I wrote this poem on bus #17 coming home late at night after a poetry reading while looking at “Rich Kids of Instagram” on my phone and instead of disgust I thought “I wish I knew more people with boats,” and then I felt disgusted with myself for thinking that, though I did not know at the time I was writing this poem:
white noise white trash white cape white light white heat white bread white white
A man was telling himself a story about two people who had a baby and I was walking behind him just because we happened to be going the same way but he was upset. He was sure that the supposed father of the baby could not be the baby’s father, and when we passed the doorman at the fancy hotel, wearing a long brown and gold doorman’s coat and his arms crossed just as you would imagine a doorman to look, he raised his eyebrows at me as if he and I had a shared understanding, but I did not know what that shared understanding was so I just smiled while the man telling his story repeated “a supreme black” many times and then I wrote this poem:
a supreme black
a supreme black
a supreme black
a supreme black
a supreme black
a supreme black
a supreme black
a supreme black
a supreme black
a supreme black
a supreme black
a supreme black
a supreme black
a supreme black
a supreme black
a supreme black
a supreme black
a supreme black
a supreme black
a supreme black
a supreme black
a supreme black
a supreme black
a supreme black
a supreme black
a supreme black
a supreme black
a supreme black
a supreme black
a supreme black
a supreme black
a supreme black
a supreme black
a supreme black
a supreme black
a supreme black
a supreme black
a supreme black
Jean Painlevé’s The Love Life of the Octopus on the big screen and Jeffrey Jerusalem sat on stage in front of a laptop playing electronic music to accompany the octopus’ crawl across the rocks, the camera zooms in so the screen is all octopus eye, then I wrote this:
red
swimming
cap
Rainy Tuesday on the Lower East Side: walking with a friend to the gallery that sometimes shows his paintings and there we saw some large abstract paintings by Michael Bauer with lots of blacks and browns and the occasional pale pink, and three women wearing black who run the gallery working on computers. We said hello, and with affection my friend placed his hand on top of the head of the woman who owns the gallery, then we walked out on the street again. Mostly when writing this poem I was not thinking about art or the gallery, but the city and its colors and the sidewalks:
on either side of your thin eyelids
you see yellow
I opened an email with a subject that read “your future has arrived” but it was a joke, it wanted me to buy some soup, but I was out of town so I wrote this poem, feeling slightly manipulated:
when you are angry your face
is like runny egg yolk
One afternoon I woke up from a nap in a room with white walls, I had a dream my grandmother’s feet swelled like elephant feet and she repeated “I’m so cold so cold so cold,” and the only thing I could think to do was to cover her feet with my own feet to keep them warm and when our feet touched I felt like I was being burned and I remembered this poem:
I need
every hour of my life
Once I was walking through a neighborhood and suddenly the sidewalk, the street, the empty field fenced in by chain link, were all covered with buttons. My friend told me there used to be a button factory here, but they tore it down. I picked some up, careful of the dirt and broken glass, and then slowly dropped them through my fingers. I did not write this poem until many years later, but what a beautiful day that was:
remove all the eggshells
