mmdcclv

The Great Unrealistic Ache

It was the summer of
I hate this one. In which
the foggy details
became all too clear.

For the obscure
clarity = obscenity.
To the foggy, it was
never really that vague.

I looked out, did a
quick survey of the
landscape of
simmering wet

toilets that
pulsate (due to
my eyes’ over-
loaded blood-

veins) and
I thought,
“How cine-
matic!”

So caught
up in this
was I (I was!)
that .. long pause .. .. ..

Oh, what a blustery
day it is (Is it?). It’s so
wound up that the
groundbreaking

ceremony for the
hardware store
that the neighbors
are building (the

ones who live in
the tiny room
that abuts our
garage) was

postponed
indefinitely.

mmdccliv

…I don’t really think in words, but impressions.
Saying something in words is so harsh; too
general. It’s never enough.
                                                 —Joe Brainard

He has me giddy
searching for that
pot of gold. What
a rainbow he is!
I am so in love
with not knowing
where I’m going.
Quick, what comes
immediately to mind
when you see the
words SHATTERED
GLASS? I’m always
moving around with
some: in my pockets,
in my socks, under
my feet, in my hair,
stuck between my
teeth, etc. Today,
I went shopping
for some that’s
as of yet un-
shattered.
It’s expensive,
though. And
who needs it
anyway? I’ll
stick with the
ruby-studded
diamonds in
my pants
pockets, in
my tube socks.
So I buy a
stick of lipstick
instead. It looks
like a battery
that when
opened is
a tube of
butter.
Earlier this
week I lost
my lock that
keeps my few
belongings tucked
away safe. I forgot
to pick one up
while I was
shopping. I
was too keyed
in to cheap
bleeding
jewels and
lip-tickling
batteries
filled with
butter.
Knock,
knock. I’m
going to use
the rest of
October
(my least
favorite
month)
to buy
a new
lock.
Stay
tuned
next week
for The Case
of the Lonely
Pneumonia.

mmdccliii

Fresh Kill
   @the
Pink Palace

Is it that
this day,
like any
other, is
rife with

possibility?

What did
we do on
those
other
days?

mmdcclii

Vine’s Rhinoceros
(an achizm that’s almost awakizm)

           I felt good that I had eyes.
                           —Joe Brainard

In the quiet room: “I asked you
I asked you I asked you a
specific question. You didn’t
answer the question you just went
AROUND the question.” Then “YOU
think I’M flirtatious?!” Then “What
if I WAS flirtatious with the professor
who was flirting with me?”
…    …    Long Pause      …
I guess she hung up.

So let’s clunk…
“How behavior light” (folly)     …
“(How behavior light!”)

…    …    “Hello? Hello.”  …
…    …    OK                  …

Suspicious of the vines, she
broke the rhinoceros. The
vines that broke the clouds
with the eyes.

I sat up late at night (top bunk #13).
I shot up in bed.
I woke up to shooting up.

If you spit on a toilet
You get nothing but
…       a spitty toilet.

The toilet, the vine, the specific question and the eyes
… … all went right back to the ache.

mmdccli

“Here,” I said, hand-
ing over her lunch,
“I wrote you a sandwich.”
“Arkansas thunderstorms are
close to my own words,” she re-
sponded, surely meaning something
like “What a neat trick!” That, however,
was then. Today, I learn of a good friend’s
passing, and my current favorite person in
the universe will not even speak to me, de-
spite my trying in most every language (in
the same universe) to explain to him that
pretty much the only thing that he could
possibly do to actually halt progress (which,
as it turns out, is a difficult word to define,
in any language!) is to cut off all means of
communication. What a lazy way to go, this
death by incommunicado. Perhaps, then, the
San Francisco fog colludes with that of my own.
Feeling my way through it, this fog and that fog,
I happen upon the zing of a word that once meant
something. “To whom?” asks my favorite person in
the universe. Thus we arrive, the both of us, in color-
ful bow ties, at the Awk Ward, where for many years I
live, taking lots of pictures of myself just to while away
the time. Much later, when I finally escape, I find myself
at every MUNI stop swimming in a curiosity that is almost
always followed by an uncontrollable laughter. I’m not
laughing (of course) at all of the people from other more
distant terrains who stand in the subway or sit in a bus
with long wands which are called Stick Selfie. “You idiots,
you lost another month!” says the person sitting directly
under the ad for Stick Selfie. Or is it that the voices in-
side of my head dare instead to remain silent? Will they
always be this deceptive, this quiet, this deceptively
quiet, like an intricate stealthy drone driven from
five thousand miles away by an even smaller drone?

mmdccl

The Sequel

What I really remember is the snow
that crunched loudly white while two
by two we emptied milk cartons all over
the carpet where we’d light a blunt auburn
candle each time we’d place a large chicken
clean into the oven and then we’d find ways
to warm ourselves up without speech until the
cold was floating around us and not on top of us

“like reindeer” amid the pink canvases filled
with runny noses we always arrived into the
same dusk-colored place – we’d be circling a
Christmas tree (“Teddy’s got mine!”) with
none other than our dusty favorite, Frosty
the Sasquatch. Thus would begin the alt-
holidays through which we’d droopily
happily endure . . . and now the sun –

shining its headlamp out toward every
slice of existence that isn’t already
pink (concocting brown and also
blueberry and ashen gray but
banana, too!) . . . and the trains

whistling arguments with one
another; non-stop red-faced
outbursts over and under
snow-capped mountains,
beside the exhausted
stumps that stubble
the inclines between
the tunnels;

these parched
remains of an
erstwhile lush
austerity sec-
retly seek –
desperately
seek – a simple
spot in the shade.

Sadly, being but stumps
(and therefore never quite
capable of grasping the fate-
altering tricks known particular-
ly by their neighbors, the rocks),
each, despite a blaze-quenching
desire, meets destiny by coming
to rest beneath a canopy of no-
thing but emboldened stars;
each desiccated stub next
to its very own frozen 

pile of decaying hay.

mmdccxlix

The Rambler

Promise me, son, not to do the things I’ve done.
                                   —Kenny Rogers

Repetition is the highest
form of slavery. Never-

mind that it doesn’t
matter what I say.

Values are less
valuable as

the high ground
gets high. It’s

our job to separate
the wheat from the

chaff, amorally
speaking. “Turning

the other cheek is a
sin,” says Mixed-Up

God, who’s always
walking away from

trouble (when he
can). I spit up

an egg sandwich
onto every offender.

Each is an officer
who bears a key

as host to this 

year’s city-state

nirvana.
Nirvana

is made of
regurgitated

gold. And
molded bread

my dears.
Good old bread.

mmdccxlviii

This Has Probably Been Said Before

Looking down onto the desert
I am reminded of the dollops
in his throat – it could just be
the clouds or how the currency
of his voice was always paid in
whiskey clinks (Were aces wild
or bases loaded? There’s only so
much one remembers); it could be
too a resistantly lingering vapor, but
a whiff of that surly misdemeanor, now
gone all but non-existent – a stinking ex-
tinction the whole of which I’d welcome
for an instant – or two – and not in a regret-
ful nor a spiteful way, either (Oh, how very
skewed becomes each glanced perspective!)….
Would that I could pay my way clear through
the pink rock-like layers that compose such
beautiful buttes as those that I have yet to
completely imagine. But come now would I,
could I (?), if but to ascertain precisely my
particular description; how each (to a man)
whose clipped talk was such a dreamy golden
voice gone voiceless – (ah, but whose now
hasn’t?) – was everything that’s me and mine
in just one singular cloud that drops by, stays
a little while, then drops a little rain upon
the desert and (poof!) was just a cloud all
by itself (like me, like I am now, an isolated
puff)? How distant are the layers of that cake!
And to the prick how each (a he) he must have
convulsed from such repulsion, and with urgency
and in direct polarity with apparently misleading
charm, that with a similar conviction and speed
a quick storm exhibits as it hops across the sage-
brush of a summer afternoon – or how a bit
further into the frontier a casino’s change
leaks softly-swiftly into pocket – with a whoosh! –
it’s vanished irrevocably, leaving for jilted memory
all sorts of bruises and cuts that in turn will leave
scars, the very templates of bitter remembrance,
and hands that remember being full with what’s
gone – as with a ghost town’s erstwhile panhandlers’….
This story of a couple of men once disguised as side-
burns walking through an arboretum, and how they
were at once two books that being stolen from a
leisure van parked on a little rock in Little Rock….
How that little black pocket rock once conveyed
a made-up mood, a few feelings, for example,
like the ones given out by whistling sagebrush –
those same clumps disintegrated by the dis-
appearance – now gone so damp as to give
a vertigo, a berserk and unconventional
spin. And do they ever spin! They spin
until all of my arms and teeth are lost,
until a single blunt post of saguaro gets
stuck somewhere in the rainforest of a
distant hemisphere as the vague scent of
whiskey as it clicks or as it clinks through
the bone-chill night after night after night
toward the rocks that are uplifted and carried
by the dreaming wind until dropped as a stack
like silver dollar pancakes into blood-colored
buttes. And nearby, where burial grounds
grow paler pink under the scorch – “We’re
going to Illinois…aren’t we?” –I thought I
heard him say. “If just to perk things up
a little bit” – (But where did we ever go?
And will it ever be remembered?)….
The once and all familiar….
And then we….
At last… And
since…. (a dis-
continuance)