YOU CANNOT STOP ME
I am making soup and I am stirring my soup with a bone. I can’t tell you where the bone came from. That’s classified information.
If you want me to stop stirring my soup with a bone, you better give me three good reasons and fast.
Because the soup’s almost done.
THE THING THAT SITS ON YOUR SHOULDERS
Imagine this - you wake up one morning, and the thing that sits on your shoulders is a basketball and the thing you’re dribbling between your legs is your head. You don’t have a sister and the sister you don’t have doesn’t have a violin, and what you’re not worried about is how you’re not not going to be able to send her to a conservatory. You are a person, supposedly, who now has a basketball for a head, dribbling the thing that used to sit on your shoulders between your legs, about to leap grotesquely into the air and execute a slam dunk to the roaring applause of 20,000 hypnotized fans. Where once you were overwhelmed by poverty and despair, now you are becoming richer and freer from the demands of others by the moment. From now on, if someone wants something from you, they’ll have to get down on their knees and ask nicely. From now on, should someone dare to pelt you with an apple or a rock, it will not become lodged in your body and send you into a months long recovery. It will bounce off of you innocently, and hit the ground with barely a thud.
COMEDY OF ERRORS
The camera pans back to show us sex between a lord and a lady, congress as it used to be called. The room is stunning in its appointments, the moonlight is streaming in, mixing with the candlelight, mixing with us, remastering our senses. We are convinced. He cannot stop stuffing it in. She cannot stop begging him to stuff it in. Everything is going great, really great, until a bat flies out of her wig. Thus the lush period piece becomes a comedy of errors, told from the bat’s perspective. We begin to pen our review - “Why does every comedy of errors start the same way . . .”
OUTLINE OF A CITY
I dreamed that I couldn’t participate in the family reunion because I’d been exposed to yellow fever. I wasn’t able to kiss any of my relatives or even go near them, even though they all wanted to come near me and kiss me.
The days recently have been like waves washing up and collecting in a big pile. When I imagine a pile of waves I see sort of a modern art sculpture. It makes a shore ugly and confusing. It mars the sight lines. But I don’t think of my life like a shore.
I think of my life like a rope that I keep pulling out of the ground, foot after foot, wondering when it’s going to run out. When I feel brave, I look down into the hole where the rope is coming from and see things. Sometimes the outline of a city, sometimes a dancing mouse.
Once or twice a year, I feel brave.
I have read, at this point, what seems like a lot of books. For the most part, what I read seems to just slide right off of my brain, but I know bits and pieces get in there anyway. Just like people. I think of some people as being flavorless and weak, like cups of gas station coffee. They cost pennies, or used to. And I’m sure there are those who think about me in the same way. But one way or the other, we leave a trace.
Doesn’t that make you feel good, at least a little bit?
MOSTLY SILENCE
Mice and moles made of paper cuts chasing down a dream. Kids fight, animals fight. They always say you didn’t have to do that. What a hopeless code, like setting off a firework in your hand. Like a firework set off in your hand. Everything is a dream, so no need to give chase. Open the front page, see for yourself. Can’t find the spin for the fog you’re in. Some are certain this is the meaning of meditation. I want to break through with you, but not to the other side. It’s hard. I’ve heard that consciousness is two parts water and one part breath. It is not like the din of a city. It doesn’t sound like Loveless. It is mostly silence, and how do you even describe what that’s like? Here’s an idea for a mental illness. Here’s an idea for a car with no windows. Here’s a perfect study of the resurrection. Craft, and diligence. Tremors and tracings. Of course I feel eyes on me. There’s a lot I need to let go, but first I’ll treat you horribly for a while. Define gray areas everywhere. Like I said. Split the baby’s lip and you’ll get a cancer of guilt and a gut. But you can do something about it. Just remember what’ll render the past unsurvivable. Got rizz on your spacesuit. I think a loaded question asked you to do that. And all while asleep in the museum of asymmetry. Twofold more difficult to spell. 2 Kool 2 Be 4-Gotten. This is what the Earth has been dreaming of, deep down in its planetary gears. I put hot sauce on my Earth to let it know I notice it everyday.
LOCAL DIGEST
Who forgot to drip the taps?
Who forgot to read the meter?
Who forgot poems, and flowers?
Who forgot to say the death poems to the flowers?
Who forgot to read even one American novel?
Who forgot to join the choir of myopia?
Who forgot to tell it like it is?
Who forgot to call in from outer space?
Who forgot what a town is made of?
Who forgot I hide under your bed and you hide under mine?
Who forgot to make our drinks on the house?
Who forgot to leave a key under the mat?
Who forgot to turn off the rain?
DONKEY KONG
Donkey Kong is a very busy man. How busy, you ask. His job is to run through the jungle every day and punch all of his enemies or his empire will fall into the sea. Now that’s busy. No one envies him, running, punching the air, crying, why are you making me do this. Even the coconuts left around for respite say something hurtful to him. Donkey Kong goes to bed around 9:30 and gets up at 5:00 am.
ASEXUAL BIGFOOT
Bigfoot would like you to know that they are asexual, and that all Bigfoots come from the same place. There is a hole in the universe outside of Olympia, Washington, which looks like a pothole to the naked (human) eye. All Bigfoots are of one mind and have the same mother, which is not really a mother, but is like a mother in that it is beautiful and a point of origin. They do not give birth or have sex, but they do have feelings that can be hurt when you make assumptions about them. Think about this the next time you are driving on a dark road out west, that pothole you just clattered over could be someone’s mother . . .
NEIGHBORLY
Get a weapon. Don’t give it a name. Its name is Unknowable. When you think you’ve decided what to do with it, keep deciding. A weapon is a shape you see in the clouds. A weapon is like the ocean. You are fortunate. Be friendly. Wave to your neighbors. Go home every night to your weapon.
