Consummation, Consumption, Constriction, or The Days of our Lives

The toad had already lost the left leg
Down the gullet of the snake,
the other foot pawing, ineffective, at
the scaled nose then trying, feeble, to flip,
forelegs tracing slow, useless circles in the air.

The snake icy calm, barely moving,
the lungs gradual bulging even, measured.
Then the tinniest, lazy nibbles, securing the left hip.

There is no hurry, here. You and I,
we have all the time in the world.

No Shade Here, Son.

A tumbler heavily beaded with sweat
Long since emptied of quinine, gin,
The chink of melting ice,
Salt stinging squinted eyes.

Lizards fat like cigars everywhere,
Unworried, indifferent.

More Metaphors of the Magnifico

hope \ˈhōp\
v. hoped, hop·ing, hopes
v.intr.
1. to cherish a desire with anticipation
2. archaic : trust
3. I was surprised she waded into the sea,
the surf so rough and her bikini so slight,
so strained.
She started to retie (retie!)
the string behind her neck,
while facing the pounding waves.
She could have walked back,
and tied the knot on dry land, quietly.
But she stood, fumbling, fingers slipping,
wave after wave,
smiling at the sea.

One Hundred Imaginary Gifts for my Lover

Note: the real version of this may be a physical version, with each "gift" written on a separate cigarette rolling paper, and all neatly folded back together into the packet.

1. the flat stoneware bottle, fitting neatly into the palm of the hand and stoppered with blue glass, that I found in my dream;


2. a tablet of paper made from the feathers of great egrets;


3. a glass eye;


4. a strong round magnet that can be heard to sing softly with a low and continuous note;


5. the star-map on the inside of a stone;


6. six drops of pheasant blood;


7. vials of the water from the seven traditional seas;


8. cornflower blue sandals, a souvenir from Basho's travels;


9. a rubbing of a stone bearing the name of a god no longer worshipped;


10. a bit of mud dropped by a nesting swallow;


11. a love spell prepared by a voodoo priest;


12. a love spell prepared by a crazy homeless woman;


13. the skeletonized remains of a small rabbit;


14. twenty-three watercolor crayons, one for each color visible at the top of the trail at Baboon Lakes at three in the afternoon, including the color of wild raspberries;


15. a very old postcard whose sender and recipient are both dead;


16. a bucket of fresh olives;


17. a magic candle that, when lighted, gives the dark shadow of night even when it is day;


18. a cologne that smells like wet stone;


19. a cologne that smells like fireflies;


20. a photograph of a male and extremely ugly faerie, washing its face in dew from a buttercup;


21. a papier-mâché model of the Griffith Observatory, to display or to burn or to use as a piñata;


22. a bed framed with Vietnamese cinnamon bark;


23. one hundred tiny clay pots the circumference of dimes, filled with bright pigments;


24. a sheet of postage from a defunct country;


25. an audio tape of frog sounds from the Amazon in the eighteenth century, including species now extinct;


26. a telephone to speak to yourself the night before;


27. the astrological chart of the long-dead concubine of a long-dead emperor;


28. seventy-five points;


29. a bottle into which nine Catholic and nine Buddhist nuns have spat, as a good luck charm;


30. a clay cup imprinted with the fingerprints of Henry James;


31. a microscopic portrait of the Marquis de Sade made from fragments of butterfly wings;


32. a lock of hair from each of your four maternal great-grandmothers, taken on the eve of her respective eighteenth birthday;


33. an ink monkey, as the ancient Chinese sages are said to have possessed;


34. the preserved skin of a pirate bearing a tattoo of a naked woman;


35. a letter purloined from the underground postal system of a prison;


36. a treehouse;


37. the preserved pubic lice of Scheherazade;


38. a miniature star with miniature planets and asteroids;


39. a secret cache of fireworks;


40. a raccoon penis bone;


41. a prime number of six thousand digits;


42. an ancient document in an untranslated script;


43. an empty wasps' nest;


44. a letter of exoneration from the Queen;


45. a chess set carved by an apostate monk;


46. a belt cut from the hide of the Minotaur;


47. the ill-lit records room from an abandoned state asylum;


48. a three-volume treatise on the forms of sexual ecstasy;


49. a jar of fog;


50. a personal zeppelin;


51. a small waterfall down a rock wall and into your personal bathroom sink, for you to wash with;


52. a packet of perfect fish scales;


53. a newly-deceased person's schedule for the week;


54. sandals carved from sandalwood, and a matching codpiece;


55. your own skull, taken from the future with a time-scoop;


56. sealed autopsy records;


57. a necklace of the footprints of a hedgehog, the footprints made in clay and fired in a kiln into beads;


58. the address of a witch;


59. a pocket watch with movement carved from mastodon bones;


60. a railroad to the frontier;


61. an envelope of grave dirt from a child Black Plague victim;


62. the testimony of every person who has ever had a crush on you;


63. a powerful semicolon to use in argument;


64. a silk quilt;


65. a deep blue-green pigment that can dye anything, including skies, wedding anniversaries, and thoughts;


66. a phonograph record of your mother singing;


67. plans for a bank heist, including drawings, annotated in German;


68. ten vials containing the characteristic smells of the year 2073 in New York City;


69. a mature cedar;


70. a lasso to bring objects back from your dreams;


71. a toothbrush inlaid with uncut sapphires;


72. a demon trapped in an emptied eggshell;


73. a piece of glass made from lightning-struck sand;


74. a piece of ocean-tossed ambergris;


75. a ship's lantern;


76. a warm and sunny field of opium poppies;


77. the figure of Salome dancing, carved in a peach pit;


78. a bag for holding pearls, woven from spider web;


79. your own dried umbilical cord;


80. a pendant in the shape and color of the known universe;


81. a hailstone the size of your head;


82. rust shavings from an iron lock;


83. the address of Death;


84. the pineal gland of a prostitute, preserved in brine;


85. cuff links made from a meteorite;


86. an Australopithecus coprolite;


87. a bottle of glowing ink extracted from fireflies;


88. a pound of pure sodium;


89. a magic spell to make a candle burn backwards;


90. underwear made from spun vicuña fibers;


91. a loyal yak;


92. a pair of kid gloves made for your hands;


93. a heretofore-lost episode of The Twilight Zone;


94. the ashes of the burned Aztec codices;


95. a scar from the excision of regret;


96. a new name;


97. a safe deposit box to be opened in three years;


98. a microcircuit printed on a feather;


99. a statue of a Peruvian saint;


100. and a human molar from Machu Picchu.

Oh Yoko

I just got a copy of Yoko Ono's Grapefruit for $4 at the bookstore on my block. This is an instruction from the book:

TAPE PIECE III

Snow Piece

Take a tape of the sound of the snow falling.
This should be done in the evening.
Do not listen to the tape.
Cut it and use it as strings to tie gifts with.
Make a gift wrapper, if you wish, using the same process with a phonosheet.

1963 Autumn

Easter Earthquake Haiku

The earth rolls.
Obese San Diegans want more ham.
Ring of Fire

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