Scooped from the Harvested
Fruit (Precisely as Instructed)
Life is a short short story
with explosive simmering.
—John Ashbery
Born into a place
filled with lots of
smiling faces, friends
and family and curious
strangers, all impossible
to trust. I was born to be
trusted. Scratch that. I
was born to be. The tooth
hurts. An acerbic wit, being
acidic, destroys enamel, slowly
making the tooth hollow. A
hollow man is only half a man,
at most. Shallow men can be
seen at the shoreline howling
over baubles. There are the
turn-of-the-century bubble
men, quite ripe, not hollow,
with feet that loudly squish
when they limp over the dry
pavement at the city-center,
where ads announce rock-
bottom prices on microwaves,
refrigerators and dogs and
buns for holiday barbecue.
