when our brain shuts down
There are no apparent limits
to science if vintage photos
of naked beachgoers can
change the way we think
about near-death experiences.
Postmodern Polka
(A Tom Beckett Title)
At first glance oxymoronic, yet there is an overlap.
Both parts autobiographical. The teenaged bassist, classically trained but now playing pizzicato, filling in at the local Polish Association’s New Year’s Ball — 57 varieties of potato salad, & just as many polkas — wearing an occasion-obligatory tuxedo borrowed from his father, one pants leg folded up a little bit because his father was lame, had one leg shorter than the other. That was one uncomfortable memory; another that the other three members of the quartet each received twice as much as this fill-in bassist, a fact revealed inadvertently when the organizer asked the band to play for a longer time, &, in offering an additional inducement, admitted what he had already paid.
The postmodern part comes a few years later, when the musician, now tired of carrying his bass around balanced on his shoulder because most taxis in the city were too compact to contain it, discovered he had a small ability with words.
inquiry
to
see where
the antecedents lie
404 error
I go looking for the
early prognostications
by Bruce Sterling on
the potential rise &
rise of link rot. He was
probably correct, but it’s
impossible to be certain —
many of his given links
have rotted away.
today’s enlarge your unit by 25 percent hotmail email subject matter found poem
judicature diminution triceratops coralli
adobe detour payroll turtle controversy
loveland genera phrasemake dagger enterprise
squatter devoid haven tehran kettle morph
cloddish zippy heliocentric altercate albumen
telegram droll lyle neutron adolphus bounty
kensington promptitude codebreak algebraic
connivance howell miocene chateaux decade
A Love Supreme
My dreams — when
I remember them — are
invariably in black
& white, but I com-
pensate with a John
Coltrane soundtrack.