#uncoffeed...

  lane street but if i’d have met you the regular way it would have been down at the Goodwill store somewhere between the pots and the pans and the curling irons and what’s-this-for i’d probably be musing the record shelf you’re probably perusing my gainly ass hooking your cane on the wheel of my cart pointing out Benny and Glenn as you pass i might be intrigued as you loaded your trunk with technical wonders from back in the day catching your eye as you lowered the lid if i ever did something the regular way

  a penny dropped pick it up like a missed step this too was not for me

 

  what's this for?  

 

  Remember Was (not Was )? 

  expanse i’ll never understand how to lift my wings  roll & yaw but i can watch you dodging spinning grasping concepts out of air fold each like origami & return to idle speakers gifts they don’t recognize stings a little to forget saving birds is not my job they were never meant to fly so i watch them fall away on some ocean wave too expansive for me to grasp but soft enough immense enough quiet enough for me to love

 

 

  좋아해요

 

TRIGGER WARNING:  CONTAINS CLOWNS.  

  The Pandemic Lockdown of 2020+ was wild. Thanks to internet & social media, many of us found ourselves glued to facebook every night to watch a troubadour named Dan Navarro playing songs from his living room. We fellow isolates formed a bond that sometimes went a little nutty. We called ourselves the DanFam™. We made a map that could show where across the world we lived. We gave Navarro a nickname: DFN (short for St. Dan of Fucking Navarro) and giggled while he figured out we were talking about him. "What's my middle name? My middle name is Anthony."  When DFN bought a van and drove across the country to play live gigs, we all came out to meet him and each other. We kept in touch with those who weren't ready to go out yet. One of us made these custom guitar picks: I'VE BEEN LICKED BY DAN. People could purchase them at the merch table, but some of the online folks also made purchases. I was the go-between, giving DFN cash and picking up merch to be shipped ar...

 

Once again, I did the thing that I tell other White people not to do. It took a day or two for my words to come back at me, to understand them. My Black friend told me about a situation that made me unhappy: she'd been treated a certain way that felt like the ways Black people are treated by authority, less politely than white people are treated for the same transgressions. Addressed with a certain wielding of authority. But she was more upset by a mutual friend: she felt he'd made excuses for the way she was treated. I told her that her perspective resonated with me, and then I made excuses for my old White uncle. He thinks he's teaching. He's looking at it from a legal perspective. He's from a different era. He's not really racist. This is not Uncle Jim Bob who spits on the factory floor & talks about the good graces of PBR , but a professional in many industries. I didn't realize right away what I was doing.  In this case, my Black friend and I both k...

"Be careful and lazy!" my friend advised. I laughed, because he and I both have a lot going on, always, sometimes collaboratively. Yesterday, the doctor asked me about pain in my broken ankle. I told him, honestly, that there hadn't been much, and in fact more in the last few days than the whole 5 weeks since I'd been injured. "Did you do anything differently these past few days?"  I thought about it. "I forgot to take ibuprofen."  This is true. Throughout my sentence of crutches, I started taking less OTC pain medication to see exactly how much I hurt. I guess that level of pain felt normal, so I forgot to do anything about it.  I never did tell anyone about the pain in my left elbow.  I can still do my work, though I have to do it without twisting or flexing. I have to remember not to twist, not to flex. Losing personal freedom is what hurts. I couldn't just get up and go get what I'd forgotten, either across the room or at the market.  ...

  I dropped some random truths over the past week which random people were grateful to hear. 1. Poet & poetry editor Jeffrey Levine taught us that your poem is an entity, and it has a name - not a title. What's it's name? It wants something - what does it want? A title is something  you assign to a thing for your own convenience - this is me talking, not Jeffrey. We assign titles, we name things, to assert control over them. To conquer fear of them. But what name does your poem call itself? What does it want? You start writing because you have a thing about yourself you want to convey to the world. But if you listen to your poem - like listening to a toddler who doesn't have full command of spoken language - it has its own thing to say. And the fact that it's telling YOU shows you something about yourself. What's it showing you? Anything a toddler shows you is the most precious thing in the world. The child waits for you to respond, and assigns value to his own...