Perpetual Inventory
            by theo konrad auer
 
 
Springing for
a deep cleaning
of my space/place
It's bigger on the inside than the outside and
the white elephant in the room is
growing ever larger looming
Pledge break season sermons are on the radio and instead of
driving me crazy the voices are making a load of sense
in any case this room, that is
bigger on the inside, it
can take me to places,
in past and future tenses, my
senses tell me I am there already, though
I am not and even though they are
both fictional and even real
sometimes all too,
I mean I might as well call it my Tardis,
My own personal, unreliable in the end wise narrator
who is the navigator of my worn out time machine
I managed to help steal from an extraterrestrial museum in a lost episode of
The Longest Running Science Fiction Program Of All Time,
See, here, it is was what I had when my mom wasn't there
In the latchkey years after my dad died of cancer, sometimes
Mom wasn't there but there was always Monty Python and Doctor Who
on endless Public Broadcasting Service reruns and
Once they even crossed over in a fantastic bit they satirized the once
current and then now fashion in art, that of the conceptual
Eleanor Bron and John Cleese as art critics pondering the Time Machine:
"One of the curious things of this thing is its afunctionalism...and in the art of lies that makes it ART and
is it is still here even though it isn't here."
Just after that moment The Doctor and His Sidekick enter and exit via the disappearing spaceship as ephemeral artwork.
 
The evidence is here
lost talents
strange tokens
and colorful totems
Aids in my quest to successfully
grasp and eventually one day
master
Zen and the Art of Mixtape Making
How else would Psychic TV, Francois Hardy, Love, Sibylle Baier, Eric Dolphy and BOWIE fit together properly?
 
Old clothes
New rarely, if worn
uniforms really
FIT for
previous lives
NOW sit in
Bags soon to
be worn by a
hipster or
a homeless indigent having
been received by Goodwill
 
Still.
Here.
Not really, the leftovers stir me,
The concert tickets, posters, the letters sent and
those never sent,
the birthday card from the ex I almost married where
she drew up an imaginary family and picked all of
our children's names
One of them was Amelie
reminding me of
why we broke up and why she married Kobe Byrant's one time teammate and why
I couldn't commit, really commit to anything more than writing(at the time), but at least I
was faithful when I was with you and most,
the record is a terrible thing to reckon with even when you are the better man now
since then, and in any case at least I have the
distraction of memory of the sound of your voice but
I think I would rather it than this, but
still, it doesn't sound as cool as the wonderful noise Doctor Who's ride makes,
I don't think I'll ever get a theme that will one day get remixed and become a rave anthem
 
These are all really game attempts
disguised as cleaning out the aggregate, because the
thing that inevitably gets lost in the journey of
choosing what gets remixed in the digital when all you
really wanted was the analog and when that fails you
want the ever increasing bit rate to make up for the failures of memory when
all you ever, ever, only if ever!
when what you really want is a chance to remember what it would have
been like before this, when you didn't know any better.