Still, Facebook is nothing if not a great attempt at soul food, social gumbo, a way of pouring all your friends into a technological broth meant to be tasted slowly and continually, but never finally consumed. For me, though, there’s never a second-day savor, when all the ingredients have had a chance to get close and then get closer. On Facebook, there is no second day, only a string of successive first days, where the flavors are as distinct and expected and satisfying as ever they attain to being in their individual merits, spicy or flat, sweet or confusing, but never able to blend in a curry, or even a legitimate stew. All Facebook status updates, by virtue of their endlessly equal march regardless of content, jostle each other in a manner that’s neither congenial nor rude, but perfectly homogeneous in their exclusivity, as though we’re all suspended in the broth’s bubbles. As though it is a broth of bubbles.

Any given day, a friend — ‘friend’, as a reference on Facebook, is a smooth-turning knob with stops at ‘Total Stranger’ and ‘Actual Friend’, and where any setting to the left of maximum implies a degree of personal spin, making Facebook, at times, feel like a very performative space — one friend might post about her terrible day while another blurbs his involvement with an ongoing and controversial political movement. Someone else will add to his long list of affirmations, which makes me wonder if he’s struggling, and then a long-silent acquaintance might pop up and scrawl a quote, newly meaningful to him — “We are all a lost generation” — but often with no explanation as to how or why it’s meaningful. Or sometimes there is a quick explanation, but Facebook is insufficient to any touch but the lightest. The Facebook flowchart of responses allows for only a few pathways: 1) mysterious brevity, 2) dry humor, 3) zany humor, 4) witty humor, or 5) inappropriate humor. It’s a jackpot when a response hits all five numbers at once.

This is, by the way, entirely an account of self-implication. I admit that I’m guiltier by far than any of my friends when it comes to putting on a Faceface. I’m always chasing after Facewit, Googling other people’s Facequotes, responding as if I’ve known the origin for time out of mind, and, generally, trying to sell others on my Facebrain, which bears only an incidental resemblance to the heavier, slower, technologically unassisted gray mass.

So for me Facebook is frequently a bummer place, despite being a place for friends — “Friends” probably the apt gross reference to the collection of amicable relationships found there, but also as a reference to the TV show that mimics Facebook’s strange, planar desolation. Always content to zone out to a familiar melody, it was years before I realized just how weird “Friends” is as a story. Every season, the plots and characters are almost exactly the same. Ross wants Rachel, but can’t have her. Sometimes it’s the reverse, Rachel wanting Ross, and that’s a nice change. Chandler is always witty and fumbling. Sometimes he isn’t quite as fumbling — cool when that happens. Ross is fumbling and charmingly witless, but he has a Ph.D. in paleontology, which no one ever wants to hear about even though, you know, they’re close friends and this is his life’s work. Joey, too, fumbling, and with a sexual power that is never convincingly established, but the audience is meant to buy it, even when Matt LeBlanc is on the Doughnut Diet, so fine, I like dougnuts too, and sex — there’s a Category 5 joke there somewhere. Phoebe’s idiocy always resolves into spacey wisdom and Monica’s relentlessly anal drives are always mitigated because she can cook. The show is perfectly flat. Nothing is really emphasized — other than the idea that, hey, friends matter — or is allowed to gain much traction, but everyone’s so pretty. Nothing’s ever established, or asserted, though there is wordplay.

And, yes, I get it, it’s a sit-com, so the joke’s on me if I take it too seriously, but that’s just the thing — I really do like Friends. I always will watch Friends if it’s on. I’ll even get excited if I catch the first show in its hour-long late-night two-season syndication. I’ve seen all the episodes, I know the jokes, I know the characters. But if it’s on, I’ll watch it, because these people are the ultimate others, with problems I don’t understand because they’re not actually problems, like a meal of human chips, salty and tasty, but not really food. Perfect, though, for convenient, relentless consumption.

As is Facebook — it’s the way to eat your friends as salty, bite-sized chips. And I don’t pretend that Facebook seriously interrupts or interferes with the meaningful relationships of my life, because it doesn’t. But if you’re prone to ennui or the mild spiritual malaise that comes with, well, living, Facebook can be a technological pharmakon, killing while it cures in a trade-off that’s very nearly equal, but not exactly quite. The argument might be made that Facebook does nothing, that it merely mirrors what’s happening within, but that ignores the significance of form. When I’m not on Facebook I don’t think about my friends in terms of a collection of brief, running notes, nor do I spend time trying to invent ways to present myself in that format. Meeting friends is not, generally, a drive-by experience that emphasizes rapid-fire cleverness. For now, on Facebook, this is always the case.

July 26, 1920
(Vega de Zujaira)

    On the sun-parched path
I’ve seen a fine lizard
(drop of a crocodile)
meditating.
In the green frock
of a devil’s priest,
his poise precise
and collar creased,
his semblance is the sorrow
of an old professor.
The marcid eyes
of the failed artist,
how they stare at the afternoon,
its lost heart!

    ”Is this your turn
through twilight, amigo?”
Use a cane, you are already
worn out, Don Lagarto,
and the village rascals
will give you a fright.
What will you find on the path,
short-sighted sage,
if the vacillating spirits
of the August afternoon
have splintered the horizon?

    Are you looking for blue alms
from a dying sky?
A penny from a star?
Or perhaps
you’re studying a book
by Lamartine, or you, sir, love
the plateresque whistling
of the birds?

    (You look at the western sun
and your eyes silver,
oh, dragon to the frogs!,
with a human sheen.
The oarless longboats
of ideas cross
the dark water
of your burned iris.)

    Maybe you’ve come looking
for a lovely lizardess,
green like the wheat
of May,
like the long locks
of sleeping fountains,
who spurned you, then
left your country?
Oh, dulcet idyl dashed
on the cool rushes!
But life! Damn!
You’ve found me sympathetic.
The argument, “I set myself against
the serpent,” triumphs
in yours, a Christian archbishop’s
great double chin.

    The sun has now dissolved
in the mountain’s cup
and flocks
cloud the road.
It’s time to leave,
leave the narrow path
and stop
meditating,
which will have its place,
the staring at the stars,
when they are eating you slowly,
the worms.

    Go back to your home
under the cricket village!
¡Buenas noches, amigo,
Don Lagarto!

    Now the field is free of people,
the mountains faded,
and the road empty.
Only, now and again,
a cuckoo sings in the shade
of the poplars.

July, 1920
(Fuente Vaqueros, Granada)

    Wind from the south.
Dusked, passionate,
you move over my flesh,
bringing me seed
of radiant
gazes, steeped
in orange blossoms.

    Making the moon blush
and tearful
the rapt poplars, but you’re here
too late!
Already I’ve scrolled up my story’s night
on the shelf!

    Without the wind,
listen to me!
Come round, my heart;
come round, my heart.

    Air from the north,
the wind’s white bear!
You move over my flesh
trembling with auroras
borealis,
with your cape of ghostly
captains,
laughing grandly
at Dante.
Oh polisher of stars!
But you’re here
too late.
My alma-armoire is moss-mantled
and I’ve lost the key.

    Without the wind,
listen to me!
Come round, my heart;
come round, my heart.

    Breezes, gnomes, and winds
of nowhere,
little flies on the rose
with petals like pyramids,
trade winds weaned
between the brusque trees,
flutes in a storm,
leave me!
It has rude chains,
my memory,
and the bird is caught
who traces with trills
the afternoon.

    The things that have gone will never return,
the whole world knows it,
and in the bright crowd of the winds
it’s hopeless to complain.
Isn’t that so, black poplar, teacher of the breeze?
It’s hopeless to complain.

    Without the wind,
listen to me!
Come round, my heart;
come round, my heart.

In your own sweet way you improvise
inside me from outside, with hands and fingers
pressing on strings, lips pressing, shaping,
playing my favorite things, valves clatter,
making air a messenger that sings.
I was yours then, I am now, tonight,
in any La Ve Lee or Blue Note,
you take me any way you want, slow, down,
cut, in a minor key, or any two five
one giant step cycle, roaring down Sunset
up at dawn, hours since the last shot,
an hour since the last fuck you but you’re
still in my head and that’s the history
you make in me, etched in dreams an endless
solo break that has changed the way I everything.