Your problem is that every little thing has meaning
Exactly
—————————-
Straight man on a 250 cc beastlet
Spluttering down Lake Shore Drive
Leather jacket supple, worn,
Seaweed backpack salty egg case dorsal hump
Work pants matte and matte again
Boots understated, functional, earthbound
Exposed by the taut divergence
Of jacket hem from trouser waistband
A convex expanse of
White fabric
The size of a football
Stretches across his lumbar back
A manifestation of absence
A beacon of commitment
—————————-
Thirty knot north gale
Ten meter spray
Five ducks
Ride it out
It’s me and the Frosty Man
On a cold day in the park
It’s 48 degrees with a north wind
No one is buying
Playing fields
Wait for the tremor that signals life
After a lost year, a vacant year
A silent year
When it was often just me in the park
But today the Frosty Man is back
With that relentless song
Which if the world ends now
Will be the last musical experience of my life
I humiliated him once for
Overcharging an eight year old
Buying solace after a soccer game
Two-fifty for a buck-fifty ice cream
He scowled and threw a damp dollar
Back across the counter to the kid
Who had to reach up to claim it
A limp measure of justice
The kid lives in Brooklyn now
Selling photographs
Commuting to Jersey City
The Frosty Man’s deceit lost
Amid a decade’s more urgent battles
Soccer balls subside in my basement
With Scott Fitzgerald, boots,
Hamster hutches, skis, a clock radio…
It’s all the quality of aluminum
Cheap rigid sharp persistent
Dementia-causing
The taste of the cold sun
The kid is a year further away
But the Frosty Man is still here
In the park with me
Da da
Deet-deet deet-deet deet-deet
Da
Da da
Da-da
Da-da da-da-da
Deet
Deet
Da
—————————————
On social media
I feel like I’m walking
Naked through a crowd
There must be something wrong
With my programming
Convention holds that
For mathematicians
Your most creative and productive years
Are behind you by age forty
Thus mathematicians share a fate
With professional athletes
A lax body, or a lacking mind,
For half your life
I was disappointed to learn that Facebook’s
Behavior Modification Department,
Milgram Group,
Has abandoned plans to add progressively
Strengthening electric shocks
To its cell phone notifications
The self-absorbed excuse
Any fool can see
But only a fool would try to justify
Fed up, fed down, fed in the middle
Fine
‘I feel like’ has become a commonplace
It’s just a colloquial expression
But is nevertheless wrong
Because there is no way
For a listener to refute it
If you say ‘I feel bad’
I can’t say ‘No, actually, you don’t feel that way’
So if you say ‘I feel like acorns come from maple trees’
Who am I to deny your feelings?
I feel like that’s kind of unfair
Culturally, consumption without creation
Equals stasis–
See something, say something
In every realm–
Especially the immaterial–
Clutter kills
First axiom of OCD housekeeping
Presume Dirt
Many people just talk,
Because it makes them feel.less.lonely.
I went to a nude beach
Which raised an unexpected question
Shaved or unshaved
What a question
NMB
Ice cream or candy
Vodka or gin
Nuts or berries
Can we attach an interesting person to that patch of skin please?
Rolling in dough and rolling in hay go together
—————————
In the animal world there is a direct relationship
Between length of life and number of heartbeats
Some authority has allocated to all creatures
About the same number of heartbeats per lifetime
So our lived experience
Will be either concentrated or extended
Depending on how fast our hearts beat
You, palpitating next to me,
Are living faster
Each second of a mouse’s life thus represents
A condensation of experience
Imagine the efficiency
If consciousness could be thus compressed
Statistically speaking, then,
To get exercised is to briefly shorten your life
In exchange for deferred benefits
All of this
Makes me nervous
—————————
What’s the chance that
Your interpretation of anything
Is universal, And
When facts are incidental,
Who gets to decide?
Nxivm Fyre Fest Enron Lehman
WaMu AIG Bear Stearns Madoff
Share a common characteristic
Elizabeth Holmes, represent
Uhaul on a steamy day
Mobile hot yoga
If your world revolves around food
You are a gourmand
If your food revolves around you
You are in the garbage disposal
Woulda coulda shoulda om
Why Buddhists sit there doing nothing
Choosing and wishing can be opposites
Work Study works both ways
It takes a good mind
And a strong work ethic
To be unemployable
The best work will always be student work
I am walked
Not driven
My shoes squeak
When I walk
I would too
