This is too much pressure. I meant to wonder about the audacity of quantifying the ‘bigness’ or the ‘smallness’ of talent.
I’m smart but not audacious. (Is a big splash in a small pond better than a small splash in a big one?) What’s with verbalizing, anyway?
The question comes more down to ‘cult status’ – endless arguments with best friends who, in their indie hipnesses are posing just as loud as a silver-plated fashion mag on a Borders rack.
Getting bigger by becoming smaller, My Hero. If I were trying to say something I’d explain myself, right? It goes something like that,
falling asleep at the east end of Whaleship Plaza with a bird (small, no further description) singing in my ear.
In the soft-core center of the after-party glow, I graze my tongue discreetly over my teeth. I understand everything now, but where do I go from here?
Clearly something is very wrong. Perfection makes me dizzy, though, so you can compare your apples to oranges all you want so long as you remain master of the big waxy ball in my head.
He’s a sucker for war, I always heard. Jim, keep these postcards coming. Maybe a pair of ours will meet over the Texas desert and a little ray of hope will—and this is where I turn to Kevin for help—
maybe a little ray of hope will arrive via a new Facebook app and we’ll each meet two new friends who’ll ease us into one or two in the morning so we don’t find ourselves crushed like a tube of Colgate.
Bright young mopheads with exuberant vanity who coax us unfurled into our beds where we milk the death out of sex, another morning’s addled rhythms a few nerveless dreams away.
That they still need toilets is mysterious. —Stephanie Young
The markets are way down and I have to pee right now. This is the first time that time stands still (in a very long time) and let’s say it is all just a dress rehearsal.
Always check the rain schedule in advance. I have a crush on Feeling Like but yes, my relationship with Yesterday is as serious as ever. Maybe I just need a John.
His son is ten, I think. It’s Tuesday and last night it seemed almost summerlike with fog. I went directly home and fell to the ground. A new Ani D
album out today and I’m going to buy it. —broke with a tiny hair growing out between two teeth so I go to the bathroom
I see it in the mirror and I don’t have anything to pluck it out. Back at my desk I pilfer through vintage dentist goodies and find
some floss, flex that stuff until my mouth bleeds, but flossing always feels so good. Nothing works, though, until I spit out a
wad of gum gently brush it up my gums like putty and voilà.
Star of India, pale Elephant Man, lanky spirit of my inner pocket, do not go out that door. You came in Tokyo. I know your hotel (what room number?). Star of Georgia Plantation, darker in spirit than my left-hand neighbor, Shang hai Seventeen, enumerator of my inner waistband, do NOT go out that door. I came here for coffee but tuck my spirit between your sock and ankle. Oh you’re wearing sandals? Come over here. I have a couch for a hotel and am not yet clear-headed, Pale Singapore, Pale Australasia. Mind my natty rims. Parch my fevered whims. Just watch me smoke one min ute more esteeméd Star of Uzbekistan, Stan of my Oliver, man of my momentary dream. I double espresso dare you.
Sure, you’re the one everyone falls in love with what a flirt! And you got my number early on. Did I get yours? I dunno, maybe I was putting up the wallpaper that day. But the parties I threw for you, they were in sane! Now I just sit here and listen to the sirens. Probably the same ones you like to wash up against the rocks. Yeah, I’m mixing things up a little because now I remember I didn’t get into your pants. The things I like to remember. Anyway, you’re a lovely human being. I mean that as I turn the temperature up on the oven. For you I’d have another heart attack. But listen, first can you help me move the couch? Now that we’re alone you can tickle me until the moon falls back into its golden sling while I lick that ball of a head of yours up from Venezuela and around back to Chad and Lithuania before the sun cracks each fan tasy like a roll of quarters on a big broken toe.
This is easy. Man darin Chinese bricks and urns (no left turn). Man walks in with no left arm, a belly full of flowers, distinguished cock tails and foot police. Birds on piano wire sing plastic buttercups open til midnight serving corned beef hash. And in the back, a pharmacy full of honey-baked ham and last-ditch Euro pean tours. Full throttle Sunday.
Having not quite every man (but love). Startover reading Kevin’s Kylie poems I have the sun now in my pocket, the disco sounds of the city streets upwaft in my windows with an airplane talking about healthcare and stomach prob lems. Irresistible notoriety. I’m too lazy to get up to throw my chewing gum away. But is it instead too enraptured too in love as a nother car horn goes berzerk and I pull out my earbuds just to breathe a little?
The waltzes were beautiful, but the innuendoes were astounding, with names I’d love to recount like Bette and Victoria. I was surprised by how much gray had
gotten into your hair. Before going too far, I’d like to add the moon. Was full. First, we took the 38 down Geary for breakfast at Seal Rock Inn
(eggs benedict). Then, we explored the ruins of the Sutro Baths, taking pictures of each other along the way. Then we walked Ocean Beach
with Buffalo Bill Cody and a representative from each tribe. Up into the park for close-ups of various blooms. On to Haight Street for burgers
and then home for a nap. All the while a lovely Saturday with room to back up and start all over again. The waltzes were beautiful, but the innuendoes...
One more Beowulf and I didn’t even crack. I’m all Anyway You Choose to Give It by The Black Ghosts. Makes me think of you and the paper cranes having up and flown. I’ll experiment with anger while I miss them (and you). If you’re looking to extract a teardrop, I suggest a movie. That’s the only way, honey.
What does being a parent give you that I will never know? How does adolescent anger and resentment over not having the dad my friends had grow into utmost awe and respect. I was reading the newspaper every morning (or thus my classmates would have it) before starting school (first grade, because they didn’t have kindergarten the year I was five), and this was all because of you. Every morning for hours you and I were locked away with ABC blocks and a Fisher-Price tape recorder. I’ve no real memories of what transpired, but can remember the look on Mrs. Renfrow’s face (first grade teacher) when she had me out on the playground concrete during “rest period” reading The Grapes of Wrath to her. My father, short-tempered like his dad, wanted his kids to have the things he never did. Piano lessons, for example. I am proudly my father in many ways: perverse, flirtatious (only it’s waiters and not waitresses for me), stubborn, well able to evoke a strong sense of confidence, but generally feeling small, greedy, but with a keen tight-lipped understanding of the restorative powers of generosity, difficult to be satisfied with what is given me, just plain difficult. But he clearly lived for his kids, a father to three sons and a daughter, a proud sire. And what that must feel like I now feel is the big mystery.
Something romantic about walking through dark San Francisco alleyways at four in the morning. Of a weekend. Slaked with the throb of, you guessed it, dance music.
Losing your sense of direction can be catharsis. I remember trying to drive home, three in the morning, realizing I’m well past Roxbury, somehow I’ve completely bypassed Jamaica Plain.
I remember concentrating intently on not hitting the construction barriers on I-75 when I lived in Toledo.
How do I remember these besotted moments when I can barely remember anything?
So how’s it going, skipping time? I think okay. I turned the green eye off, however, only to realize that fantasy requires physical proof of existence. Allow
exhibitionism to turn you on and next thing you know it’ll be pegging porn in tea rooms. Breathe with ease and comfort. Allow
the body to take over. I once had a cage full of rabbits in my backyard. Now I look for poems in pillboxes, vaguely recalling a stew of
rabbit shared with a dining room full of Little Rock drag queens. A spirited discussion about wigs. But then someone nearly chopped a finger off (instead of a carrot?) and after that
the memory disappears. Tonight, a new friend tells me he feels like putting on his wig and dancing around in his room. Let’s rather take off our bras and go
cavorting in the moonlight. It’s warm enough to streak and my path to true engage ment requires a certain degree of perversity earlier and oftener than these memory banks goldenly recede into oblivion.
I lost all of my movies. The police sirens remind me of this fact. Honesty, with all its smoke and mirrors, is what I am trying to tell you.
Let’s get high and argue. This sense of belonging is important. I will crawl around on my hands and knees looking for contact lenses (which I don’t wear)
while you throw the camera out the door (along with yourself). Anger is important. I get dizzy eating a cheeseburger and fries reliving it.
Getting back to the anger is where peace can be found. I am short-tempered but rarely angry. Does this make sense? If each morning I clip the hairs that have
grown wild upon my face (ears, nose, eyebrows) I take two solid minutes to look at my sogged- over eyes and recount one angry moment,
the day’s primary problem is resolutely solved. Peace and happiness forever.
High on the couch with exploding wind; the air at the ceiling having found its depth or its relationship to the floating furniture (incongruity like TNT, which is how easy it is to fall in love with the “wrong person”). Never a dull moment, looking a lemur in the eyes. As if to say “I am right here with you.” Or “Just yesterday we exchanged places—I saw things ‘the way I always wanted’—and today each expelled breath sinks to the bottom of the lake that used to lie in torpor outside my living room window.”
an envelope addressed to a broken backyard —Landis Everson
The fan on high; webcamming in the afternoon. A wealth of filth in the boring carpet. Loving to spice things up, I try my damnedest to stay awake. Things start happening.
Mom calls to inform me that she’s wrapped her back porch round the entire north side of her house. Stores run out of sugar keeping her hummingbirds quenched.
An email from a lovely friend I haven’t seen in months; an invitation to dinner. Why should we quibble with fate? If you find me flirting in the chatroom, just remember that flirting leads to friendship.
Pretending to remember is a glorious device; the fan on high from too much San Francisco summer. I was talking last night with someone in the middle of a storm. Trading tornadoes for earth quakes was entirely too easy. And easy makes way for complacency. So I do my laundry and furrow my brow.
Today I am skipping time. When it’s too difficult to tell September from January, what’s the difference? How ever, I’ve nothing really fantastic to say to you. Unless you have ESP.
Reading this morning at Jasmin’s drinking coffee outside ultra- beautiful day waiting now for crab fried rice and 5pm poem swap at Union Square for dinner then Joanne Kyger and Anselm Hollo. Message in my phone from “the snowflake ;)” makes me drunk with happiness as I eat a smoked salmon sandwich with Ralph Fiennes followed by apple pie and the gym. The sun disappears behind the St. Francis Hotel. Salvatore Ferragamo sun. Pigeon sun and trolley car sun. Louis Vuitton sun covered by fragile tree blossoms as my foot falls asleep.
Rules made to be broken suddenly seem sacred. How I have swiveled and swayed my way out of this, the indefatigable dance. Today we’re five to a bed with sex, drugs and rock and roll, puzzling later over how cherished this unexpected fragment of time has already become. Later, filled with rocket fuel, surrounded by a conglomeration of luscious tartines, to find one’s hunger utterly sated comes as a shock to the system, another moment to savor.
