I lay in bed and listened to the wind that stove

The branch apart from barrel trunk. The old house shook

And heaved into the wind the way that once

I thought that I would heave against myself.

The house is large and full of ghosts tonight.

I like the way the curtain catches on my face and strokes

My neck. I used to think that we would be large, together,

And that each would fill the other’s empty places,

Would touch and tease the ghosts our lives

Could not contain. We would have clove together in just

the way the wind moaned in and through the dusty house,

And swept our cobwebs up and out to God.

“You have the uncommon gift of common sense”

I wonder if the writer bites the inside of her cheek to keep from laughing,

And try to see the matte gray finish of a smoke-reduced machine.

I know there is no smoke inside a fortune cookie factory,

And that “she” may not exist, although I like to think she does.

I am white. And male.

And actually low on common sense,

And my disposable income of privilege allows me the luxury

Of a few domesticated neurotic tics.

If I met this fortune-cookie girl, whom I like to think

Is smarter than her place requires, and stronger, and except

For some decision years ago, needs not work at a place like that:

Hot, and full of imaginary smoke—

Maybe her son was born too young, and her parent’s rage, though dimly felt now,

Was enough to send her from her home –

She wouldn’t be there.

I like to think that I have passed her by in line

To get a cup of coffee, have a smoke outside, and watch

The dreaming clouds of smoke on the edge of vision,

And thought her cute, but couldn’t think of how to say the charming things

That it would take to break the shell

Of matte-gray finish and of smoke.

Do the dead keep their names?

The nettle thinks so,

Though the dandelion does not.

It says,

‘Whether Melvin and his loving wife

And (improbably) mother were people

Or the sum of yesterdays expired, then

They are now not dead.

Their fictive passing begs first of all a question of fixity, and of fate.”

If they were alive once, the nettle rebuts,

It was through first of all a sense of will

And not a will of senses;

‘True, but then we must ask whether they,

Since ’31 defunct, were not borrowing against the future the way that atoms

Seem to see themselves alive first..”

Then, the dandelion interrupts, they are only alive

Now, in memory,

Not, he hastens to add,

In the memories that preserve

Tobacco-stained fingers, coffee-stained teeth, sun-stained hair,

But in the stain of memory fading they grow to life.’

My grandmother died this year,

And I talked to her after the funeral like I couldn’t in years.

I didn’t need to explain to her why I laughed, gasping,

When my niece asked why they bothered to seal her urn,

Her parentheses were wars. Her stains were tea.

And before I can let the memory go, before she can be real,

I need to hear her laughter

At the inanity of the talk of weeds.

Smooth except in one spot and the motion of keeping my hand down is likely to cause carpal tunnel, which is one of those things that has never made much sense to me and I wonder when we’ll evolve past that point if we will given the likelihood of being caught in some sudden evolutionary deluge but the point is the only burr is one that I can remember and not feel underneath my left wrist where the athalon II core sticker is starting to spring up and flutter and that sort of entropic devolving is probably precisely no more no less what happens at a cellular level no more no less being somehow unequal because that implies equality when what I mean is analogy.

Blue

Background blue

Having the blues

Blue dog

Blue’s clues (was he really on drugs?)

Urban legend

Byway/social wisdom promulgation

Notebooks

Obscure

Insanity

Rimbaud

Spicer/self-press

Self-mythologizing

Champollion and the obviating myth of the genius

Test metrics

Anxiety over performance

See also, performance enhancing (sexual) drugs of a totally illicit nature