JUNE 28

It's impossible for me to go to a grocery store without rushing
through the place, conspicuous with its excess of choices, packed
to the gills with people slowly drifting amongst products that
represent what it means to be free in America. I know this isn't
a very original idea. Believe me. I'd rather it not be so.
I found myself stuck in the dairy/bread aisle amidst people
slowly counting the minutes until death--one woman checked
every brand of sour cream available, encamped there. I'll never
know if she bought one because ten minutes later, when I
streamed by, she was still moored there, ecstatic that she lives
in a country where you can spend your golden years choosing
between Breakstone and Country Fresh brands of sour cream.
I'm hopelessly stuck in the version of shopping--call it a scene--
you'll likely some day run across in a Coen Brothers movie.
Maybe it exists already, but if not it will some day soon. I don't
even have to explain this scene--you know what I'm talking
about. I'm thinking right now of the scene in A Serious Man
where X is speaking on a phone with a representative of the
Columbia Record Club because his son, unbeknownst to him,
has purchased a copy of Santana's Abraxas, and X is arguing
desperately because he has no clue what the hell Abraxas even
is. The voice on the phone repeats the word "Abraxas"
seventy times. It's a terrifyingly funny moment. (I own
a copy of Abraxas, tho the vinyl hasn't seen the light
of day in a good twenty-five years.) So, that phone call
reminds me why I have not had a land line in ten years, and
why I had voice mail removed from my work phone.) Anyway,
back to the present, all I know is I start deconstructing the
culture I'm stuck in the second I walk into any store of any
kind (I have not been to a mall since 1980). If you've taken a
cab in New York City you have an idea how I push a cart
through a grocery store. A student of mine, lacking lunch at
his house, used to say he'd use a potato as a silencer (punch it
over the end of his barrel) and shoot a squirrel before he'd sit
idling in a line at a drive-through window (same sort of
weird as above). That guy was so crazy!! people say to me
once in a while, remembering him. He's in Alaska right now,
with the mountains and pine trees. Doesn't sound bad to me.
So, not a good trip to the store. I skipped the cottage cheese I
often pick up because I was too wired about it all. Some days
I should just sit by the river and see how many fish rise to the
surface (it's very similar to watching for falling stars (if you're
somewhere rural enough that the man-made light doesn't
obliterate the starlight)).

ORPHANAGE


More and more, warm weather, like steam in a kitchen,
a brace of teals, her feet in what sun's fallen through,
like cola with some flower drowning in dry grasses.
This is what my father foretold, the end of winter
like a trembling inside the smallest of eggs. A train invisible
in the dark, shaking the stones, drinking in the headlight
of moon, her breasts and a cool pillow, bats panting like old lost
__lovers
hooking their wings around the windows and porch screens,
breeze through the eves troughs, her back like a swivel that clicks
in the morning, before sunrise, the flowers outside shaking off dew.
He said it, and they closed the lid. We don't want any more money.

from Hokku Notebook (Jack Spicer)

(from a chapbook made by Ryan Murphy)


Bitterness
Bitter - ness
People worry more about bitter than
__they worry about - ness
Worry more about - ness
Damn you.

DRINK FROM THE TAP

The word appears to blaze, and in the distance

The rest dissolves

The--what might I call it?--meadow, its razorish

(((pond))) ))) ))) . . .

Just who does make a better monument to self

The pissed off ones

The ones in cups

The ones not sifting hot sand--which is how

The stars melted during the history of God--

Costas Hummingbirds, followed by rage where

There could have been a poem

(((poem!)))

( ))) ))) ... )

A bent hanger for sale, teeth plashing onto

The fatty green moss beds just perfect for Yoga

And Money? The nearby creek hisses like a

Cow's teat, foam on that open notebook . . .

The water running under the trough is the
Palest moonlight you can buy with your Visa

Card warmed over chow mien congealing in its
Tray of grease left out on the kitchen counter

Just smack them all with a broom

There are too many

Peacocks in this sun-saturated mesa

Too many "young" dumb dreams

Cowbell with a verb on it

A wide, flat bed

Stupid company of birds, but no ticket

THE TREE DOCTOR SAYS ENTROPY


You said it, short-seller, the built in
__obsolescence
Better to drop the whole plan-for-the-future
__(out window)
Drinking the mud off the money, sailing under
__your shining
The men stack up next to the women, and
__they squeak
This is why a house fire is so pleasurable
__(after some time passes)
Instead of a postage stamp an empty
__podium
Stood in that small space on my
__envelope
An intelligent Jerusalem cricket will give us
__our confidence back
I looked at my dying pear tree--it's going
__to heaven
Piles of monuments, the broken letter Q,
__fiduciary self interest
Let what fails invest, I say, dark in my own
__guttering heart
I said nothing when Millie rammed into my
__little Honda