Joy of Stopping.
Cold Rain, Joy of Stopping in the Cold Rain.
Stopping by Starbucks on a Rainy Summer Afternoon.
Air conditioned like a bunch of plague victims.
Hurts, Incest. Insects. Sex.
Joy of Stopping.
Cold Rain, Joy of Stopping in the Cold Rain.
Stopping by Starbucks on a Rainy Summer Afternoon.
Air conditioned like a bunch of plague victims.
Hurts, Incest. Insects. Sex.
This is more than less.
This is a venti no water Americano.
This is a lemonade.
This is without respect.
This is a poetry of abuse.
The abuse poem. The nirvana poem. The well poem, the ill poem.
This is a leap out of poetry the false well.
This is a heartstring.
This is a spoonrocket (K. Prevallet)
This is a landfish (Sam).
This is incapacity.
This is the rest of the beggars.
This is the consistent.
This is the technical.
This is your sip, these are your glasses,
this is your mirror, this is your window.
This is your sudden face,
this is rabid dog fear in the night,
this is jumping flea ukulele.
This is Mr. Killbug, this is a Burgher. This is a Beggar.
This is air, this is male pattern baldness,
this is a reduction, this is avoiding getting organized.
This is not a gnat, this is not a note.
This is the scent of your sweat and a sharp pain behind the eyes,
this is code, this is a tangerine, this is over but not over,
this is ooh and aah
this is lipsynch, this is lip stuck
this is father daughter day
and after all that okay
No need to drink this latté. No need to say “doppio.”
Sip of latté. Sip of capability. Sip of Venice. Second marriage. Didn’t work out well.
The coffee is terrible. Watery for an espresso.
Learning to resolve, learning to dissolve, distort, depress, the discouragement of your name, learning about tanned skin, catalogs, and scans. How the coffee machine works, where you stand up where you stall where to stand up where to stall, how far to go, considering you are a hairy white man chubby belly straining plaid with ear phones and bewildered eyes—
Flashback to Nantucket and The Bean and
the anxiety of my last day there and not so long ago.
Rhyme Rhyme Rhyme rhyming one-stroke here we go.
Andalusia. Spells. Smells. Coffee bean.
Little girl lacking, lacking coffee, not that good for her anyway. I would have made an excellent divorced dad.
Remembering…
isolated parks where I have retreated to do some writing. Not happening today. Today, no pleasure park, just chaos in the Starbucks. Busy. Holiday buzz. Bland songs, blunt. Cold feet. Fast talkers.
Sometimes here, sometimes not here.
More reading, more writing. Right now my skin is salty with dried sweat, I’m jittery with coffee. There is no torpor. I am radiant in the fragility of March. The fleeting ice, the flavors in the atmosphere, the thin glittering legs of these lake birds, hunting, hunting. Fish? Wishing for a lot of frogs around the edges of my pond, wishing for a pond. My parents’ relationship with the spring peepers in their backyard swamp. Yes, I have boredom, ill will, yes, and guess what—it is mine. I saw and felt that here just now. How latent it remains, the tendency to blame. Here I am warm and contained, my teeth are singing off the fluid line of ink. The failbetter, the magazine. Lists of objects. A book, over-sized, with heavy plastic pages, inscribed (somehow) with freewrites. I feel breathless.
Here I am 5 pm—New Canaan coffee at Zumbach’s. Excellent. Civilized day—work at home, yoga, and quit at 4:30. Intense yoga one-on-one with Chikeola.
So foreign I can only follow
challenge to my understanding
wall, a see-through wall—a screen
No comparisons are possible
Learn to use my body in completely different ways
Part of me will not go back
Pussy willow (weeping) in fuzzy yellow bloom, this is a first—
Struggling with documents
The shop is closed
Sense desire—in its place—I don’t like a cold shower, nor do you. I have my coffee. I like my kids, like ducklings, in a row. I dream of tsunami or thunderstorm, the fast typhoon, the accidental candles. I will reread that chapter, Melville, about the lightning strike.
Un visible
A standing stone.
Three standing stones, white marble, in the conifer garden (trust the rhythm it will take you where you want to go) the lax
whispers
the coffee
the hand
Metta? I don’t think so
Though Chikeola threw it in
this morning—
This latté is like
a cup of milk
nothing to it
I am really struggling with a lot of questions—
Maybe this is the tail end of my tenure working I am certainly chafing under all the structure I felt Linda closing the lid down on my dear chaos Friday and I wanted to cry especially since there was no way to explain EXPLAIN—
pressures pressures decompression after Eli’s birthday party yesterday my eyes my eyes my moon
Pain in my feet. Cramps from the heavy boot. Hair falling down, escaping the barrette in wild strands.
Guilt drinking coffee without Sam.
End of October—I blurt out in an email that there’s a reading from In Pieces, an anthology of fragmentary literature by Impassio Press in the city on October 29th. I’ll be there (but not reading). Of course, no one from class shows up, it’s not that kind of group. I’m quite excited by this gathering—there’s Guy, and Jason, Audrey, Ellis, Mary, and lovely Roy, and afterwards, I collect signatures like a giddy child and drink wine and talk of fragments and connections. It’s a lovely gathering. Outside on the plaza, in a windstorm, I fall down and break my wrist.
I miss the next two classes. Halloween is just two days away, can’t really navigate, I stay home becalmed (uncalm) in an utter slump. Unable to celebrate in any way with Sam, a masked witch in a bad mood.
The next week, I’m in New York, but entertaining Geno and Michelle after the marathon. We’re eating at Pure Food and Wine, with Blair, and baby Harry. It’s a good time although I feel phenomenally stressed by the logistics of meeting people in the city and the baby and the driving and the wrist and the expense and the phone call saying I won’t be there at class and the what the hell of all of it. But I like Michelle. She tells Blair stories of the squats in London and Berlin. Geno wrangles Harry pretty well, and Sam takes him out for little walks into the rainy courtyard. We even stop for coffee (terrible) at a nondescript, nonrecommended deli (Greek joint). Returning to my car something like the sound of a loud gong, in the Gong Show, loud and deep and fatal—parking ticket, $65, I parked at 5:40 pm somewhere where I shouldn’t have parked until 6. Just suck it up.
I catch up with the next class. I think I’ve lost the thread of Duncan’s life completely. All I know is that I’m envious of his household, alive with art and poetry and avant friends, community with all its prices and its costs. I’m envious of his ego and his correspondents. Him. Levertov. How to come to terms with what is past. That was then, you see, and this is now.
The coffee is a bit appalling, as is Sam’s insatiable desire for a phone.
Worn floors in here, dirty linoleum, the random escaped coffee bean.
Coffee tends to cool it, to thin it out, bring edges into crisper relief. I think I understand.