The clerk’s pinked hair
Seemed energized by the glowing scanner
Meant to capture a foot’s essential structure
An algorithm would determine
Which overpriced shoe would fit
No clerk required
His slumping posture,
Adipose tissue pooling at the hips,
Suggested
Evidently not a runner
He was no match for the
Taut assurance of the machine
He operated his own
Sophisticated replacement
He didn’t think there was much difference
Between ten-and-a-half and eleven,
And couldn’t tell me what an instep was,
But I liked him much more than the machine
We are like dogs on spaceships
Only we have steering wheels
————————————–
Overthinking is bad
So is underthinking
Aim for Goldilocks thinking
‘Think before you act’
Speaking is an action
So is writing
Even email
When you speak without reflection,
When you spit it out,
You deposit your thought
In a parking spot in my brain
That I was going to use
That spot
Was reserved
—————————-
Kafka dreams of flying,
Winging down a valley
From a hilltop clearing where
Transmission towers oxidize in the breeze
Aging bunkers crumble and
Tarmac bleaches
Pelted by photons
The hilltop is deserted
Yet Kafka, accompanied by a dun sparrow,
Tips over a parapet
Descends the valley
Fleeing enemies
The drainage broadens
Exposing a plain below
A warmth touches his belly
He extends his wings
In embrace resignation surrender
And rises, borne aloft by
Wise molecules
———————————
Tomorrow:
My memory’s sell-by date
I am the guy who goes to the supermarket
Two blocks away to get bread
And comes back with fifty dollars
Worth of groceries
But no bread
Who rides his bike to the same
Grocery store and walks home with the groceries
Only to search in confusion the next day
For his bicycle
Decals on the
White Lexus SUV stationed
In front of The Peninsula Hotel
Stanford Princeton Harvard Brown
License plate says NOT INC
A cloud of privilege
Ima huff ana puff an blo yer house down
SubPerDis
Mit mit miss
Life-work balance
Is like speed-quality balance
The difference between
What you want to accomplish
And what you can accomplish
Engineers have no doubt
Calculated the correct solutions
To these problems
‘Can you see if there’s
Four prong canes down there?
Just go down to fourteen
And on the cane rack.’
Took me a minute…
But I suppose
I’d start with
One prong
I’m not interested in sentimental
I find nostalgia depressing
I think cute is an affliction
I guess that makes me insensitive
Or, in certain circles, a sociopath
In the great Pacific gyre
It’s not the trinklets of junk
Amid the soupy chaos
That are most interesting
It’s the chaos
Baubles may dazzle
But bubbles enthrall
Figured out
Giffed out
Memed out
Ticced out
Tokked out
Tick tock
tick Tock
Tick
Tock
Tick
Tick
tick
Toc
Armadillo
Amarillo
Next!
Tristan Tzara’s
Slide deck
To a paranoid
Occam’s Razor
Is neither
Straight
nor
Two-dimensional
In India your train will be overcrowded
In China your train will be on time
Which cage do you prefer?
For me, cracking under pressure
Implies an unfamiliar initial state
Crumbling would be more like it
I would like to release a single mouse
Into the Burj Khalifa
Not so much to
Terrorize the management
And threaten that seventh star
Though that would be fun
But to add perspective
Actually, the perspective I’d prefer
Is the Burj Khalifa filled with mice
According to my calculations
That’s 79,455,449,340 mice
Let’s just call it 80 billion mice
In the Burj Khalifa
Chocolate Coffee
Potato Leek
Salt Slug
Rain Memory
Home Secret
Stone Soul
Autumn Fear
Scripture Salve
Rubber Release
Word association, playground of the subconscious
Some of us can’t help associating with words
A poet friend said
There’s a poem in everything
This is good for poets and bad for readers
Jia Tolentino writes that
She can only think when she writes
So, then, when you read her,
You see her thinking….
Uh oh
Weave your thoughts
Don’t wield them
Often good enough
Is
