Four Poems by Devin Becker
Ben Lerner
Ben, my high school best friend, Ben,
is nothing like you except
you look
very much like brothers.
You are both Midwestern too,
as I am, (as everyone is)
so I bet,
Ben,
you grew up with the same excitement
about the new Applebee’s and other
late 20th century upheavals in
monetary and food cultures.
Ain’t it all the same, Ben,
aren’t we all
like all
like each other
like
one another like
one, and the simulacrum of one,
which is two,
if you believe in the Other,
which you do, Ben,
you do, I know you–
or I don’t, really,
I just read you but
I know people who
do know you like Ed
& Elizabeth and Erika.
They say you’re smart, Ben,
and you are,
it’s obvious–
your books are like A+ papers,
they won’t give a red pen
grip–so
I have trouble
continuing
to address you
in your absence
(fearing you’ll think this
stupid)
but I keep
doing it because
doing it
as both our childhoods taught us
is really, really important.
Supremely so.
It was almost our first lesson,
save for our first
first lesson, which was:
Envy all the fruits
of your neighbors,
and didn’t your backyard
back up to a golf course
and didn’t you hit the errant balls
back at the yuppies
who sliced them
& who were not
yuppies
you realized later
(when you learned how
culturally irrelevant
your hometown really was)
but just people
like you
who had no hunger
that wasn’t fed to them
years before their weekly
45-minute waits
with the buzzer
that lights up red and
shakes when your table’s ready–
We grew up with it all
coming to fruition, Ben–
they quantified and quaffable
and made it profitable,
their logic
becoming so
essential, so undeniable
that now
we hardly question
why the buzzing
makes us (each time!)
feel as if we’ve won something.
Koan Head
I’m trying
what I can to learn
to unthink, Ben–
Not to
not think
(mind you)
rather
to understand
the reason
I say
I think
but not
I beat my heart.
Lerner
Growing up, we cut down
everyone, Ben
we exhausted
into hilarity the material
of our failures
And like any sort of
love
this marked us inferior
to the point that
now we only know
we’re friends with someone if
each of us can say something
so accurate about the other
it devastates, emotionally
but stays funny.
And this is
good laughter sometimes (sometimes
even restorative) but it catches up to you, Ben
turns inward when you’re older and your
guy friends dry up
and you have adult friends, which are worse.
Once established, our childhood defense/social systems
need to feed on something and this is you,
Ben, becomes you, Ben,
which prompts that famous, poetic discovery:
I is an other
and he’s a dick
and he hates you
which seems wrong in this century, when all the other others are all
like:
Like! I Like it! and Look! I like it!
like it was never cool to dislike everything, which we all know it was.
I wish
I’d more enthusiasm generally, more joy,
and maybe that will come, Ben, and maybe
I will take it easy and vice versa:
maybe I and I we’ll both follow each other,
read each other’s walls as we text each other.
Eat each other’s feeds.
10:05
Everything’s been
made fun of
already,
Ben; been
mad funny.
What’s left
but to praise everything,
anything,
post it all
so it
means something;
fix it all in bits.
I mean
what am I even
doing here
typing
when I could be
pasting this
into the internet,
embedding my picture–
Oh but who am I
to grimace
at this newest messaging.
