From the Bookshelf of Around the Year in 52 Books …

Everyone is constantly trying to articulate the secret languages in their head to the outside world. If your language is too secret, then no one can understand; if your language is completely public, then there’s no mystery. There’s no longer the pleasure of decoding.

I Saw a Skulk

This was back when I lived on a mountaintop
It looked like a cone:

O
-|-
^
/ \
/ \
/ \
/ \


The balancing act
was more difficult than you could imagine
Who cares if only one thing drawn to scale
(my head) (your fingers attached to my missing finger)
(the punitive wakefulness of mornings
alone) (the tiptoeing and the wandering off)
Who cares if you’re smaller
than one of the periodic elements
I tried to turn into water
Later Michael taught me alchemy
I found that smell as well
Later my brother changed his name to “Og!”
Befor that, “Sixty cents!”
When I bought a single carrot I thought of him

I walked into a room full of bromides
They were interested in me and I thought
Of course you’d be
They were shown a slideshow of a performance
of a scripted exaggeration of a theatrical reinterpretation
of my life and who I used to be
They clapped for me, reinforcing my outline
as a shady place for entrapping the past
and the pre-past passing of years
I’m only depressed for a moment when I show them
the drawing of the mountaintop where I lived—
My father slept on a cloud
I kept the swelling down with a cane

In the mornings, I slid to the base of the mountain
fulfilled my duties as a rhapsode
denouncing all of Greek culture; “I will not reference
Aeschylus!” I said to my friends who were eating rice
and wearing rice hats and being ignorant of their
ignorant ignorance; “I will bring you the Wu’s, the Lao’s!”
At that point someone banged three pots together
called it Chinese; they were right and I was wrong

I shook hands with the bromides, the questionable
youth who came already as an imitation of their future:
one had wrinkles around her lips and was tired
of the way society treated her like cattle
“Mooo,” I said
It’s all very scientific and it’s all very necessary

When I saw my father floating on cumulus clouds
the accumulation of all these years of feeling
and not saying anythign was too great
I purposefully rolled down
enduring thorns and the branches and the bramble
and the broken glass and the upright bottles
and the beetles and the whole decay of my mountain slope

The neglect was my neglect
I didn’t know what had happened and I was slow
to find out what was there
at the bottom was my grandfather’s shrine
“These are turban days,” I say to his portrait

you and I keep meeting at the bottom
I meeting other balls of dust and together we forge a history
later, in meeting new friends, I forget all of this.




I Gave You Unicorn Ice Cubes

I smoked so much
my ears started
singing: ‘You will find your prince’
Okay, I found pricey vials
in thevirgin forests where virgins are born
knowing everything and like Babel’s grandmother
I want to know everything
You must know everything
as a virgin
as someone so completely complete in the infallible first day
when babies were born babies
and virgines born totally good-looking
to insure that ephemeral life was all life and
all life is mine to have
as much as it is not.

When Michael Gets Here, I’ll Teach Him Mahjong

Poring over the last five cuntrags
lined up in a row telling me
your style is just temporary –
the flare ups, the osteopenian guilt
mammoth and insurmountable
my anger was shingles
the shiver you felt was a bad one
my voice warped by the spineless stents
which gave me every disease
the unhappy premature stench of tinnitus
the titties of morning
committees that succeed in spite of
carpe diem written to exacerbate
my carpal tunnel, my hydronephrosis
and the impetigo of every cloud
that is less about me and more
about the pleasure of scraps
found words and the rejected moments
were herded to a field where I stand
with a bouquet of stems to eat
until I puke and the weird bunnies are all me
sad not to be with you until June.