Eric Tyler Benick

NEGATED SESTINA

after The Fugs 

I don’t want to say it was all for nothing,
but my fear is deeper than my honesty. Nothing
scares me more than death. Its vast nothing
and absence. An eternity built of nothing
and nothing’s impossible opposite—a dialectical nothing
where thing accepts its final enclosure of not thing.

Or maybe I’m wrong. I’ve never read Being and Nothing-
ness, mostly out of fear that I would understand nothing
and feel, once again, small and imbecile—nothing
astir in me, no synapse, no warmth, no thing
I can put a word to or call surely my own. It’s nothing,
I tell my wife when preoccupied by the visions of my skull. Nothing

but light and shadows, like an apparition that turns out to be nothing
more than a coat slung over a door. My ego is absurd to fear both nothing-
ness and its return, a spackle of matter that slips through the void nothing
can trespass except that which we don’t understand. You can’t tell me nothing,
a bygone Kanye shouts through me as I run down Stuyvesant in nothing
more than a small pair of green shorts. My head full of nothing

but the echo and clang of a man’s early illness. Nothing
can save Ye at this point, or me, or you, even if we are all nothing
alike but febrile with solipsism—the conscious self a distracting and odious nothing.
I can’t even count the times I’ve gone on about nothing
beneath the dark spell of alcohol or passed through a nothing
town feeling judgment and trepidation, wanting nothing

more than a warm caress of acknowledgment. It’s nothing
if not human to be vapid or perverse and to say nothing
of our substratum, our opals of mystery, our texture. It’s nothing,
the doctor tells me as I sit in her chair watching the shadows of nothing-
ness recede like black water. I walk out onto 63rd Street resplendent with nothing.
On the train, a woman clutches a copy of The Gorgeous Nothings,

and I think of those envelopes, inverted, containing nothing,
the writing fringed and broken, their language like nothing
before them. Bright ephemera on the verge of their own nothing
plucked discerningly out of time, lutescent and small, nothing
more, nothing less. How I envy them and want nothing
else than to be held so certainly, confusing no one, harming nothing.

Ha, ha, you can’t tell me nothing.
It is said Emily Dickinson can be heard through the grave
singing, Uh, uh, you can’t tell me nothing.

ERIC TYLER BENICK wrote the fox hunts (Beautiful Days, 2023) and Memory Field; A Travelogue of Forgetting (Long Day, 2024). With Nick Rossi, he is a founding editor of Ursus Americanus Press, a publisher of shorter poetics. His more recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Afternoon Visitor, Brooklyn Review, Copper Nickel, Harvard Advocate, Meridian, NOIR SAUNA, and Puerto Del Sol. He lives in Brooklyn.