HUMANS
Humans learn early to smile to keep from being eaten. Also to aid in procreation. Those are the only reasons. Clear writing is clear thinking. Run your finger down your verbal blintz. Here comes the indecorous cube steak. Crawdads, like lobsters with feelings. A freshly painted fingernail tapping the counter at the courthouse. They put a heavy machine on my head. It felt and smelled like an old manual typewriter. “To better study the human skull,” they said. Raising the usual questions of Character, of Capacity. (Could not stop licking my lips.) Of Sublimity, Ideality, Mirth, Time.
GAMES IN THE SAND
As a boy I was taught not to gobble my chocolates. I had just learned to walk and I’d play a game in the sand with the other children. I would stand there with my stick and draw an animal from memory. A cougar. A vole. I’d draw an animal from memory and ask them to guess. If they guessed wrong something terrible would happen that week to someone in their family. And then there’s you. When you were young you’d lay about on a huge silk cushion pulling the wings off hornets, careful not to disturb them in any other manner. We were made for each other. You, you gobbled your chocolates, but we worked on that. Now those days are behind us. And you say “huffing gas again.” And I can’t keep from smiling a little. As tourniquets of light cut across our field of vision. And childhood memories flash like swans. And we can run down the gazelles just by thinking it. And it’s still like being little, really.
VOTED BEST LEGS, CLASS OF ’78
I’m lying in my motel room in the dark listening to the muffled voices on another man’s radio coming through the wall near my head. I’d held my Cobb salad at the airport like it was an infant, and slept as if drugged from take-off to touch-down, dreaming I was a famous doctor tearing into a pastry with an expensive laser, one monkey after another off to organ grinder school, tough broads in the Melissa Etheridge vein, some everyday vitriol in a shaky hand, Jesus tossing the various fishes into the crowd, the Pope’s niece’s daughter running from us (we followed her), and then like I said the plane touched down. Now I’m here wearing my dark brown suit and lying on the dark brown bedspread like Gulliver tied flat by the little people, revising my life, revising my life, a kind of Easter feeling in the air.