fiery droves - each one pleading more than the one before for a part of you, for pieces we're never quite sure we ever quite had. You are not enough from rolling spirits around the country. This is when the next moment is scarier than the last. Still you have fought and forged a future, but nothing ever gets left out that you want to leave out; nothing you want to include is ever enough included. The parts of you are never whole and too many want all of them. Where is there to go but into your headphones?

Around now, I'm left wandering in the ways I know how. "I won't fuck us over" I am telling myself, not-quite-convincing each component section of my mind. "I won't fuck us over" as a mantra or a therapeutic confession. I do not know what this is doing, anymore - only that it's not doing enough. Waking up several hours too late for any forward progress, it's all just a filling of daylight with interaction so the nighttime doesn't flounder into a Navidsonian nightmare. Plotless, the forms and facts are all skewed, each warp and woof a mere house of leaves, sans accolade or vindication.

It's November now. And I don't know what Matt Berninger of The National means when he sings and screams and tears apart the heart of his voice into shreds of not-knowing and needing to say it - if that question of meaning could ever be asked genuinely. It seems somehow unimportant, the desire to solve it as unfounded as the pretension of tracing any lineage from this to that to another point. But the determination of his fucking up - the sheer desire to make it to the next hopeful moment without letting it all go - is here the necessary function of a necessary next. I'm in the mood to punctuate / only with that maker of promises, the colon: Dunn writes in Different Hours. Next, next, next, it says, God bless it. But unlike our dear poet Stephen, Berninger cannot wait around for the typing of soft phrasing - for the algebraic constructions of Dunn's constrained enjambment - instead ejaculating statements of desire in as much of the next-is-now rawness the human voice can produce, spilling the lowest common denominators of What We Can Hope into aural disruption :

I wish that I believed in fate
I wish I didn't sleep so late

So, Mr. November, here we are: and I don't know where. Next, next, next Dunn says. God, I hope so.

The National - Mr November (live in Boston)
(photo courtesy of Rock and Racehorses)