miss bridie chose a shovel is the title of a book written for children grades one and up. it is a picture book.

she could have chosen a pick-axe
or a well rusted garden hoe with wooden handle
or a new philip roth book with special display stand at borders

she chose a shovel

this made the dancers stop dancing
the singers all had strep anyway and so remained silent
the undertakers put down their jewish lit and made for the 'shovel house'

that is what they had named their tool shed
that was very clever
that was read in a book somewhere

miss bridie was a stripper when she was still fuckable
she knew how to work a pole

the undertakers were not counting on this
the undertakers would not read that line as sexist
if it were in a book
especially a philip roth book

she chose a shovel on one of their faces
the man bleated like a sheep with freshly punctured lung

the dancers kept dancing
they wanted to pretend they hadn't seen this

a person who chooses a shovel is no fool
miss bridie was a realist
that is, she realized that all must die

miss bridie only decapitated one undertaker with her shovel
she realized they were already dead
the undead are a stubborn breed she would later acknowledge
in greater detail over a morning newspaper

miss bridie took to screaming
screaming was pleased with this

this is how and why miss bridie chose a shovel
shovel a-chose bridie. miss why and how?

is this.

mixedgreens

Is Life Getting Better?

If you want to make the world a better place first
you will have to take everything you know about the
world and pretend that you don’t know it and then
you can begin to look

at things to look at the ocean after
forgetting everything you ever knew about the ocean:
the water, the sand crabs, the sand gnats, the sand
dollars, sand castles, the jelly fish you put in sand
castle dungeons, the old fashioned lollipops,
and so you wandered out to Myrtle Beach in a tuxedo
and patent leather shoes and looked in the giant
blue shape of water and you thought you might
and swim out to the dark blue line between the ocean
and the sky, but wait, as you are swimming, you realize
that the line is just the edge of the ocean before you
get to outer space, and that you will never get
to outer space, and so you are left swimming, until
you get to Sierra Leone or somewhere

where a tribe of hunter gatherers picks you up
on the beach and nurses you back to life with
some berries they foraged in the woods, but they
are strange people who share everything, including
clothes, so they strip you naked and divide your clothes
up among the other tribespeople, and so you are left with
one tiny square piece of white tee shirt to cover up your
penis, and everywhere else you are going to sunburn, and
you have no idea how to hunt for jungle pigs, so
the kids in the tribe make fun of you, and you end
up mating with a girl from a neighboring tribe who
also washed up along the beach, but her white skin
has long ago turned brown, so you make a nest full
of babies with her, and she doesn’t speak English
she speaks French Canadian and you wonder what the
fuck she is doing here

all the other not civilized people play music
out of hollow sticks, which are not a lot like American musical
instruments, but maybe like Canadian musical instruments but I don’t know if you know, because in this story you have forgotten all your previous knowledge so you decide to compose an opera for your beautiful wife to sing and it is based loosely on Giacomo Antonio Domenico Michele Secondo Maria Puccini’s Tosca, but you don’t know that and the violin part of the opera is performed using the two horns of a rhinoceros strung with hairs from jungle
pigs and performed in conjunction with many other musical
instruments you create in what might be called your
golden period of creativity that would have never happened
until you forgot everything you knew about the world

and then your roommate from freshman year of college
walks up with a whole lot of people who look
like they are about his age, and they are all carrying
bibles, but you don’t recognize that they are bibles, you
just keep singing tribal operas with your wife and
the village children who are not hunting or fishing
or cleaning up the huts, and your roommate says to you
who he doesn’t recognize either because you are brown now
and not a white student from the university of Georgia who
is used to his sort of people, and always have a defense
ready for missionaries who knock on your door, asks you if you have ever met Jesus, and you say

to him because no you have not met Jesus, because you
forgot everything you ever knew about the world and everything you ever knew about fighting back against Christian missionaries, so he tells you about Jesus and you actually listen for the first time in your life and then he says he is building a church in another village and you decide to go with him and you hear other people talking about love and you have never heard this before and so you are converted to Christianity and taken in an airplane across the ocean and back to Georgia, where you started,

but now you are a brown Christian and you are knocking on
doors, and everyone you see you have never seen before even
though you have and you think that these people are a lot like the wife you left in Sierra Leone, and then you knock on your parents door and you look at them and they begin to say that they are not interested and you look back and you wonder why

but this poem is not about finding Jesus, or finding your parents or finding a beautiful French Canadian women to make babies with, this poem is about two things

1. if you pretend you don’t know well then really do you not know anything about the world or do you instead look at things through and through again another lens

2. in Bhutan the tourists have stomped the holy grounds for the last time says the king to his people who restrict most people from coming into the Kingdom of Bhutan where the king is a small wise round man with eye glasses and he listens to the people who are small-eyed and don’t know anything but persistently laugh

picture that is loosely related to poem below but then not really related at all.

we are too much for one puddle, you and i.

when we were young in broken coffee table apartments we had a higher survival rate.

the blacktop, bathed in oil and excrement, knew how to hold its drink.

then, we were and i could say if then was now ' we are'

and you would sprout a quizzical look from your flower petal face.

but then is never now and puddles are fleeting under this southern sun.

'we might have been enough for one ocean if we were closer to such a body'.

and your quizzical look remains.

the best i can think is that we are better off without puddles anyway, which we know is and will be a lie even after the dinosaurs come back and humans are buried in tree sap.

in lieu of anything appropriate to say now i will do a head spin, like in that break dancing movie.

and i will spin until my skin evaporates off of my chalky skull and then i will spin faster.

the friction will lessen you see.

and i will make a new puddle and you can rub your flower petal face in it and fill your capillaries with me.

and in this way i will prove that i never knew what to call things. that my labels were never right.

and you will be more beautiful than one person can be.

this is all true.

ran

Out for Dinner

then going I back where I came from with it to 

and, suddenly,             sensed interest

 in                        

and while you 

Pad Kee Moa by her shoes, tried wandering

through the thai restaurant, the chairs are

covered in pink doilies,

pink masaman, and your eyes are watching

left, centered out from a window

the street      sensed interest

eagle-straight-vision down to John Donne Street 

they’d allow thought the pass, 

and,   so

with my legs going i am back to the street, 

suddenly crotched by brown-legged towers

lapping at the black ass of the sky

is a place to get and find and

or ,

 and 

, or

stopped breathing, drank

little yellow and little blue take an inventory

we are too too small. and weak, very weak. and without shoes. : little duck:

i am yelling into one of those tube things that exist on playgrounds. a zazzophone i think :little fish:

'we need two more bananas, a handful of strawberries, and bark from a lynching tree' you echoed into my ears 'to complete the smoothie'. :little banana:


i am finding my air pipes similar to those of the zazzophone i think. that is, curvy and narrow and made out of shiny red plastic. :little baby:

and without big people clothes. and wearing unknowing lip designs. with fingers not fit for gloves. :little lightning bolt:

ephemeral and shitty. either way we never changed a thing. :little puddle:

we say scrap conduction. let us be dirt instead. no more blue no more
yellow. zazzophones. be damned.


::

this is a poem about project pat written by project pat that is attempting to approximate project pats level of greatness. it is real.

fuck you puffy

with your fucking cars

and your bitches and hoes

fuck your bitches and hoes

fuck you puffy

i got yo number off the internet bitch

you were the only black man on the list homey

all the rest is white

fuck you puffy

with your cruise control

and your internet

and your diamond ring

and your diamond earring

and your other diamond earring

and your gay tattoo

and your foot products

fuck your foot products

and your meals on wheels

and your mother

fuck you puffy

fuck you

this is what i get when i listen to your music

****the sound of bitches and hoes getting stomped****

lemme tell you about some shit i did

back when i was fuckin shit up

in north memphis

with my crew

and my bitches and hoes

we went pharmaceutical up in there

and we fucked shit up

not like you

bitch

i heard about the panda messiah

aint nothing you can do

nothing you can say

to project pat

aint been said before

talk about my mother

go on

tell me one thing about my mother i aint heard

i dont need that shit yo

*****sound of shit getting started*****

fuck you puffy

fuck you

fuck you puffy

no fuck you puffy

no fuck you puffy

no fuck you puffy

no fuck you

this is a poem about puff daddy written by puff daddy that is attempting to approximate puff daddys level of greatness. it is real.

i am puff daddy. i bought five Bentleys the other day. i rode in four of them at the same time with my diamond plated jet pack.

you didn't know diamond plate existed did you?

i roll with NASA son.

the other Bentley i gave to some poor people that had bad legs and shit. they decided to sleep in it.

tore the leather seats. ungrateful, that's what i call that.

i took that shit back and i rolled it off a cliff.

fonsworth videotaped it.

then i dropped 500 DVDs of me rolling it off a cliff onto the streets of new york.

each one had a tiny silk sean john parachute.

this bored me.

so i bought a triceratops straight cash.

i do these things.

i rode that bitch to the set of making the band 17 and stomped out those hopeful bitches.

can't stop. won't stop.

this is how i get down son.

i had some working class hoes install wings on my new ride.

cause you know i gotta be fly.

i flew up to heaven and stole the golden gates.

i put that shit in front of my mansion to keep j-lo out.

if you see me flying don't even ask for an autograph.

i will have my new ride pierce your heart with its front bumper.

believe that.