ALL RESPONSES |
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A cat has done this,
a wicken, mean cat
has hooked the dog,
good old fido
to a Pavlovian contraption,
to ether
or either
1.) get a tooth removed or
2. train him not to slobber.
Little does the dog know
every emotion he has
about W. is recorded in the mirror
and that something very nasty
is about
to spring from the pneumatic
gizmo behind the door.
You see? The dog has even
lost its spots not to mention
its member once called "willy."
Such a mean mind to have
devised this doggie terror.
Poor Fido, living the true
no exit in Gide's hell.
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sometimes it only seems,
the Everly Brothers still
murmur in my left ear
…only trouble is…
gee whiz…
it was so long ago
i can no longer remember
so sometimes i count
the rhythm of church
bells instead
or red & orange
autumn leaves
being carried
by a cold current
sometimes i loosen my neck
tie, allow myself
to reminisce
about her tiny
waist, how my two
hands would encircle
the small bones at the tips
of her slender hips,
how they felt just like
valuable silver coins
turned over & over
in my trembling fingers
…only trouble is…
gee whiz…
there are so many trails
into memories, but only one
path out & half the time
i can't remember
if i’m coming or going
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Well, better this than life
In an electrified rat cage,
Hugging Harlow's wire mothers,
Getting stuffed in Schroedinger's lethal boxes
Or getting launched into low orbit
To bathe in cosmic rays for the Kremlin
Because I couldn't sign fast enough
Or cuddle a kitten in front of a camera.
Navigating the thin-walled maze
Between best friend
Or mad moments like Cujo
I've still got most of my original equipment.
I'm fed.
One ring, and my belly goes hollow
As the average human soul.
Lately, I gnaw on memories more than substance
But I'm still not a sheep,
And no one begs for my vote. |
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I used to think of cold beer on hot days
and lick my lips with thirsty tongue
as chemicals in the noisy wet brain
urged me to the nearest working taps
Those were just serial connections
made by axonal spikes, sparking
me to simple decisions, not some
spooky action at a distance. When
consciousness was finally located
on the boundary between quantum
subconscious and the classical
world of perception, where time
doesn’t exist and dreams occur,
in the fabric of Nothing, my tastes
expanded to include the eleven
hypothetical dimensions. The
information is reduced in mitotic
spindles of dendritic webs, where
coexisting possibilities reach
threshold at the moment the wave
function collapses. You can feel it,
the stream, forty times every second,
choosing actions and experiences
in the universal proto-conscious mind,
holographic, entangled, and persistent.
Now I just write about beer, feel
its thick coolness in my throat, and
stay drunk all the time. Whatever that is.
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(for Maizie)
onthebed he’s awake awake
letsgo outside walkwalk letsgo
odor of rainofftheshingles odor
of grassjustwaking greysquirrels
in the trees graysquirrels darting in grass
chase chase kill! mark
inside and the mistress
playtug odor of mistresssoap
then gone gone gone gone gone
sleep lookoutthewindow sleep
barkatthemail odor of meatintherefrigerator
keyinlock he’s here again he’s here!
outside mark inside food
walkwalk odor of nightheatearth
odor of racoonwasherejustnow
late the mistress the mistress again!
jump lick sleeponthebed
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It’s a fundamental sin -
the thought that rivers to your hands
There is no shame or apology
for the living
or a quote
When we die
we die alive
And every Spring the rains will come
to pull us on toward delusion
At the Shepherd’s watch
less a balance between
faith
and
instinct
than a division of
what I know
from
a clay beggar’s bowl of graceful prayers
and a mat of simple straw
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Waiting for the treat.
Shiny sophisticate,
sleek slink, a tease.
Arch to touch, brush
against, flirt open.
Lithe surrender, wet,
sweet the forest of fur
embeds a jewel.
Rough lick, tough love,
whispered cat ecstasy
in purrs.
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I miss the barking
and the scratching at the door,
the bones all burried...
diligently but not well.
They would not let me keep him.
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We build erections
with cold nails
and subject them to
elements of internal fury
Implosion
followed by a cry
from burning rubble
prepares the foundation
for our labors
Exposed frames reach
with the purpose
of youth, and are
over time,
adorned with questions
Cities
overflow with towers
blindly constructed
to mental heavens,
immense, throbbing,
inhabited by expectations
Those who remain are
monuments to stimuli,
their occupants long
expended in the final rush |
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(i) i’m lucky the box
has no cover & i can
still count & stars can
still shine at night
the only thing i fear
is rain in the corrugated
world in which i live
rain is my enemy:
my heart becomes limp,
arms peel their layers
i long
for stability
of wood
(ii) the sky was made so
not everyone can reach it
it is mostly blue,
i am often sad
there must be a correlation
(iii) even in extremes,
we are all the same
justification often lies
in the temperature of water
or angle of mirror
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The bowl remains empty
but your voice still rings
just the same. |
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Better
Pavlov
Paired his bell
With output from
The business end.
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Someone posted this to the NEWS section. I have no idea who wrote it. - Britt
At the new health spa
the techs show me a
a new way to lose weight
and improve my aura.
They point to
the doggie diagram
on the wall,
a highly anticipatory system
invented by
their top dog,
Chet Pavlov.
It may take time, they tell me.
It may take patience, they tell me.
See those folks, along the wall
in their Pavlov Trotters,
hooked up to data drums
and sensor pads.
And the bowl?
You'll know what to do, they tell me.
Good boy...
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The sun in this glass cauterizes
the mind, sweet fire racing
down empty lanes, filling
atmospheres with his song.
Armies of murals parade
down gilded avenues, each one
testament to a dream, gods
to worshipers they cannot feel.
A wind, final and forced, scatters
the unread in a language that
refuses to be spoken.
The only thing left is the sound of a bell,
thick and sonorous, heavy, slow, dull,
each pulse a memory from gray to gold,
every interval a small madness. My blood
drones with a deep, wistful pleasure,
a comfort, a love,
that sometimes feels like music,
sometimes like warm saltwater currents
and southern sunsets,
gray acid oysters dancing on my tongue. |
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So, Thanksgiving was yesterday, for us Americans anyway. I went to my mum and dad's house, enjoyed the family time, ate too much, and brought home a shitload of leftovers. This is a good thing, because until the leftovers entered the picture, my refrigerator had the following items in it: a pitcher of water, ketchup, a half bottle of Sake, and ice cubes in the freezer section. But alas! While I was putting away the leftovers, I noticed that somehow, I'd ended up with a Tupperware container of dark meat turkey instead of white meat turkey. I don't like the dark meat. It tends to be grissly and slimy and I don't like either of those adjectives for my animal byproducts.
I immediately called my mum to inform her of the horrible error. She calmly told me that my great-aunt, Winnie, probably had the white meat in her possession and it was a simple mistake.
This is terrible! I thought to myself. How can I make delicious white meat sandwiches with gravy and tons of pepper if I don't have white meat? Not nearly as upset about it as I'm making it seem, I went to bed, slept for 10 hours, and then called my dear Aunt Winnie this morning to see about making a trade. She, of course, was fine with that. Since she'd intended on taking home the dark meat anyway. She only lives about 5 miles from me, so I told her I'd be right over.
It's the day after Thanksgiving. Remember? People who own businesses call it "Black Friday" because they are assuming/hoping that all the After Thanksgiving Christmas Present Shoppers who have the day off work will put their accounting books in the black for the first time all year. Yay for them, no more debt! I don't do shopping much (see aforementioned comment on refrigerator contents for an explanation) , so this doesn't concern me. No crowded parking lots. No long lines. No accrued debt. However, I live in an apartment building that has, within reasonable walking distance (if one was so inclined as to walk) of about 8 shopping centers--two of them quite large. It took me...
oh... 10 minutes... to get out of my parking lot (it opens onto one of the main drags). It took me three light changes to turn onto the road I needed to get to for the 5-mile trip to Winnie's. The light, by the way, is about 100 yards away from my parking lot. Traffic was obscene, to say the least.
Thirty minutes later, I was almost at the end of what should have been a 10-minute journey. As I turned the corner into my Aunt Winnie's parking lot, I realized I'd forgotten a vital ingredient on this
pilgrimage: the dark meat. Doh! With tears in my eyes, I turned around and headed back toward the madness of my neighborhood.
I returned, ran up the stairs, got the meat, ran back downstairs.. .
and waited ten minutes for the cop car to move that was blocking my exit. Ugh. Got back onto the main drag, and another cop drove by, lights flashing. Which, of course, completely stops traffic for a good ten minutes. Once I was out of the rush of the mall section of the city, I relaxed a bit. The cop cars and shoppers were eerily replaced almost at an equal ratio by dog walkers. Chihuahaus in sweaters, Alaskan Malamutes wagging their Hulk-squirrel tails, Poodles (usually in pairs, oddly enough), English Springers prancing along like they're at a show, fluffy little mutts walking fast to keep up with the kids that seemed to always have THEM on the other end of the leash... they were everywhere. It was cute. Yes, I said cute.
I arrived at Winnie's and made the trade. I know she wanted me to stay and visit, but this trip had already taken me an hour longer than anticipated, and I'd left my apartment with lights on, an icy cold Sprite on the computer desk (the cat probably knocked it over by now), and having just thrown on dirty clothes in order to get the job done.
She commented on my hair (it's short now, and I didn't "do" it today, so it's, like, major bed head style going every which way, stickin' up mostly on one side, that sort of thing). She also gave me three newspaper articles to read (she clips them and sends them to everyone she knows). One on dogs--because I like dogs; one on homeless people--because I work with them; and one on single women in their 30s--because that's me. It's nice that she's thoughtful about specifics. I wouldn't want to read articles on mating season in Bangladesh. Well, maybe I would. But that's another topic.
Anyway, I left 15 minutes later. Saw more dog walkers on the drive home. Many of them. As I approached the ramp to get back onto Snelling Avenue, I saw that the bridge I'd soon be crossing had a lot of flashing lights. Then I saw that the ramp was blocked off by two cop cars. So I had to take an EXTRA 15 minutes to drive down to the next road that would get me going the right way (damn city streets). On this alternate route (Dale Street, if you must know), there were less dog walkers (but still a few) and lots of cop cars. All of them parked alongside the road, but with cops inside. It was almost creepy.
Back to my neighborhood. A fender bender happened about a minute before I arrived at the street before my apartment building. I had to take ANOTHER detour, through a Target parking lot, and wait at two more lights. Finally... finally... I got back to my apartment. I rolled up the window, turned off the ignition, got out of the car, lugged my ass up to the third floor, unlocked my apartment, kicked off my shoes, noted that the Sprite had not been knocked over... and then realized I'd left the white meat in the car.
Fuggit. It's cold as a refrigerator outside. It can stay there for a bit.
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With patience I’ll never know
She studied the minutiae
Of my morning ritual
Clock buzzes. Slap it still.
Clock buzzes. Slap it still.
Clock buzzes. Crack eyes open.
Sit up.
Throw off covers.
Throw on robe . . . .
With calibrated precision
She calculated the last minute
Before even I knew I was done with breakfast
And charged back to the bedroom
Settling atop my bed to wait
And watch with sad eyes
As I dressed to leave her for the day
Took me years
To understand her science
The less cereal the bowl holds
The more assertively the human
Scoops at remnant morsels
Striking spoon against sides
In louder, sharper clicks and clangs.
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Ask not for whom the bell tolls
Ask for whom the bowl tells.
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