A Little Amusement

I am to be hung as a witch on a Monday morning. It’s shingle-dark outside and the field is glowing with mist. I can’t decide which blue tie to wear. There is a great crowd around the gallows by the highway. Somewhere, a humming bird dips water from Mary’s hands as a cook chops heads of lettuce.

It’s All in the Steeping

Just after the spoon has left and the tea is still swirling, it is possible to see the entire universe. At its formless beginning, it’s a child’s green booger. Then, the child begins to sculpt – he makes a rock with his booger, which was easy. Then a chicken and a calculator. He makes a nun and a pantheon. He makes a long silver needle stitching into the night by an unseen hand. He stands them all up on his desk. Then he gets bored and runs away. The janitor comes, the lights go out, someone realizes the child no longer shows up for school. Then it’s just tea again. Green tea. That first sip, ah, it’s always too hot.

The Fishnet

I’ve met a lady’s stocking. It is black like the heavens above the earth. It wished to take me dancing, but I suggested coyly that we ought to pray instead. Inside there was a spider, a little brown one. It knew my name before I spoke. Also inside: a blues singer, and a man on a tightrope. There was a small sunset in the distance. Smoke forked up from a chimney here and there. There was also a tiny mirror, so miniscule you had to bend in real close. This made the stocking cry rape! rape! and I laughed a little, and my little self, after some delay where I appeared to be thinking, laughed back.

Another Empty Dream

A man was building something in the dream hanging just inside his pillow. It was there he could work uninhibited. The design was simple; the parts were many. Or the design was complex and the parts were incomplete. Whatever it was, it had to be finished before he awoke. Outside, the world’s oldest cloud lost another piece of itself to the air.

The Projectionist

Our projectionist dozes when we doze. The film is slapping against the frame. There’s magnified dust on the white screen. When we wake up, he wakes up and scrambles to change the reel. It’s early summer, and the first thunderstorm is creeping over the little towns. There are red tulips against a fence, and a bee upside down on the cement. Perhaps we’ll mow the lawn in an infinity of decreasing circles, or perhaps not. The projectionist wipes his brow and settles in.

The Column

I was a column under a dark bridge into fog. I’m told the other side holds an island of madness. When white moths form a question mark in the air, when wasps make a woman’s purse, when marbles spell I love you in the snow, a lone man with a leather satchel begins to cross. He’s a year on the approach, a year on each girder, and an old man when he enters the fog. Meanwhile, I’m urinating into a fish’s mouth. I have no classical order, and my insides are the same as what’s exposed to the weather, which never changes. My pylons have many spikes in their palms, but the swaying of the bridge puts them to sleep before they make anything of it. All the while the fog imprisoned the madness on the other side. Barges blew their horns; we assumed the crazies thought it was the hunting horn of a warden in the sky.

The Model Home

An entire life of walking has created two parallel lines. Do they extend infinitely into the future, or do they abruptly end? I walked right into my friend’s dangerous loner model home. “The examined life is not worth living,” was his philosophy, although his mother shot herself on the stoop of the funeral home. He still tucked in his black sheets every morning, chatted with her about the neighbors. I was watching the endless weather channel wondering if we are blue-screened into this life and all we do is point at blank walls pretending we’re really somewhere else? If things were always just out of reach, what were we reaching for? My friend’s house with its black curtains ruffling in the wind. The exact same house being built up and down the street.

The Captain

Well, I was captain of a great ship. I was wearing the uniform anyway. The problem was nobody would recognize my authority. I would command the great wheel to turn, but the water was still. I would command the deck mopped, but a storm came and lashed waves over the railings. My false wig was blown over, my captain’s suit too. There I was, naked, my ass pinched with crabs, which was a conspiracy because the waves look like claws.

Without Comment

The wind in the trees is trying to tell me something in code. I spent all day with a pad of paper trying to decipher it. A storm’s coming, and the sky is getting prematurely dark. The tree’s message becomes even more urgent, like a stutterer whispering sweet talk to his new bride in the hull of a ghost ship. There’s lightning scattering across the sky. The empty arms of a sailor’s costume lift in the wind.

The Pond

A man sitting alone by a pond covered in green algae. Another man comes up, stands for a minute, and asks what he’s doing there. The bullfrogs are chirping, the clouds are low, and there’s a family plot in a stand of trees. Before anything is said, the second man sits down to stare at the pond. By the end of the day, men are perched all around. In the distance, the highway’s jammed. Somewhere a radio announcer refuses to recite the weather, and a little boy who was sent to his room turns over in bed.

A Little Bit of Eden

We had a daughter who was becoming a woman. So we decided to plant vegetables on her head. One bright Saturday morning my wife and I readied the tiller and shovels. We put in rows of corn, peas, lettuce, and carrots. All while our daughter slept soundly! We stood back at morning’s end, sweaty but proud. She came downstairs sleepy-eyed and ate breakfast. She washed her bowl and stared out at the trees, which where getting their first green of the season. She scratched her head. I looked at my wife, who stared back proudly. The scarecrow in the yard was waving in the wind. Hello, he was saying to the crows picking through our trash.

Magic Carpet

I took a nap on our Indian rug and when I woke up the pattern was pressed in my skin. It was like the world’s most exotic tattoo covering my entire backside. Everywhere I went people tried to walk all over me. A woman tried to park a couch on my back, a cat leapt at me to sharpen her claws on my ass. I became very depressed and mostly moped around, except when my wife would haul me outside and beat me with a broomstick to get my dust out.

Ancient Cuisine

We’re at a Chinese restaurant, except there are no tables or chairs. We’re led to an empty room and asked to take a seat. It’s impossible, so we refuse. On our way to somewhere else, we pass by the windows. Inside, an old Chinese couple sneak food from the desert dummy, and a waiter drops an armload of fortune cookies onto the ceiling. When he sees us, he puts a finger to his lips and brushes the white moths from his shoulders.

The Cave Man

I was a cave explorer, and I was lost. It was in the most beautiful of all caves, but also the darkest. The bundle of string snaking around every corner was evidence many had been here before and that they hadn’t made it back. One could gouge one’s eyes out on a formation, one could then wander the caves blind for eternity. Imagine that. A blind man in a dark cave with only blind animals to keep him company. When I emerged, my family handed me a birthday cake. The candles were lit. They were waiting for something.

Youth and Such

They say that time begins to speed up as we age. That a day of youth is a week of maturity. I am of the generation that has no idea how old they are. We were not born in a time of war. There were birth certificates, yes, but they were never completed. My father wrote most of my name, got about three pounds of my weight, and then his hand trailed off the page. I asked him about it, but he didn’t remember being my father. He screamed, “I have no son!” He hadn’t slept in weeks; his hair was full of leaves; he was nearly delirious. He kept yelling, “The day has finally come; any minute now I’ll meet my maker.” I said, “There is no maker.” “Son?” he replied, his eyes wet with what could have been tears. “How long has it been?” “Years,” I said, “years.” But I had seen him the other day.

Life's Great Mystery

There was that one tin can in everyone’s basement. Label-less, rusting, no one thought about opening it and most didn’t even remember it was there. If they happened upon it, they wondered what was in it? Worms? Something foul and dark, not of this world? When they rattled it, there was no sound. There were no leaks either. Ah, well, they said. It’s too far to get a can opener, and besides, the sun is going down…

Love Poultice

Ennui with particular flavor of nightingale. O, the black plumes from the chimneys drift like a note from a wine bottle in an open window. The wind has taken the recipe card and now the rain is spotting the ink. I guess, love, it’s dueling banjos until our blood thins enough to reverse its flow, and time’s rooster tail settles its plume of mist upon the valley where our little nest laid an egg.

Do-Da, Do-Da

In those days I slept with my head in a birdcage. It was in the middle of an abandoned pet store. There was always some cat or viper trying to pick my brain, but I had hung myself far enough above the bloodstained floor to feel safe. I was a friend of the carpet beetle who made the controversial statement that they were more populous than god. As for the jazz-playing mongrels howling in the windows, their pawing didn’t bother me so much as the fleas, who immediately moved into my fright wig. I had to reach out and pull the rope even higher, which screwed up the canary’s view of the setting sun. My legs, of course, just grew longer, and a parrot sang me the blues. Ah, those were the days of discovery. Now I stand lashed in the playground where children swing from my crotch. I still have the bird shit halo, which I wear on walks.

At the Cleaners

I was a suit on a drycleaner’s rack. A gray faucet drips at the end of the line. All night my closest friends and I advance toward the hissing machine. I with the loose red dye, with innumerable dark buttons, and a black ink stain in the pocket above the heart. My naked owner with his chewed stub is cowering in the waiting room. The store lights have been turned off, and the closed sign flipped. Outside it slowly becomes morning and a line of naked men forms at the door. The first ones through are a priest, a minister, and a rabbi. They’re demanding their clothes, but unfortunately for them I’ve died them all pink.

City on the Brink, the Year 2001

It was just a little big town, the kind subject to flowery description in letters home. A peddler with his fake watches waving hello, a commissioner whistling on his lunch hour with his sweetheart. I was from someplace else, and I went there to bury my face in a tire. There were remnants of the fragrance of blossoms the tire had traveled through – I saw straight into the future with its many white steps. But then dark clouds bullied out the sun, and the bricks began to shiver. The watch man packed up his parasol and the commissioner stood and stared at the sky. Still, I clung to my tire sniffing its many scents. I was taken to the heart of some greasy borough; I was elevated on a suspension bridge over the whitecaps of a channel. All the while I was composing my own letter home. I spoke only of a green jar at a fishmonger’s filled with fish eyes, how they looked on but never blinked. I thought that was all the people at home needed to know – there is an eye that sees in the middle of a disaster. Never mind anything else.