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?