from The Reveries

My instinct for drama had me lying down again looking like death.  After the movie, a little gunplay in the street. She said wasn’t the astronaut sealed inside the foil suit a good metaphor for modern life? The muzzles were enshrouded with halos & barked. I thought (as I often do) to lie down on the sidewalk & die but could see how the gesture (although convincing) lacked commitment. For the astronaut, any small thing he held in his hands got crushed. The coastline appeared again & again in the museum like a virus. A likeness in the first place is a workhorse, a wheelbarrow for moving creatures of the earth: walking around now over me dead in the earth. Metaphor, you’re young but still constitute a string of casualties pressing down on the subject. Didn’t yellow at one time mean how many houseflies on the fermenting banana? Didn’t banana mean world: skittle/easement/morsel/gob—or the place where all four meet? They pick them green in Mexico & fly them to us on refrigerated jets. How many suns burnt out before we?

The Neighborhood Where I live

I was born with a handlebar mustache, nobody could explain it &

although it fell off years ago I still feel it at times, it tickles. there are stores

in my neighborhood I've never been in but daily I walk

the cobblestoned alleys, my hands fall

on condiment jars sticky with fingerprints. the problem

with the surrealists is they were writing I LOVE THIS! or I HATE THIS!

instead of HERE IT IS! today in Baghdad human limbs

& hats & bloody shoes fly up from explosions like

human limbs and hats and bloody shoes flying up from explosions.

I don’t want to tell it any different than it happens.

and yet I love this : walking in the door

of the Turkish grocery I see things one way only:

the hands of the cashier occluded with milk.  on the shelf:

a tin of paprika, jar of rose petal jelly,