Platypus I Stole

If you live long enough, everything happens--P. Levine

sonorous is a good word

what we do each day

give up & turn for home

a handful of change

lacking thought

a train or other set of wheels

speaking like to the public

we expect to find

a stray and quiet voice

a completely invented life

horsecock and mattress stuffing

Something I didn't know

Names similar to Tony:
Anthony
Antoinette
Clifton
Sheldon

The first two, yes, I get it. The last 2 names, though, is it because there's a 'ton' in Clifton and an 'on' in Sheldon? If someone called me Sheldon or Clifton in the street, I'd probably want to punch them or throw ice in their shirts.

Letters to the indifferent interior

Dearest H--,

I am unencumbered by happenstance. The scabs on my arms are starting to itch. The skin has faded there, at least the color has died down and I know the scar tissue will begin to rise. It's hard to not peel back in places and see the body doing its mending. I'm looked at with pity here and I hate the eyes of people.

Your last letter had an air of desperation to it. I can count the numberless ticks that crowd my roomate and part of this relates to your telephone experience--the people in the center of this country are desperate for entertainment. I don't care if I sound like a general sweeper. This is something that you should not be concerned with. Wash your windows, keep your books, dance with someone if the mood strikes you. At any cost, however, do not rely on the kindness of any disembodied head to draw you closer to understanding the human nature of noise. And keep your mouth shut for the sake of the good lord Jesus or you run the risk of having your mouth misused.

I am always thinking about the countryside, even when I'm in it--especially then. I hope your days move and you move within them.

Faithfully,
B--

One Reason Why People Don't Like Pigeons

If your face was a doorway and all of the world could enter and exit through it, would the bird know it didn't matter so much what its waste was? For instance, this child is at such an angle in relation to the ground, it's unlikely remaining upright's an option.

They aim. One picture proves it--like the face on Mars.

What we don't see is the child sprawled out after another step and a half.

Found on a Piece of Paper in my Hand

Things Bad For Business:

-mutations
-toe stepping
-worms
-bullets
-juking & misdirection
-unseemly back hair
-head trauma (while helmets are also a faux pas)

The 12 step program to help recognize the shortcomings of your soul: for those of us lacking something in that special place...

Continued Weirdness

The train that takes me home is not working on the weekends until March. So I had to take the N to a shuttle bus and back to Sunnyside but while waiting at Union Square there was a man shouting about god (not entirely odd) and his grandmother carrying a gun to church and problems with the deacons and the preacher and guns and the blessings we have just being alive--it made me think of Son House:

Yes, I'm gonna get me religion, I'm gonna join the Baptist Church.
Yes, I'm gonna get me religion, I'm gonna join the Baptist Church.
You know I wanna be a Baptist preacher, just so I won't have to work.

One deacon jumped up, and he began to grin.
One deacon jumped up, and he began to grin.
You know he said, "One thing, elder. I believe I'll go back to barrelhousin again."

One sister jumped up, and she began to shout.
One sister jumped up, and she began to shout.
"You know I'm glad this corn liquor's goin out."

But I was drunk so there was no singing on my part. While he was shouting, there was another fellow making birdcalls by the payphone. Someone further down the platform was responding to the calls. I had no idea what in hell was going on. So I wound up on the train car with the God shouter--he had a tall can of Magnum and his right eye was dead and set well below his left. He continually gestured with his gun hand and praised loosely our lives. The gun-toting-grandma-church-going-chatter ceased two stops later when he got off the train but further down the car was a man dressed in a Spiderman suit. He must have been a street magician because he did a few little disappearing kercheif tricks and then proceeded to rifle through a rather large suitcase, pulling out balloons and honking horns and flopping a rubber chicken around. He almost missed his stop looking for whatever it was he couldn't find in his trick case. He stepped off the train with a pink star balloon on the end of a stick that popped as soon as he got out the door.

These things happen all of the time, right?

new band name involving animals

there's really only one that counts: anaconda death grip
an acoustic "ballads only" band with metal sensibility

heart heart pigeon is a close contender for the new band name title.
horsewind fury, not as much.
3 tigers is killing.
winter of the stork
llama propulsion
platypus
orphan dog park
jamming the dolphin
armadillo breastplate
breakfast with donkeys

yesterday the day before

Yesterday I drank a cup of coffee at this conference for conceptual learning--how to implement Concept-Based curriculum and instruction in "the thinking classroom". On the cover of the handout for the powerpoint presentation there was what seemed to be a hummingduck or some sort of bird hybrid. When I finished the coffee there was what seemed to be a detached cat claw in the bottom of the styrofoam cup. Like one that gets pulled off by the carpet--this is what it looked like except brownish instead of whitish. I showed it to the people at my table and they looked away. At one point after the coffee and before we left there was a video shown. Through technical difficulties one section of the video looped a few times cutting back through a teacher and her classroom saying "The government/work together/verygood/change/the government/work together/very good/change/the government" and then it stopped. I am drinking coffee again now, today.

The day before the telephone rang and I answered it, to be informed that I owed $500 to AT&T by a small voice on the other end of the line. I told that small voice that I had never had AT&T as a service provider and threw some linguine in boiling water. The small voice said "I want some ice cream." I then asked the small voice who it was and if I could have a dollar, since I didn't have any ice cream. This conversation continued and went nowhere for about 12 minutes until I stopped talking and the small voice hung up saying "hello...hello." I then seduced myself considering the date it was.

Letters to the indifferent interior

Dear B--

On the last circumstantial meeting request you posted your nose like a wine drunk cowboy to the light filtered behind the window where we were eating. Smeared grease stain mark on the spot above your head there and I was halfway through the soup before I fogged out and mistook the small outer spoon for a very weak weapon--hefting this and that to the opening produced by my face.

I don't care to call the operator anymore for assistance. Her unfathomable creulty is like the weather and sometimes I wind up talking to people that aren't even there. For instance, last Wednesday when the patch was put through to Minneapolis, all of the neighbors were listening in and so I continued in code until only enough breath to sustain one awkward conversation filled the space between my own lips and the ear of whoever was listening, and by that point I was pretty sure it was only her. Listening and not responding "Letter f downplayed the importance of howzits named calf bottom and the meat freezer is no longer full" If only she weren't this way with my insisting so. I could hear papers rustling behind her and the small tick of a fan's blades. It was not easy to convince the other people who had stopped listening and set their ends down to believe that their silence was not exactly an electrical current and that coursing through me were channels of all sorts. A hockey station, the last kiss of an elephant on the mouth, train terminals filling, my part in all of this--however small and inconclusive.

The last letter you sent covers part of the wall. Your handwriting is immaculate. I will continue waiting and try to shout less, as you have requested.

Yours,

Tiger I Stole

TIGERS

the zoo's breeding record showed the tigers had exactly the right environment and diet, which includes 10 kg (22 pounds) of mutton twice a week as well as fresh poultry meat.

White tiger mother Bety gave birth to the cubs, two females and one male, on December 23 but Thursday was the first time zoo visitors were able to see them.
White tigers are a genetic variation of the better-known orange Bengal tigers.

Between 5,000-7,000 tigers live in the wild, down from 100,000 at the start of the 20th-century. Poaching, deforestation and over-hunting of their natural prey have hit their numbers.

There's a big party every time there's a birthday

The work of stealing a cat 5:33 AM

If the coffee is not hot, this will not do. One spoon. One plate and the moon. It's the heart of February you hear purring with jackhammers in the morning. It's the heart of the window that bellows as you look through it and chuck little candy coated hearts with letters on them into the street below. Here you go lovers of sweet-things, you say. Fat pigeons scatter into the air.

It's the middle of a month and whiskers dust the legs of things. A single person wakes up in the night to drink glass after glass of water in the dark. The tap is complicit. The thief is the cat itself, sitting wide-eyed on the sill, un-bothered.


Sew much catatonic-after. glade-wrung absolute transom. positive blight weathern. volume mescal-laughter. force. quick hundred-dollar yuma. jabloney ciphon-pants. cat nix cat. eye transistor. drowse machine forgery. clampit offer. heart heart pigeon. toothsome hunger. the brushing down-sill. the pad of floorboard. nuance. voicebox rattle static.

Between the dead and the animals a boy ought to be able to find some semblance

If you really loved me you’d have been on time—

We lay down one night,

not to rise. Lover, you said, don’t ever
let me age.

So scattered I am, passing through their dusty hands.

A dating material, our brittle bodies. Essential

to everything that dies. Even
the mauve gloaming—we know that
color and not—

say taupe, say luscious,

say elder, and then again—say any other color you can name. Say

we listen like an untended fire. Say
if you really loved me
don't ever

let me age

into the crackling of flashbulbs.
You would never lean,
I swear, to regain composure. Say

to the left in most photos
you sway—imbalanced—
an impatient bag of earth,

I swear, say
never let me

away

Craigslist's Missed Connections Slightly Reconfigured W4M

You are the first thing on my mind
when I wake, I think about you every day,
Fed Ex Express guy.

Bad timing, looking for love? Please
wait for me in your shirt, I want
to party!!!

Hey handsome, hey mister
ellipses, hey mean fiddler, did you ever
get in to see the show? Did you really
want me? Did I see you smoking
outside our office building
in search of hot teachers? Did I see
my hand catch
your door? Have I been wrong
for 10 years?

I'm not going to answer you this time.
Please come find me.

Interspecies Love

Who knew it was this easy?