briefcase

it was dark i was lost i was despised and i had lost my briefcase when my brother and his stuckup friends showed up i left the hotel room and went down to the news stand to find the latest best seller but they didn’t have it in stock i bought a pack of gum instead when i left the news stand most of the lights in the city had gone out there were a few lights n the distance but i did not think they were the hotel’s i started walking i realized i did not have my briefcase did i leave it at the news stand? did i leave it at the hotel? i got loster and loster i thought of how awful my whole life had been and how everybody laughed at me and despised me and barely tolerated my existence and what a failure i was it got darker and darker finally i ended up at a police station i was told to take a seat on a bench against the wall when i tried to ask sone questions the young woman at the desk told me in no uncertain terms to be quiet finally she summoned me over tapping on her keyboard she asked wearily all right, what exactly was in this wonderful briefcase?

heisenberg and st basil of cappodocia play gin rummy

apprehending the benediction of contraindication despite the emptiness of flowers growing happily in the interstices of jellyfished kineticism the loose matriculation of narcissism overflows the percipient quagmire in the ruins of a snow-covered tower under the vertiginous wasteland of the expanding yawning zeitgeist but the zeitgeist has no amanuensis as barracudas chomp the debris of the empire of the forty graves

slender

i hate poetry but i love slender volumes of verse i used to tell myself i was not a voyeur i didn’t understand porn or want to look at naked bodies at flabby boobs and dicks and asses or stand in the dark in the wind and rain looking through lighted windows at unsuspecting humans doing - what? but naked souls that is a different matter i admit it now i am worse than the sad peeper seeking a glimpse of ass or boob everything pales beside seeing naked souls i always thought stand up comedians were the bravest people in the world nobody could be more naked in front of a crowd with no cover and no excuses they either “killed” or “died “ of course i never had the guts to try it myself but if you can’t do standup or performance art or read poetry out loud what you can do is write poetry in slender volumes forget zines and anthologies where the naked ones can huddle together and hide behind each other no, it must be a lone slender volume the distillation of a single naked and lonely soul the fewer words on a page the better nothing is more naked than a book of bad poetry except, perhaps a book of ordinary poetry

suitcase

i was not worried about losing the group even though my black suitcase wth my new novel in it of which i was so proud was in the group baggage being taken to the bus downstairs under the curved marble staircase when the old woman with the round lined face leaned over to me and whispered “you are quite a character” and laughed softly she and another old woman began talking in french but so softly i could not understand them when i went down the stairs the bus was gone but i was not worried because “i knew the area” wide polished vistas in gleaming red and orange and white porcelain tunnels with a hint of rain and the cafeterias were closed i kept going in circles but was not worried except a little bit about the suitcase with my novel i was never in a dream which was more obviously “just a dream” but when i woke up i was surprised

something

i always thought that someday i would find something somewhere on a dark highway on a rainy street in a dimly lit cafe on a lonely road on an empty subway car in milwaukee a motel room in las cruces new mexico standing over a juke box in manitoba or tokyo at a bus station in vladivostok something maybe not love or peace or illumination or divine revelation but something something i would only know when it happened