frail old crones sit in the laps of lean young street wolves—
& you make conversation with any crazy meteorite that crashes
into your table’s solar system, unless you’re mildly autistic
or whatever, in which case you eat silently,
sipping hot cocoa that’s one-third black coffee
& dipping into the filigree & shadow of french literature
((o people, do you know the joys it can bring?))
or make nervous laughing but ultimately suprisingly viable
conversation with a stranger,
but if the two of you are guys, or overly nutty,
it will likely take a fetid turn,
& soon you will be speaking of the choice
between fried worms or grasshoppers for breakfast)
She was telling him about this other girl she knows
who has been suffering harassment from goblins
there are people who are goblins
bullyrags who bedevil their selected targets
(usually the most vulnerable, the least lovely, the least privileged)
with mean goblin games to drive them crazy
“So you’re not you’re not crazy, see?”
she said, meaning to console them
“But the things is… I am, actually,”
he answered, with a rowdy laugh
I tore open a pack of “coffee creamer”
then a second
dumped them into my coffee
picked up the creamer packet afterwards & read the lengthy list of contents
Last night with transit time to spend
Checked out the skate park under Burnside
Guy wanted to sell a deck for five bucks!
“The bearings alone are worth fifty bucks,”
Said a kid, as we together wished
Between the two of us,
That we could cough up five bucks.
Ogled the old Towne Storage building & remembered
(or imagined remembering) her telling me,
Back in the days of our QuArt collective,
About some friends of hers squatting there
In one of the upper floors, & how she thought that sounded
Like “the most amazing thing imaginable”
It took me a while to appreciate what she meant by that
And she may never have even told me that,
‘cause it becomes harder to tell strands of reality apart
From the bright strings of yarn of my own invention
(plus garlands of tinsel I find lying around)
with which I so assiduously weave them
The skatepark looked incredible
Like the portal to another, & better, reality
Where there are tons of punks & no pigs
& I imagined it expanded tenfold, a hundredfold,
A galaxyfold, to the size of Golden Gate Park
(after dark), & beyond—
swelling like the universe in the moments after the Big Something,
swallowing up hellfire & calamity & conformity in its implacably awesome maw,
leaving us with all the time in the world
& the most fabulous place imaginable to play,
for fucking ever.
Can you imagine that shit?
Let us not be so busy preparing for doomsday
That we neglect to tend
The bright gardens of our best (non)judgement
“Are there more cops than usual on the street today?”
I asked a streetscarred fellow on the sidewalk—
“About the same as normal,” he said,
Failing to confirm my paranoias.
He asked if I had any weed to sell
No, sorry, I said—he turned away in blank but expected disappointment—
“but I have some to give away,” I added, bringing him back
In surprise—things like this don’t happen as much these days
Or do they happen about as often as they always have?
“I want to make art again & not just talk about,”
I told Luke, having (almost really) made up my mind
to start again in Philly
Last night
we walked, my friend & I,
On Peacock Lane, & saw the lights
she made me a delicious mug of cocoa
With real love & style, it took ten minutes,
Adding a dollop of coconut oil in last,
& dousing us with lavender,
As we smoked a last chance bowl
—cause I go sober in two days!—
& ate the amazing fudge & peppermint bark & similar
Gourmet confections created by her multitalented mother
I told her about the friends at my last house
answering her questions, “why aren’t you still living there?”
With a plagiarized description from Kate Bornstein
About how he & I briefly united like a binary star system,
Only for our polarities to shift, expelling us
with white hot force
to opposite corners of the universe
How they tried to find work for me
as a floor installer
as a Vibrant Valley worker
as a sort of escort
(“you wanna dole out that cock?”)
None of this bothered me,
Any more than it excited me
“So what should I be?”
I asked one evening over those dinners he knew how to cook
He meditated a moment
“You should be a monk, Tony”
he finally said.
