A Poem I Found About Sardines

A recipe.

Fette Sau, or why objective reviews are useless.

I have incredible affection for any place that sells meat by the pound and beer by the gallon. From that description alone it sounds like it should be so industrial and mechanized, at yet it's the very opposite. Pork belly, beans with burnt ends of brisket. Last night they had short ribs, which weren't remarkable for taste or texture so much as a deep primal rush that accompanied gnawing on the bones. Having gone through large quantities of beer beforehand was probably somehow key to that experience.

I ate with friends -- between the lot of us we had a relationship on the rocks, a marriage in crisis, one who just got dumped and one who just broke a heart. After several gallons of bear and pounds of barbeque we shambled into the night, ending up in a park with paper bagged forties watching a softball team's fielding drills under tall bright lights while discussing relationships and love and obscenity and sex and hope and dammit, we were too old to be drinking so much on a work night and bring hither the fatted calf, and kill it; and let us eat, and be merry: for we are alive again; we were lost, and are found.

There are more things in heaven and earth...

but understand, sometimes
self satisfaction
has been earned.

Sometimes there's a girl that

might be a girl you know so you

stare at her to figure it she is and

it turns out she's not so it 

turns out you're kinda creepy.

Thanks Guys That's Real Fucking Helpful

In the men's room
killing a cockroach
the size of a chicken wing
with a dustpan
while big dudes
with gang tattoos
wait outside
with wide-open eyes
obviously thinking
they're backing me up.

If you chased dessert truck away

[responses to a text message complaining about the absence of dessert truck]

I will be angry with you.

What did you say to it? Did you give it a nasty look?
Dessert truck is sensitive and delicate,
(how else could they get the bacon's barest whispered hint in crème anglaise?)
One must treat it gently,
and with care.

-----------

Oh, poor dessert truck.
Maybe it is lost, having missed a turn in the rain,
and currently wanders the back roads of queens,
or staten island,
or jersey,
looking for home?

how we worry.

-----------

or perhaps dessert truck is hiding,
say from a broken heart,
it has joined the french foreign legion,
toiling in a north african mess hall,
dolling out profiteroles.

-----------

"...and then after a prolonged absence, the followers of dessert truck came to realize that Dessert Truck was not an anchor in space and time, not a physical presence off astor or a place of market transations, but that Dessert Truck was a state of mind, and the enlightened needed not the actual substance of bacon crème anglaise, but could experience it's texture and ghostly porcine notes at any moment by simply opening themselves to the immutable Dessert Truckness present in the very fabric of all human experience. Sadly, the enlightened then fell out of the habit of eating physical food, leading to an ugly degradation and death. Thus DessertTruckarianism's flame, while blindingly bright, consumed itself before the movement could get anywhere near self sustaining." -- Johannesson, Johan "Movements and Faith in Early 21st Century New York." Cargo Cult Studies 72.8.

Neologism Opening

Kathy wants the distinction
between crispy dry-fried hashbrowns
and soft, gelated potatoes.

On the landscape of "Pink Panther" cartoons

P: They always seemed like they were set in an existential wasteland.

Me: Yeah, but I always find those hopeful and beautiful.

P: Yeah...but it's like, closer to Archean than Precambrian period.

Lady Yi Gets Kidnapped in Mexico City

Welcome back Kathy!
Written on Ambien.

It’s not the inconvenience of it, so much
as the economic inefficiency. Lady Fong, Christ,
you would not believe this weather.
No air conditioning, no decent gin for leagues,
don’t even think about hair conditioner.
A true lady would get kidnapped someplace cool,
by hot-tempered Vikings salacious enough
to pound the DTs out of her clammy mind.
How I hate this ceiling fan.
See you next season. As yet unraped, Lady Yi.

5th steeping of Shi Feng Long Jian:

This must be how grass 

tastes to a cow.

Shut her tiny hole Car Guitar

Thi: "I think they've figured out that all they need to get past the spam detector bots is a person with Tourette's."

Sitting under an overhang at a cafe, reading essays on the formal analysis of trust, while it pours down

When it rains in L.A.

you can see

what sport everybody does.

Substitution Love Poem

This putative martini which has vodka
instead of gin, and which has no olive juice
but is made pathetically dirty
by the addition of the dregs of a jar
of pickled okra, and which has positively
no vermouth at all, though I did consider
substitutes: bitters, sake, uh, apricot brandy?
- this martini which, Christ, knows enough
to be ashamed of itself - is like the idea
of having a man other than my lover.

Time

Raining, raining, raining;
still raining.
Is it still raining?
Yes it is STILL FUCKING RAINING

Neighborhood

My neighbor's sex noises:
passionately recreated
by my neighbor's parrot.

What am I supposed to do? Write sober? As if.

Laphroaig's iodine.
Halls's menthol-lyptus.
Not as bad as you'd think.

What whiskey that's supposed to taste like mustard tastes like when you have a cold

Ash, charcoal,

death, and jasmine

Sensory sandwich, slightly stoned

Marvin Gaye;

two hot girls;

sound of frying oysters.

Garden of Earthly Delights, detail 4

Garden of Earthly Delights, detail 3

Garden of Earthly Delights, detail 2

Garden of Earthly Delights, detail 1

Poetry Challenge

My august employer recently did some high res scans of paintings in the Prado, including Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights. I mean super high res. Go to Google Earth, search for 'Prado Museum, Spain', and there should be a white box thing you can click on. Best of luck from there on out.

The challenge -- I'll pick a detail once a day (more or less) and post a screenshot. Poetry responses in comments.

Game on!

Are taggers making nerdy font comments?

Some bridge tagger
has carefully painted "SCRIPT"
in sans-serif caps.

Columbo

My coworker Gabe is awesome. At first glance, he can be confused for someone who is precious and sweet, but if you pay a touch more attention you realize he is a spectacularly excellent asshole.

Things he's recently discovered and done: the joy of flashlight forums, making his own lollipops, purchased a concertina, set up a real traffic light by a coworker's desk to turn red whenever he breaks the build (think bright enough to be seen by drivers thirty feet away at noon on a sunny day).

He recently got into watching Columbo. He composed the following haiku sequence, which he cautions me is just a draft:

Columbo hunts crooks.
They often killed somebody.
He always finds them.

He is so wily.
So cunning, yet bumbling.
Catches crooks off guard.

They think he's their friend.
That way they tell him secrets.
BAM! Used against them.

Columbo's car's old.
It sputters around. So slow!
It does look cool though.

Update:

He mentions his wife.
We never get to see her.
Maybe she's ugly.

His trenchcoat's classic.
Not very warm though, he says.
When does he wash it?

More RBS

JLH Blues -- The presence of absence in the home that your woman completely emptied while you were out, calloused fingers on steel strings, stale tobacco, cheap whiskey, groundhogicide in the parched garden out back.

The Idea of Order at Key West -- Caribbean sea spray, palm trees, decaying dock wood, moist summer air at twilight, distant hint of citronella.

Ambitious (At the Grocery Store)

Dude in a bike helmet and spandex,
heaving a twelve pack of Bud Light
onto the counter.

Grey morning

Friend asleep on the floor,

Tureck playing Bach partitas.

I'm on my fifth brewing of tea.