Fish Feeding Dream
In this damn recurring dream I have a fish tank an elaborate fish tank (I don’t really, in real life have any fish tanks, when I was a child I did, with guppies and goldfish, black mollies and catfish, but that was another time, another era) a big tank, 50, 80 gallons, maybe bigger, with plants and colored rocks, ceramic bubblers and some large beautiful fish, serene fish, floating along in the water, angelfish and zebras, neon tetras and sucker-mouths stuck to the sides. But in this dream I keep forgetting to feed them, I don’t remember feeding them for weeks, yet miraculously they are...
Read MoreHell Machine
Yellow ribbons unspool, disappearing with the curvature of the Earth. I eat yellow ribbons. The road is gobbled up before me. I drive these roads only at night. It is always night. Hubcaps dance, spiral-spinning. Tires scribble rubber-black meaningless symbols, translatable only from heaven’s perspective. Cliffsides hold back empty air, lest it rush in vaporous waterfalls to my mad lungs, drowning me dry. A lone shrub marks a passage through shiny gray guardrail taffy-twisted. Drunk at the top; sober by the bottom. Time is a window in a very high office building through which we...
Read More(already seen)
it’s hard for me when my dead return in my dreams vibrant, healthy not knowing they’re already gone or perhaps it’s me who’s made the jump, done the traveling, challenged the dimensions, gone to the spirit world where it’s like how I imagined déjà vu when I was seven years old another complete universe all of us on Mars just one second ahead of all of us on Earth and sometimes a slippage a leaking from the container too full to hold it...
Read MoreRetirement
He had woven out a net, had woven it with the measure of his touch and tongue, loose, exuberant, he had thrown it out upon the width of day, had flung it forth, had given to his time a tongue, had worked had lived largely on this earth; his emblems now are gone, his songs are sung, the children of his listening. He is a songbird caught in a net, its head hung down, a stranger murmuring to himself, turbulent,...
Read MoreOld Man
Old man in a near empty house bridge port to the sea— (mortgage foreclosure assured) late in his payments to life, sits in a lavender lawn chair meant for picnics or poor people— pillows stuffed under his bum like layers of sponge cake. He sits at a handmade wooden desk he forged with his own hands finished in lacquer with the edges of his fingers tips. He types prismatic words forced together like a jagged Japanese poem or something resembling a Haiku forgery— while 2 Persian cats, Tambala and Shebelle, meow constantly with passion with pain, with hunger— bowls empty, food dried,...
Read MoreIf… Dog… Rabbit…
(for John) The ‘if’ sets up the futile ground of possibility while the ‘only’ that’s implied underlines the ruefulness of being human, of being a mother, of having seen too much of what’s disguised as what is wanted. Sometimes it is the dog that is missing, or the dog could save the day, or the dog chases after the rabbit yipping its high-pitched joy only to return winded with a slobbery grin. The only answer to “if only.” When the idiom changes to if…son…motorcycle and the only becomes if only he had not inherited my need for speed, my need to risk everything to...
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