More prose poems from long sequence

Mess

A sociolinguistic fucking. Hear the cowbell ringin’. Out, our hands! A too-moist towelette. A reddening. A sociopathic semi-autonomous robot pterodactyl on the fly. We are herding nicely. Hear that? A toe-letting. A moist blood-letting. This pallor fits you well, cow-love. The talons that grab. Programmed poorly and pinching. We are letting our reddening down. Tow-style we herd.

Reddening

Our face, stubborn farce. What skin will we wear today? What mask, hollow-holed can we stretch over lumps. Fleshy. Paint me clown-nose red if you please. Please. A letter was found in my retina yesterday, it read. The bears are back and flipping still. Clown-love, what is real? I’d tell you government-style. Red faces, In distans.

Lumps

forthcoming in elimae

I am listening to cassette tapes of John Denver in my car driving west and it is raining.

I am driving west on a road for five miles before I reach the library and then I am going to park.

I am the sum of all my creative impulses I think as I accidentally run into a telephone pole.

I am in the parking lot when it happens and my car was moving at 2 miles an hour so their is no damage.

When you get in a car accident and their is no damage you begin to doubt the salience of the universe.

Am I lucky that I am capable of remembering events that occurred in my life when everything else is just space dust or exploded star pieces or animals?

I stare into the wide flat beak of a black bird picking at the dirt for little earthworms.

I remember how I lay awake in the middle of the night in my room without windows and couldn't hear anything.

Sometimes the mere fact that things are alive other than me does not make sense but it wouldn't make sense to you either.

(Exercises in identity-relativism)

Hi I say to you looking through the window trying to forget that I am also looking at a slight reflection of myself fidgeting at the crease of my shirt.

I am hopelessly obsessed with the idea of things turning into other things.

Part 2.

There is a bridge that runs across a field I am driving over now.

I am looking through the rear-view mirror at a semi-truck driver talking to his CB radio.

Some grown men in New Orleans were found in an apartment together wearing diapers and feeding each other milk out of bottles.

There is a sense that you would never have thought these men would do this if you saw them in the street that I am getting from the sad old radio news anchorperson.

There is only so much writing that I can do before my brain gives up and this will be permanent.

Some people will fall in love with you even if they don't want to.

Some people wander through a city without ever seeing me.

I am surrounded with cloud-shapes of birds who bend with the crossing branches of trees and syncopate their wings like an african fingerharp player.

The harp player is ordering lemonade at a bar in Sierra Leone on the ocean. His phone rings. He has a shakira ringtone. Boy is it beautiful.

Boy is it beautiful to watch the waves dazzling up and down the coast and forward and backward and reaching out into the land with watery grips that can't quite reach the highways until God makes a hurricane.

This is a poem about Hurricane Katrina and 9/11. It is a conspiracy theory.