"Extras" in Autumn

When I walk by the house where you no longer live
I am reminded of the sound of Ricky Gervais's laugh
mingled with both yours and mine
and the color of your skin
lit by the television
while you sleep.

Love Theme: Reprise

AND ALL
Where's my coat
No not
AT ONCE
yet. Tell me
what's wrong
I KNEW
Nothing
I KNEW
Nothing's ever
AT ONCE
wrong. Do you
love me?
I KNEW
Yes yes yes
HE
Tell me
NEEDED
...
ME.
Good-night.

Breadbaker

It is Sunday morning and
my father is up early baking bread
His strong rough hands delving into dough,
kneading it with careful and quiet deliberation
The house is empty allowing a silence to settle
as I, small and determined,
have again lost the debate over
the necessity of Sunday's service

But my father's dark and heavy hands knead dough
in the kitchen in his own ritual.

Early morning light filters in
as the terra cotta bowl allows the dough to
rise over its lips
and my father sips coffee from a mug
once belonging to some ancient hotel room
and that is just as heavy as his hands,
as impenetrable

I return,
one hand in my mother's,
the other already tugging at the lace of my Sunday best,
and find my home smells of a warmth
and a comfortable familiarity that I am too young to articulate

...

My father still sits cast in steel at the kitchen table
sipping coffee from his stalwart mug
but my Sundays home are rare,
and I am too old to believe in redemption from weekly masquerades

And my father's hands,
leaden and weary in tireless domestic rest,
no longer bake bread.

A Book Review for Eeeee Eee Eeee by Tao Lin Found On Amazon.com

In a darkened room in a small and filthy apartment
that sits invisibly above an office of little significance
Tao Lin's intern is about to write a book review for Tao Lin's latest book.

It is 3am and
lit only by the gentle and luminous glow
of the computer at which he sits,
Tao Lin's intern begins to type.

Words come slowly and with great difficulty,
but they come.
They come honestly and simply
and free of the pretension of capitalization
and the presumptuous brusqueness
usually incited by virtual anonymity.

i feel confused. i think i am 'having fun.'

Then, without much thought or reticence,
a fortune cookie truth drops from his fingertips
and Tao Lin's intern falls asleep
wondering only how to pronounce a title he hears as a screech.

it is hard to write a book review without using cliches

[work in progress, comments appreciated]

The overbearing hum of a million in love
signal the start of a summer I won’t feel
Born out of earth, memory, time
Crawling out of the back of my mind,
out of the tightly sealed boxes I’d placed them in

In days they are floating drunkenly in the sky
golden black moments of repression unleashed and
filtering through the sunlight in

assumed warmth with
assumed breezes

My footsteps shrink and I contemplate insurmountable
distances once crossed in a mindlessness not unlike
the stupor that surrounds me.

Ritual dances performed with a lewd audacity
and vulgar proclamation
only to have it all culminate with the smell of
putrid meat
and
years of waste and memory
in the rotting humidity
Dozens of small bodies writhing in streets and gutters
and still I am fixed behind panes of glass

Until silence, falling leadenly, allows a breath to escape and for two words to be realized:
Soon
Autumn.

By the Way

With the icebox plums long gone,
along with my mother's vase,
which we never agreed on

This is just to say
that I have left

Forgive me,
you are impossible
so bitter
and so cold

Like Truth

I want to say what it is or what it isn’t,
simple uncut truths,
striking against a smattering of whitewash metaphors.
This is
I am
Here is my life,
an unripe tomato, a tree, a conversation, hot breath on a cold night, a pencil, lead
My brain a lumpy gray mass of nerve endings and cells and imbalanced chemicals
A heart of asymmetrical blood vessels beating in time to a rhythm that means only that I am not dead or dying
enclosed inside a body that I sometimes like
and sometimes don’t
Here I am
a smog, a computer, a coffee cup, stacks of unused notebooks, entwined fingers

There’s nothing left to say
Say anything

Here it is.