Aught, no. 11/12 (2003)

Noah Eli Gordon / from Jaywalking the Is

« Back   |   Next »

I’m taking my pirate ship apart. An overdose on the letter arrival circuit? An accidental gift? They hold my nose, empty the bucket. I tried the sledge merger before flossing the saddle sheets, the drop & roll to put out what I though was a flame in the fridge. January day. January dance. January doldrums. Let’s talk about baseball on the TV. January sprint. January seal. January seventh. Let’s talk about baseball on the TV. January error. January elevator. January exam. Let’s talk about baseball on the TV.

You pick it up, play it & put it back. Is that funny? My person has a theme. Thermodynamics & sediment rotation. I unrolled the dream of a city without its back draft, then tore the sheets in two, hoping for some fresh air to lift off the lingering smell of the old books. My person also has a green library, a gutting knife & some tinsel. We go out, all of us, carrying a picture in the wallet for precisely such an occasion. If the floorboards creak, someone’s walking. This is how we do it. Like this & like that & like this.

Waiting for the fossils to thaw was one thing. Maybe I shouldn’t have torn the wooden horse from your library, ridden it bareback into New England’s need for another castle. Regardless, the splinters made an appropriate mantelpiece to mark the Dionysian affirmation of all these empty bottles; besides, the lessons said to pull from the root before puncturing the lids. Let’s hope there’s enough breathing room in those ballet slippers to start the wind chimes signifying. You can play the clown in your best halo, but don’t take my word for it, there’s an expert to unwind all the false-prophet-in-a-tinder-box posturing that passes through the noun machine.

Someone buys cigarettes & someone is me. Don’t you love the clarity vectors over the flow chart, the union suit I was lost in? The strings matched the sea gown, scrapped, scuttled, tore a wing from our tonnage vessel, our towering blue vicissitudes. Changing my clothes everyday is one answer, static drips another. I could proceed in the normal fashion, go with the go-getter label. Lettuce soup. Long dot. Dints. Smile when you enter a room, someone might listen to the largess.