mmdlxxxvii

Did I Miss Hearing You?

“I don’t remember seeding
you.” Clearly, I said that.
“Grow open my mouth //
that I may speak as I speak”
...(Brandon Shimoda)... “a
sea forms,” he continues.
The clicking also continues
outside my bedroom win-
dow. Does that mean that I
am to be continued? (Sound-
ly, resoundingly.) Now I
hear cars whizzing down
the main street of my
youth, which is High-
way 22 in Northwest
Arkansas. The whizzing,
however, is actually just
waves finding their var-
ious ways ashore. (Whew!)

mmdlxxxvi

WHOOPS!!

mmdlxxxv

A Bar of Soap

“I would like a bar of soap,
please,” I say to the lady.

The lady looks at me as if
she recognizes me.  In
my dream the photo of

Curtis didn’t do him
justice.  Awake, it’s
amazing the differ-
ences between life

and death; between
life and life.  To
think.  If I’d like
to take a shower,
I have the option

of walking a
block down
the street
before,
during or 

afterwards.

mmdlxxxiv

I’m feeling kind of
log inside.  I can’t
be $46.  Could you
ever so kindly find
a way to make a
small parade and
just call me a cab.
I eat a few bitches
of the smashed-
together bagels
&pretzels.  A
shower&coffee
w/ the neighbors
sounds nice, I won-
dered.  The total tab,
as it turns out, was
only 22¢, which is
                 just tabulous!

mmdlxxxiii

Peanut

He didn’t like it
as a nickname.
No, not one bit.
He didn’t like it
as a cartoon. What
a silly cartoon,
he’d think.
Beagles can’t fly.
But one morning,
before the cat-
hedral down the
street struck twelve,
before it had even
struck eleven, he
walked in to a
dining joint,
sat down,
and ordered
a steak. And
while he waited
for that steak,
he emptied the
entire bucket
of peanuts,
tossing each
and every shell
onto the already
shell-ridden 

steakhouse floor.

mmdlxxxii

The Facts Communicate with Themselves
(and can often be found in the Fiction section)

I thrive on sentences. One might some-
times say that they are flying dangerously
off the side of the cliff. One might say
alternate reality. “Well that’s terribly
wrong,” says the comedian in a wetsuit.

“Allow me to diagnose this,” she says,
not even trying to disguise herself as a
real doctor. Everyone gets it except me,
of course. They’re all ROFL and then
she’s ROFL. I’m just ROF until I learn

that my name has always been neither
Ralph nor Rolph. “You have an excel-
lent understanding of today,” says the
thistle to the undergarment that is sooo
comedienne. Today we all say “hooray!”

Yesterday we sat dumb in our chairs,
like, twisting our heads almost all the
way around. Tomorrow will be so
passé. But jokes to some folks (be
they—the folks, the jokes—ditzy or

deep), even though they might be
funny to everyone else, are so
cliché. “I rest my case,” says
the Basket Case (who happens to

make a living as a basket weaver).

 “The dog ate my homework,” 

says Plunger. “I draw the line,”
says a boy named Sue.
People are just funny that way.

mmdlxxxi

The Big Lunk

You taught me the world.
What a language.  “But I
can’t introduce her to
anyone orange, the new
earth’s underbelly,” he said,
trying desperately to under
stand it all.  The sea was
hissing like a snipe.  Each
piece of furniture wore a
comb-over.  And Once
Upon a Time couldn’t find
Happily Ever After, even in
this tiny little hearth (and
what an adorable hearth!).
Springs and thistles and
forlorn clogs filled all
space all the time (which
is not the continuum we’d
always imagined).  Frank
seemed to generally love
the songs, but could never
come clean, never break free
from the seedy neighborhoods
of the city that handcuffed his
tongue to the small thatch of
hair at the bottom of his back.
“It’s my small,” said Frank,
always knowing it was such
a big deal to everybody who
bore witness.  It was larger 

than anything at all, really.

mmdlxxx

John Lennon was murdered at the age of 40.
My 40s were delusional: The Delusionist Era.
When Lennon died, I must have been around
10, because at 11 I was crossing the American
West in a Ford Leisure Van™ with my family, my
first trip to California, where I might have turned twelve.
That summer I decided, at Great America, which
was to my mind somewhere between Fremont,
where my great-uncle ran a sawmill, and San
Francisco, the Elysium, where the coldest day
I truly ever spent was indeed the summertime
day I was there (which was spent with my family
at or near Fisherman’s Wharf, of course). Thanks
to a certain Arkansas blonde, I’d just discovered
that I very much enjoyed rollercoastering. I’d
so avoided them until earlier that same year,
when, riding with that blonde, I’d realize that
being upside down for brief moments was just
fine. But the slow tick-tick-tick-tick up to the
first (and often highest) peak could last forever,
and...let’s just say that my problem has always
been anxiety, rather than depression (something
I’d find out too late in life to enjoy so much that
had come previously). Anyway, that cross-country
trip in the early 1980s, our family of six, my dad
so proud of the newfangled van’s sound system
that he purchased eight new(ish) 8-track tapes for a
buck on the very first stop of our vacation together,
which was either a Walmart (most likely) or a K-Mart (I
forget which one) in Fort Smith, Arkansas. Among
them, was John Lennon’s (who’d recently been murd-
ered) and Yoko Ono’s Double Fantasy. Wow, that
was a great trip. And now I live here atop Nob Hill.
Life is a beautiful thing.


               I’m just sitting here watching the wheels go round and round
               I really love to watch them roll
               No longer riding on the merry-go-round
               I just had to let it go
                                                                               —John Lennon

mmdlxxix

Please Inhale Deeply Before The Next Section Ends

Or Something Happened. On either the day before-
hand or seventeen years ago. On the other hand,
the night before, I just don’t know. Ask me again
sometime. Oh! On the night before, our I do? But
I do doesn’t remember (therefore, I don’t?). Realiz-
that this is such child’s play, I decide to make an
entire career out of it. A lifetime career, so to speak,
I write. A lifetime, just to cut it short (despite its
length [which is always too long, relatively speaking]).
So, I make a career out of this, this nothing, this no
thing at all. It’s so very easy. I just close my eyes as 

if all of it happens. And even though it takes forev-
(cf., relatively speaking), we wonder if any of it ever
happened. Or if we made it all up. And if we are to
(eventually, or perhaps inevitably) discover that we’ve...
made it all up...does it go about happening 

(and continuing to happen) nonetheless?

Like the light of the neon sign from the hotel dire-
ctly across the street from our apart-, the light
that burns into our closed eyes each night, be-
aming through the bedroom window and down
onto the us, onto the bed I just now made up.
Just for you.  The moon.  Over us. Lying incessantly
atop our be-...in the bedroom of the apart-
building in which we sleep and(/or, as proof
would suggest,) we have slept and slept and sl-
Over the bed I made up just now. For
you (and for you alone), we await a sign,
each in our respective place (which is not
lying and is not upon any aforementioned bed)
that, upon seething, burns into our closed eyes. 

At night.

mmdlxxviii

               Halogen Therapy

(or pausing long enough to catch a bit of air)

Everybody knows that pricking an aching heart

as it lay in pieces before you (or during you)

can be great fun, right?  Whatever the case, that’s

who I think I am already: a foaming heart (or a

foaming heartlet).  And love?  Funnyheartlove is

almost always fun, brainless, and has many more

names than seventeen (right?).  At seventeen, for

example, I had a kiss or two or three.  At nineteen,

however, I broke through into the night, where I

might simply have remained a poem or poetry,

another astrolabe, pausing only occasionally

every couple of hours just to open my eyes

or take in some air.  My eyes!  My, my!

Keep in mind that neither nobody

nor I have heard his voice in aprox-

imately nineteen plus seventeen days

now.  Great fun, right?  Yes.  Great fun.

mmdlxxvii

Every prick I gripped was a poem in my hand
                                                  —Ronald Palmer

Stupid love. This is a story called Career. And it has to do
with stupid, stupid love. I write its name (the name belonging
to stupid love) seventeen times because I honestly don’t know
what it is, nor what I’m doing, who he is, who she might have
been, what it was as compared with what it is presently and
what it will be in some future, should it arrive. One thing is
certain, and that is that I wrote (or performed) a stupid, stupid
love. I don’t know what it was, but am I ever going to miss it?
Or stop missing it? Well, we did have this this. We were (or
it was) certainly the thing, even as it eventually evaporated in
to nothing, or something akin to nothing. There’s still, perhaps,
something here, or there (as there relates to here, anyway).
Remember where it was, where we were, at any moment
that ever might have existed? Who cares, really, where we
were or went, because wherever we were or went, memory
or not, it says here that we were, most assuredly there. But.
Who cares, really? The toilet’s still in the restroom or the
bathroom, however one might call it or however one might 

have once called it. But who ever uses one anymore, right?

mmdlxxvi

Anything’s more real, once it finds its mirror.
             —something I wrote down, surely stolen, 

                but I'm unaware from whom

Probably remiss,
I made sure some-
thing happened.

It turned out
horrible, so
horrible.

I pull a sock
up to my knee
(it’s all about me

being up to me).
Oh, to be a striped
swan gliding by

the geraniums
or two bees foul-
mouthing this

narrative (sur-
prise!). My eye!
Your power of

attorney (my
Bane to your
Batman),

whose up
again (in
chaps, of

course).
Something
happens, at

least—per-
haps a chapped
Batman vaulting

in just to take over
my yawningly long
chase. Which

is fine, all
things
considered;

it was
high time 

for a change.

mmdlxxv

Too Small to Sing About

To believe
for a mo-
ment that
I can act-
ually name 

this feeling.

mmdlxxiv

Too Large to Fit

It wasn’t
the miss-
ing glass
of water
that I
found
under 

the bed.

mmdlxxiii

Duets That Would Make Your Jaw Drop

He has a blatant disregard for life,
which I greatly admire.  It is not
the admired life that I go for.

“Admiral Awkward,” they always
call to me just as I am heading out,
“Once again, you forgot your lunch.”

mmdlxxii

Duets That Would Make Your Jaw Drop
        I Love a Parade

I want to get up, but I
don’t have to.  Trying
to fit everything into
denial of withdrawal.

A dog barks at the
scratch of vinyl.  A
sound or an instance?
Not sure.  But I found

a bunch of hidden cal-
ories in the bottom of
the sink drawer.  Un-
derneath all of the

other stuff nobody
calls tickertape any-
more.  Or, no: with-
drawal of denial.

mmdlxxi

Atrophied Paperwork

I’m feeling kind of wasted
life. Somebody figure out

how to bomb shelters yet?
My hiding places. But I have

no cents for doing anything,
like last night, drinking it’s

the end of the world, and
it probably was. For eleven

years, a clicking noise,
many mornings, out my

(hauteur) bedroom win-
dow, just on the other

side of the screen. I
have yet to determine

or decide upon the sores
of it / the sort of it / the

sour-source of it, this
intermittent clicking

outside our bedroom
window. Have I ever

even attempted to
do so? I—

wounded— 

wonder.