CLOAK/5.5

Variously disabling attempts to grab life by the balls, few more disabling than success, with its perpetual requirement of at least one hand's busy work—and the other so frequently frozen cupping to catch every praiselet. What matter why the stars prosper? This is their time, they are the products and the profiteers, their resources can only dwindle as they spend themselves on self-promotion. The record would seem to indicate that even under the most favorable conditions this is not an easy, not a good, not a comfortable life for them. The marriage to Ava Gardner does not last. Stars function but fade while they do what they do, which is nothing new. Binary harrowings—win or lose, hit or flop, score or go home alone—hurts going up, hurts coming down, the air at the top is only anaesthesia.
In this refining of fantasy interviews for the kick of original thought, my methods are almost tragically inefficient— in smoke and obscurity I fumble at controlling a virtually random manufacture of material for which I have created no demand.
I am still unprepared for the routine lack of reaction.
And these shameful longings which are daydreams of fame, their narcotic fumes beclouding hours of every day, these factory emissions of sulphuric hue—every time I try to step up production I create this environmental hazard for myself.
Each night at some unspecified hour before quitting time I take the benzene-slick stairwell down around the ammonia pails, down past the garbage to the exit door that always sticks, and with the first step outside hit the puddle ice of limitations—
I am bug-flipped and windless.
I gaze across the parking lot surrounding sleep to where sleep blazes steamy-windowed, the central universal donut shop where the object of desire works nights,
lit up like Lincoln Center sleep is beckoning with fountain jets, promising head rest—
just splay there underneath a whistling star-and-birdie halo, the torn half of box seat ticket in the fist.