PAUL KILLBREW on
JULES DE BALINCOURT

Paul  Killbrew

I Lack a Certain Presence of Mind

I slipped off to the corner of my desk
and do you even work here? Yes, great, it’s great
but so unnerving. Graph paper 
doesn’t  mean anything, and I can’t concentrate 
on the even tones of your voice explaining
how we share this floorplan like a status 
in this particular arrangement of human situations.
Our ambitions arrive between us 
in a sort of mechanical pathos 
jabbering on and on about itself
until it  gets shot like the rest of us.

All you need to see clearly
is an office, a forgetful cartoon,
a slow withdrawal from discretion,
a willingness to trade in chunks of experience 
with their clarifying attitudes
for just  the attitudes themselves,
and an abandonment of the photographic clarity 
you feel in the calming tragedies suspended between us
on hooks sunk into our chests and strung in a mesh
that stretches to catch falling people.

Stare at the middle of the target, 
but you can’t for too long.
Its deliberateness is unwatchable.
Walk around the pool until you fall in.
Look around to see if anyone saw.

Jules de Balincourt
The Watchtower, 2005
Oil, enamel, spray paint on panel
Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita State University