by Christopher Schaeffer

        “Only in the summery middle of the nineteenth century, only
under its sun, can one conceive of [this] fantasy materialized.”
                -Walther Benjamin, Die Passagenwerk

i.
Economist Charles Fourier postulated that
After however many years of peaceable anarchist communes
Bunched into phalanxes the planet would enter into a new
And confusing epoch of fantastic fucking beauty.

Animals would learn to sing music and stars would wheel
Around the sky copulating flicking their cosmic sweat
Down on earth, where, meanwhile

We all would have evolved third “harmony arms” with eyes on the
        ends
And moved past the trivial need for food and sleep.

Everyone would be having sex with everyone.

It would be ok. No, argues Fourier, It would be more than ok.

All of this is true.

“There are an infinite number of parallel universes
varying in subtle or enormous degrees, all locked off
by some curtain or caul or horrific blank wall,”
writes the experimental physicist in the suicide note
addressed to his autistic daughter,
“and many of them are better than this.”

All of which is completely baffling to the modern reader.

None of which is true.
I am eating and sleeping on Earth.

ii.
There is a village outside Paris where all the clothes
Button up the back. To get up and get dressed
Is to put yourself at the service of another,
To turn your naked body and say
Help me with this for a second.
The small white horn buttons and even whiter
Loops of silk are ideas, are a suggestion made
By the fingers of any other citizen working something
Into something else, working slow
But with a heavy tenderness.
Like a lover, I’d almost say, but let’s not
Get melodramatic.

They wear masks and cardboard signs
Advertising their likes and dislikes.
They are strangers but they like it this way.
They love all of their strange faceless neighbors.
Their buttons are perfect.

Meanwhile in the next room my girlfriend
Vomits into a toilet while I think and go hmm
And replace “carried away” with “melodramatic”.

Sometimes we think the guy downstairs is hitting his wife
But who knows and who can be bothered to know.
If you turn up the radio you can barely hear it anyway.
Sometimes my fly will be down for hours and oh well.

I am eating and sleeping on earth.
None of this is true.

iii.
William Dorrell was impervious to pain
Until beaten to death by unbelievers.

America’s first vegans were, like so many to come,
Frantic millenarians. My favorites own “New Harmony”
Which in Indiana closed for good in 1827,
Leaving 20,000 acres of earthly paradise empty,
And now broods in Philadelphia making mock-General Tso’s.

And anyway I lied when I said he was beaten to death.
After the first punch to the chin he rose
With blood on his white collar
And only after a half-dozen more blows,
Pinned to the chapel’s rough floor,
Did he relent, three teeth knocked into
The mouth’s flooded cathedral,
Did he say, yes,

I feel it.

The Dorrellites, they believed
That in the new garden of eden no flesh
Would be harmed. They settled in Vermont.
In my earlier drafts rose-water flowed
From their skeptical wounds.

William Dorrell ate and slept on earth.
He lied when he said “I feel it.”

CHRIS SCHAEFFER is a biographical blurb designed to break all of your hearts.