mdxiii

You’ve Got a Chip on Your Soldier

     Yearning, on dog days, for the coco locos of seaside Mexico
                                                           —James Schuyler

Let’s argue which city in Italy. Let’s take walks
between rainstorms. Let’s ride the ninja bus
to Avenue Q.

2.   (lesson: re-learn how to correspond)

Argue over drinks. Decide on the water. Summer
jam, a boysenberry, French octopi, a plateful of
ravioli halves.

I used to imagine I’d be a soap opera star. I like the idea
of thinking about what I used to imagine (thanks Guy
Birchard). I used to imagine getting out of a money crunch
by selling my stamp collection.

There’s a terribly annoying man a couple tables over
talking about how all models are lesbians.

The cat walks in. I keep saving the
end for tomorrow. Type a quick note.
Type another. Drink the fuzzy water.

mdxii

What fight?

All of you people are
wonderful.  Just so you know.
And I’m just a sleep-deprived
ditz reading bedtime stories.

It’s impossible to find
last night’s wit (& other
drunken nights).  One
date down, another

over smoke.  Recently,
a drunken evening
stroking out.  So
flirty I bought it

in the mouth.
He thinks &
feels & clarifies.
Blue plaid, sunshine.

mdxi

Retribution

He grew a new set of
weeds on his head.
Old by proxy or
hair-restoring foam?

This morning is so
nasty compared to
Starbucks.   I’m
cold reading

the man about town
circa 1964.   This
restroom sucked
my cock.   A wise

respect for a
stormy presence.

mdx

Vibrations

1.
“If you have a thing
for Buddha then I say
go for it.”

2.
“Are you the
hot pecker
of my dreams?”

3.
The last issue
of Nest magazine.

4.
“I love you.
Next time
flirt back.”

mdix

Are you really wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt?

Tonight’s the night for introspective table talk
and crushing out on rockstars.  Slink into the
sushi reception, avoiding the exhibit.  Last night
a simple life of butterfly and bird, of playing

UNO and sleeping on the floor.  Initially, it
looks like a guy and a girl dancing.  And then
you look closer and the girl has a smoking gun
in her hands; the guy a knife.  You manage

quite an accumulation of friends.  The beautiful
boy at Starbucks paused over it for a while
and said “I don’t quite understand the nature
of their relationship.”

mdviii

What’s with skulking? I like the ones
more experimental. Today, everytime
I stand (I am usually sitting), I get the
feeling I’m going to pass out. Not your

average pass-out feeling. And as we
learned on Friday night, I have never once
passed out. So I drink lots of liquids and
have the leftover wonton soup from last

night while reading Oh my chin-chin china
chow dog for graceless dinner bong hoop
(James Schuyler) [roll eyes] and send
sanka card. I’m so lunky and happy.

mdvii

I am concerned with this alcohol of approaching smoke
                                           —Michael Palmer

No.  I’m just trying to milk the present one
until its last dying breath.  This page is
out of touch with reality.  He may have been
having a little fun with someone else.  I

pour a glass of lemonade into the silence,
happy if they are happy, having a feeling,
knowing the truth.  We share an afternoon
discussing the word inconsistent.  I want

to take a bath, to clip my nails, to drink
lemonade.  I know I’m straddling the
frame a little bit.  I wonder if I’m
somewhat reasonable.  Beautiful

day of secret stuff.

mdvi

My Latest Darkness

My latest darkness is about love.
I don’t remember what I was going
to say.  Except PARTNER.  Then
coming up cold with your own
decision (i.e., counting with a

hand, counting with a foot, etc.).
I’m reading through the 1st few
pages.  I’m cold.  I’m so COLD.
I keep looking around for the pur-
ported cruising, after the purported

hotness.  I do not seem to be see-
ing or feeling any of it.  Just coffee &
tea with no cream or additives.  So I
move to San Francisco where it’s
always a month before the bubble

bursts (one hand plus one foot)
and a cold evening with one more
episode of Paris Hilton.  With Paris
I find myself, usually with butterflies
and birds.  This time it’s an epiphany

of BLANK.  I conjure a life-size
cardboard cut-out, this bold blank
vision, a representation of Paris
in the flesh, how far it goes beyond
representation.  Weeks pass.  It appears

as fact with no further effort from me,
my clairvoyance capacitated into the
cardboard flesh of a cut-out reality,
right in my very own living room at a
‘surprise party’.  It’s my 38th birthday

but there is no surprise, of course.  She
even and also lives in my television
all day long.  With the waif of a crooner
who’d burned holes into my eyeballs
with a voice that defied airwave infinity

in the 1980s.  For an entire decade, ghosts
of his descendants blankly cruised each
farm where pigs were bred in Alma, Ark-
ansas.  It’s the Summer of Love.  I’m del-
ivered 13.7 miles away by a drunk doctor.

mdv

Are You Interested in Marrying?

My fingers fought small fathers
in the Diamond State. No Herculean
task, I might add, like regretting this
two-bit town too much.

Water only this week. Well, and
coffee and tea – no cream nor
additives but artificial sweetener.
Troubled by others’ methods, I take

Tuesdays and Thursdays off. This
place is creepy. Fuck, I hate myself
he’s so creepy. Which is why
we should TALK & DISCUSS

these things – like last night I proclaim
I AM YOUR CREEPY BOYFRIEND.

mdiv

Everybody Been Born

I can’t believe I jumped up and
chased him down the hallway
for a telephone.  Months passed
and then I waited all day but he
never accepted me.  Great anger
gets deflated and/or the economy
sinks.  Like a kitchen.  But you

have a way with words so I
send all of the acronyms
out to find you.  We’re
Matt Damon playing a
frumpy closet-case on
the run.  We get con-
fused.  But it’s okay.

mdiii

A table for one, please.

I already said that.  Or have déjà vu or

dyslexia.  I got myself into this mess.

I’m so lucky and happy in my still life,

Olfactory Toast.  There’s enough butter to

spread a knife around so I get so antsed up I

scream into the gauzy eyes of YOU MOTHER

FUCKER!!  These are the same lozenges that

amp up the ecstasy glaze over the orbs of love.

Let’s just say I court a glaze over my eyes, and

you too, maybe a quart of glaze between us.

Who’s to see what’s skating upside down

and frozen underneath it?  These aren’t actual

lenses / neither processed with pharmaceutical

prescriptions much.  These are just plain water

with no blue poison thrown right over each

blinking heap at minus forty; & this week no

cream additives and no artificial sweeteners.

You’ve the luxury of a stool at the bar with a

pain in the ass waitlist clung to a pain in the ass

waiter in a hard winter rain.  I am such a

glaze of orbs redacted by love, so lucky

and happy in my mess.  I am so toast.

mdii

Happy Belated Birthday

The code-word is peanuts.  You’d
think we’d make more sense of it,

but I’m an online thug at a geisha
exhibit.  I’m at a talk about what if.

You’ve probably read this, but the
key is to know how to explode one;

skid row skid marks under butane
tableaux.  Get ready to Grindr.

mdi

And Because

The publication won’t stop because of
apartment stuff and I probably won’t go.
I probably won’t go if I am a dirty dance.
The latest in sexual news is shampooed
from the mezzanine up on Saturday night,

the perfect combination of dance and
shampoo with lots of apartment stuff.
I’m hungry and I don’t get up.  Except
for talking about what if.  It goes up to
five floors or something.  Then he says

no problem with me before we hear the
elevator jack off in the distance.  Go a-
head and ask him what we tend to do,
sidewalk elevator or cable car?  Really
high woman table-talking with a funny

accent.  Then he walks by online with
someone I’m dating.  He’s an exhibit
and it’s freezing so who’s the voyeur?

md

A table for one is reading a Kindle
at Toast: it’s the first book she’s fin-
ished in this year of the new space-
aged head. Learn how to organize
in ‘partial alphabetical’ and clean
each individual slat on the six
sets of blinds. The curtains
have de-evolved, they’ve
lost their swagger like the
rest of us uninsured. No
culture in these curtains.

Dr. Obstacle is obviously
part of this adventure. He
bends into yogic tantrums
morningly and noonly,
yellow with the patch.
In the lobby’s a rash of
patients, each with a
bad case of Cuba and
a gnarled fist slammed
over each ear; a pasty fog’s
filled like an air raid with the

Google’s-Gone-Down(!) Alarm
and a loudspeakered litany of
symptoms; each crackle-voiced
outburst a new acronym that
itches like hell, and, because
this is not a test.

mcdxcix

Last Night’s Need

Last night’s need dropped in on me
again. It’s the nicest shout-out I or
mine have gotten in a very long time.
By the time I’d calmed myself down
for thirty minutes, his parents of guilt,
his panic about school, and boiling
issues of commitment, she was
crowning. Now it’s pushing
play. A smile for the
wanted. So much
shame to enjoy (&
its matching
publication).

mcdxcviii

SCOLDED

I’m always scolded again.  And I’m not
complaining because this is trying to
communicate, productive.  Beautiful
day?    Scolded.  So last night’s need

for parents first thing in the morning
causes a storm of a dance.  I let him
play school with his bonus guilt,
his panic about school, and hair.

mcdxcvii

Saturday Night Housewarming Picnic

I boil this down to separating
after five hundred or so.   With
swagger.   Cute, but there’s
no need for the comma (
correspondence disintegration).

Whilst I coffee my diary with
Joey & pals, calm productive
into tears (hyphen).   Or years.
Thirty minutes of french fries
over laundry.   So every 500

I calm myself.   I read tons of
Anselm Hollo.   Beautiful stuff
for a perfect movie.   This wk’s
agenda: invite ~75 people.   Oops.
Saturday night housewarming picnic.

mcdxcvi

I’m So Full of Sorry

I wrote some apartment stuff,
actually helping.   I know I’m being
at least somewhat reasonable.   It’s okay
as a bummer excuse, but what to do in an

LTR?   That’s his word for beautiful poetry.

mcdxcv

His secret’s on the side of much
willing.  Or should be.  The
joke about the coyote never ends.

We take the depression okay, an
anxious gift full of responsibility,
capital p, and lost trust.  I know

a reasonable fence he should
err on the side of.  Ha ha.
Is this wanting help?  Okay

calm down secret.  Be
reasonable.  Life is so
important to proclaim.

mcdxciv

It’s the Dead of Winter and I’m Nearly 70

I wrote an anecdote out of shampoo,
home by myself with a hot martini
recovered from work.  Otto’s drinking
M&Ms.  There’s no trust this week.

Six and a half years ago I write something,
9:15, and decide on drinks.  I have written
hundreds of drinks about where I am.  I’m
older than Kasey.  We decide in a minute

where I am.  Oh, I’m here, arriving in the
mail along with possibilities.  I miss Nick
but worry about his return.  Gloss up the
kitchen a little bit, the masked-up wall,

doing some apartment stuff before going
out and calming down.  A somewhat
reasonable need to make up for lost
trust.  Err on the side of assure.

Err on the side of parent?  Being a
big pain in the ass?  Calm down,
secretive!  Boats wobble in the breeze
without green.  A cure for the hair of the

dog that bit you straddles the fence a
bit.  He’s such a kid about actually.