Oh, cast out Vanity, come back! I can barely smell your presence Where are you hiding? Show your face, Show your ass, let me press my ear to your chest And study what might flow through your mirror-glass heart
And then let us repair to the boudoir Where I can witness the spectacle of your Miraculous edge, your bowl of swirling nasturtiums, Your wall vase filled with narcissi, Flowers of the lower-caste’s depiction of love, Theorems brought to light from Asian underworlds
And then to the pond out back Trembling with catfish and we’ll Roll our eyes back into our heads until our Unseen pupils tremble, fluttering with the ripples Of the oversexed pond and the moths that flap as Dusk arrives in their craven approach to the fireflies That begin to appear in your proximity in swarms as if To expose your ruddy complexion throughout the night That you may never disappear
I am an invisible giant in your presence Held captive by the intoxication that blows from beyond Just in the direction of your precious garden filled with blooming roses Our desolation of riches knows no bounds
Ribbet! Ribbet! go the concupiscent frogs splaying their legs wide As each leaps into the pond in an attempt to cool their bellies and groins The catfish swoop and sway at the surface just to meet the frog-flesh Their madness is my madness, my obsession with you is a mirror Of the surface of your pond
Oh, if you could lift your eyes to see me, try, try, As if I were one of your bedroom mirrors, But nothing, especially not me, takes you from this Cacophony with which you are one—and I, Rising, am left alone, myself, to wallow in sorrow
They’re terribly, terribly, terribly moody —Björk (from Human Behaviour)
the freckles flecking the skin over the tops of my cheekbones. am i nine? so fresh-faced.
can’t remember the word that was on my mind (did i speak it some where between the dream it came from to) as i was waking.
wake up, america! quack, quack! it wasn’t a spoof it was an homage.
besides, i’m only ever catty when i’m in a great mood. and i’m not in a great mood very often.
“i was crying?” “he was crying.” “shut up!”
nostalgia kicks in as the burden of youth is lifted. actuality goes unremembered. instead there are a few tableaux, the faint recollection of emotions twisted (tainted) by time.
a harp’s melodic somersault over life’s peaks and valleys. the tragedy of a last hurrah, how it sticks with us, suspensefully.
impossible to placate, day in, day out, something always stirring at our depths, unshook.
everything. The apartment is messy and I’m afraid to look my paycheck in the eye. But what do we have here? I have received an email
from the attorney with the list of necessary documents. I call the phone company and for some odd reason I’m no longer on hold. “Hello.”
“Did you receive last month’s bill?” Oh, how random we are not. It’s the day the television, the new one that just arrived, spoke to my heart. Or shot
a harpoon through it. And the morning after a friend called, deep into the night, to ask a few questions about my current goings-on. Because friends care. And
the night before last was part of the weekend. What is weekend? Can weak humans make good on such promises? Oh, look at the time!
it was meant to be. people say this a lot, and it has turned me off, for as long as i can
remember, as an excuse to live life lazy. but today i’m wondering exactly what is meant when it is said. it
seems to me that there are at least a couple of unsatis fying options. the most obvious, i suppose, would
have some grand plan laid out somewhere out of our reach that gives us each a predisposed destiny. yuck!
or it could be more of a complex tautological shrug of the shoulders, something like a well, that happened, and
there’s no going back; it can’t be changed, it is what it is, what’s done is done, it was meant to be. either way, as far as i’m concerned, it’s a
pretty lame way to give up all accountability and, furthermore, if one were to believe such, why set any goals at all? when some
thing bad happens to me, first i get all bent out of shape, sure. but, and quickly, i go about moving forward, learning from what happened,
readjusting whatever plans i have for achieving whatever i want to get done on this earth, how i’d like to be going forward, and double down on getting
there the best way i can. i guess what i’m saying is that i don’t mind being a sap so long as i’m not a lazy sap. i’m in as much control as is
humanly possible, or i damn well try to be. and when things go awry, well, long story short, logic dictates
inappropriately. I meant reincarnated. When I was a child, I was a terrapin. Or at least that was my father’s first nickname for me. This is no extraordinary tale. But I suppose that this particular diminutive was transparent, was, of all of the ones that would later come, the most direct nickname of all of the names that my father called me over the years. So it was just the beginning of a trend of condescending sobriquets that my dad would anoint me. And when it came to my father, as related to me (and we were definitely related), condescen sion was most assuredly his language of choice, it was something he could (and would) do, and it was some thing he most certainly felt that he could do well. I don’t recall how it went exactly, but this trend must surely have begun when my father decided, perhaps as I was doing something he had asked me to do, to his mind, in a manner that was too slow for his particular taste. Perhaps it was during those sessions that transpired each day for many months during the year that would have been my kinder garten year—which also happened to be a year when kindergarten was not offered in the smalltown Arkansas school which I attended from first grade through twelfth—in which he somehow used alphabet blocks to teach me how to read (some thing for which I cannot but be immensely grateful). Or maybe, and perhaps most likely, it had begun on one of those weekends or summer days in which I’d have to go out to whichever pasture he’d be keeping his cattle that year, to tend to them, to help
him build the fences that he
so perfectly built (most
often in exchange for the
use of the pasture). What
ever the case, at some
point he decided I was too slow, and so, for a while, I became Terrapin. Of the later nicknames, each to his mind surely more derogatory than the last, other tales will be spun. But this is the story of the first—to my memory, at any rate—of many a nickname that my dad would, over my childhood years, conde scendingly dub me.
