—Jack Spicer
words used multiply include hours and sucking.
not necessarily together – but of course almost
a bedroom? what’s more familiar? i’ve lived in
several studio apartments, and most particularly
in the past 7 years have lived in two very tiny ones,
two tiny places that were basically just beds. my
new place is, to my mind, incredibly more expansive
than what i had been used to at the previous place
in which i lived for over six years. it feels breathable.
but if you breathe in too intensely it’s possible you
might breathe in a bed or at least a comforter, may
be a pillow or a pillowcase. but then you might also
suck in a book, a potato, a tiny christmas tree (at
least as long as the holiday season goes this year),
a diet soda (but who wants to drown?), there are
a lot of books. my refrigerator, which is maybe 3
meters from my bed has begun making intermit
tent banging noises a couple or three times a day
(or night). this is my bedroom. where i eat, watch
my extra large television that rises from the foot of
my bed, a printer next to it, the three fans i need
less and less, unless i’ve not enough change to
do laundry and have to wash clothes in the
bathtub, but hey, i’ve got a bathtub. only
it’s down the hallway. i have a hallway
here! looking up from the virtual page,
i’m now imagining downing one of the 3
christmas gnomes sitting atop books on
a pocket wall-shelf that i have nailed to
the wall just next to my bed, or one of
the 5 miniature christmas trees on the
makeshift shelves i’ve assembled that
lie below one of my windows, gagging
harshly, but it’s a comical image, i
will admit. i’ve got pots and pans
and plates and forks and a container
filled with cotton swabs. the lid’s on
that, though, so no big worries of choking
on one of those. this is a silly, out of ideas
piece, the idea for which came from reading
A Birthday Poem for Jim (and James) Alexander,
a mid-sized poem by Jack Spicer. While you
might see the same ideas running for years
throughout what I write (should you by
chance read any of it, which, obviously
you are, but if you were to keep reading it
for several years, i mean, or binge it at some
point, what a concept, and if that’s you, let’s
grab coffee sometime), i do occasionally run out
of them, can’t quite sit down to write without
having some sort of gimmick or just begin to
freely associate. and that’s fine with me. if
it’s not fine with you, i might ask why you’ve
gotten so far in this one particular piece. but
your response would likely not begin to answer
anything about the relative importance of
poetry written when low on ideas.
