Grandpa

Grandpa worked in a Cleveland airport for thirty eight years as a vender selling hot dogs.  He said people at the airport dressed like they were going to a wedding and that maybe they were.  He called work “people watching”.  He said these things to his grandkids and his dogs.  Sometimes his dogs died, so he would leave a steak out by the back door, wait for a stray and catch it, yanking a rope tied to the gate.  Sometimes he’d catch the mailman or milkman as a joke.

I sat on the front porch once, on a dirt grained board that creaked.  He spoke up suddenly and said, “I don’t like people to watch me shit.”  I looked around, the pines and the pond suddenly looking out of place.  “In the war I shit in a hole for three years until I got hit.  Then I shit in a bowl.”  He creaked back in his seat, eyes slits to the sun.  I saw the Philippines, how he might have looked at the water.

My mom walked out with a small box full of things:  a welcome mat with pine trees, little bears, wolves and deer, his old coffee tin.  Then we took him to the home.

Just Chat

On the internet I could find a man in seconds bending down to lick a woman’s vagina at a party while he masturbates.  Never try to subtract words, or anything fancy the time for that is over.  And God, if mothers were sexual what could we rely on!  Even if it’s light out or chemicals are on your hands take someone else’s food right out of the saucepan and put it in your mouth. 

I was on the porch a few minutes ago and could see the moon move because I had the reference point of a power line. 

It is right to talk about time going backwards because we just did.  And not playing with time is the wrong thing to do.  This is Georgia font.  A new one.  Invented in 1993 specifically for the internet.  There's really some awful stuff on the internet.  

Georgia is tall.  Look how high that IT goes.  Love, oh be with me, you know your name, say it, type anything, because they're just letters TO SHOW THE VARIATIONS, but you're saying something without saying something because where this is black are noises and people you've never met.  

This A is in Times New Roman and has 4 serifs.  See the little knobs jutting out from each leg?  Those are serifs. Serif letters create the illusion of a pen-stroke.  A sans-serif “a” looks like this: A. This is Verdana.  Notice how the bottoms are flat?  I find these letters are more honest, true to their formation.  For there was never a pen here.  

Verdana was designed to be easily read on computer screens (so this is the time for looking at pictures of Goldie Hawn on the internet). Verdana is a portmanteau, a word made of two preexisting words.  Verdant means “something green” and Ana is the eldest daughter of the inventor of Verdana.  

Smog is a portmanteau in practice and theory. 

Chatroulette.com is a website that pairs strangers from around the world for webcam-based conversations. A visitor is chosen at random and begins an online chat (video, audio and text) with another visitor.

Recently we’ve been talking about the noises in our house: the little clicks and nudges that accompany the clock when you're alone and nobody else can say exactly what anything means.
 

At any point either user may leave the current conversation by initiating another random connection.

It’s four A.M. and there’s a man squinting outside in Tunisia.  A little farm-boy looks wistfully away from the screen.  The moon has moved—entering my living room window.  A man dances in a wheelchair.  A shirtless boy sits all the way across a room.   In Idaho, a man masturbates furiously.  In Costa Rica, a shadowy room sits empty.  And with a flash, I can’t see.  A Chinese boy holding a Polaroid picture in front of the screen sits below a single light. 

Sea-gray, yellowing.  He’s smiling, holding the picture steadily.  The shadows arrive like a bruise.  A face, looking to the left, with a slight smile.  It was only moments ago.  I turn to where I was looking and remember nothing.  I was dimly happy, it seems.  He’s backing toward the door. My lips turn.  Eyes at his leg, eyes at his chest.  The ceiling a daytime floor never closing.  I glance out my window and behind him a door-less doorway floods with light.

Being Born

III

In vivo. It was only yesterday I began to see.  My scenery was alight with bubbles, blood everywhere.  In a moment of panic, I realized I hadn’t thought about anything in seven months. Seven months!   Two hundred and eleven days poised like yeast in hardened amber, inching like a Rottweiler towards its fearful reflection.  Seven months in a great speckled confusion: puttering and humming in that light that sees dark in the way of the blind.

II

A delinquent spark, a locative urge to urge persists.  Cosmic inevitability: the fate of conjoined leaves, the phases of the moon, fission.  The ontological chain reaction of reduction leads to a hole in a starry field: a paternal answering machine of confession—dryly received, forgiven.  Baseless suggestions every moment fulfilled (breathe!) and the tendrils of the mind, now dancing, dance and dance with the faith of two ears at a ball with two bands.

I

People talk to me at the bus stop and I realize, as a dead leaf blows by, tapering into a seed, no one is there.

South

It’s true that I’ve been somewhere, though it happened only in a moment.  I was at my parents' home in Chicago sitting in the yard.  It was summer and I was twiddling my thumbs at the gates, watching the water from the hose, thinking of some great thing.  There were two roads.  One went east and one went south.  We slept under a big oak tree and at night went to see a college.  In the country there’s much land that nobody owns where you can picnic or even sleep.  In the morning we bought apples.  The land is remarkable there.  We slept in a football field by a mill and when the workers stopped for lunch they walked in bands to a gas station across a yellowing road.  We had fried chicken there.  At night there were hills.  My aunt lives there all by herself; her husband once shot a KKK man.  It rained for three days and we stayed in a motel and watched rain sweep across the road.  A creek ran behind a parking lot.  We shot bottles there.  A sheriff dropped us off by a reservoir.  He said his wife had killed him.  Before noon there were clouds and trucks with pine trees went down the road.  Water was in the forest.  Oil floated around trunks and the wind blew.  The water spread out and boardwalks led into the trees.  A kneeling barn sat stately in the water. 

Controlling the Bath Temperature with your Toes

I look at two silver eyebrows. The left one is hot. The right one is cold. A tarnished snout juts out and below it there's an abyss. In my left foot there’s Jupiter. The right holds Plato. In the tub the whole body is given to dramas. The first act mocks Copernicus (it was written by a Pole). The second act begins slowly; the workers are divided and their revolution is failing. The third act lingers; a port city on the coast of Spain has been raided by Celts.  The carts are empty and the fishermen sit idly in their boats, looking at the shopkeepers.  There is snow on the ground, which is unusual for that time of year.  The moon is out. The curtains close. I’ve barely had time to clap before I’m roused by a stern knock on the door.  The water is overflowing.  A voice asks, “What are you doing?  I stand in a panic.  The water recedes and I notice for the first time that it is cold. 

Homelessness

The form of man sits with arms hung around himself.  Holding to the street the constructions of all things Man.  There is nothing there that has been not been placed.  It walks along the street towards some train tracks.  There are trains and cars, people with their arms hanging out horse joint drunk.  “Offa ma laaaawn.”  Sent away fasting from some townships.  God only hiding: cutting what is not food from food, bringing few crumbles, cutting for the cutting, making the day faint.  He is certain in hiding two things from us: oil and floating; in parking lots oil sinks under water: tires: rises.

Monsters

Most of life consists of simply avoiding monsters.  Kids turn up in trash barrels and creek beds.  Wild world.  It’s when a monster walks into the room and you’re in it that the world truly makes sense.  

There’s an exception in everyone’s mind.  War’s a big monster.  And everybody’s scrambling all over it.  War has community, teams, sides.  And that’s fun.  

War’s mutable; the Taliban watch for pigeons across the valley because they fly above American soldiers looking for food.  Then they drop their mortars and shoot their machine guns into the woods below the birds.  American soldiers have planes with thermal imaging to detect body heat.  They score fatalities in huge, huge numbers: blow their bodies up so they’re not around anymore, knock off their furry little buttons when they’re not looking.   I'd have to say I’d root for the bird-watchers if asked straight-up.

Then it starts to look like us. 

Mostly it walks in plain cotton clothes into some gas station with a gun and tells everyone to lie on the floor then blackness or whatever God is real happens to them.  All the people act crazy because they want to live more.  Then the living walk in after the dead and say, “Oh my God.”  

Chasing The Well

When I was a child I was hounded by loneliness.   I needed small spaces to exist in.  Large areas left too much unaccounted for. 

Fearing then the depression of adulthood, I traveled: just once, and not the type seen in movies.  I assumed some things about ‘the well traveled man' :  for whatever reason, he has done it, and goes on to convey with acute awareness and maternal love the untraveled man’s inheritance.  You could see yourself and your face in his hands and he sees in your face the soil of the earth.

For me it happened in one moment; I decided to leave and then returned.  Two nights before I left I watched the sideways trajectory of airplanes.  The smiling face of the Italian man was gone, my coffee already drunk, cold and warm again at once. 

It’s the same thing: this verve, this giddy-up, that exposes only the anxiety of its unfulfillment, that makes me smoke a cigarette before I begin typing: the same thing that makes me wait until I’ve opened a book and digested a line before releasing my excrement. 

Some direct this anxiety towards sex or consciousness of race, or the news.  Some fight for the union.  Luddites. Some play with typewriters and scarves and hats.  Luddites. 

And what would you say to me then?  If I spit water out from the broken glass and you saw that I looked like a madman and was, and that I was not 'the well traveled man,' but a claustrophobic  an agoraphobic. Would you, in the earth that sits around me, accumulate?

Origin

"Hello?  Hello? Hello"

My mother is Scottish and my father is floating somewhere.  It’s where I get the Irish, which I am American, respectively.  And I am Irish which I american.  And I american. 

I read a wonderful story today about a man whose father died of lung cancer.  He shot himself in the head to meet him in heaven but his father wasn’t there. An angel told him that there was lung cancer in heaven too, and it had gotten his father again.  I thought this was the funniest thing I’d read in years. 

My mother works in a predominantly school Mexican which is to say that they are all Americans. So for this job (that she had to take because my father had started floating and quit working) she had to learn Spanish.  Not Spanish Castilian.  But on the contrary Spanish Mexican.  My sister and I inherited an interest in America Latin.  It’s a coincidence grand.

My stepfather Joe is German and I think a Jew.
He's good with cars too.

My sister doesn’t really like Joe and I feel
bad for that but families are difficult.
For instance my mother’s side has shaky
hands and I can't reach my father’s side .
But I’ve always had a good relationship with Joe
who I have taken as my father.

How would Hitler have    

Died were the Russians not                                                                                             
To have won Stalingrad and
Pushed all the way into
Berlin to take down     
The old city and make it rubble?                                                               

                                                                                                                                                                 

     
It was            lung  cancer              that would   have    killed    Hitler because all that smoke from the bombs and    bullets   of the last stand    in       Berlin              that failed    and led him to put a gun to his head   and say,    “eins,      zwei,              drei!“  in lovely         little         iambs so the Russians    wouldn’t do googly 

things with  his body

And remember, if you're looking

For Hitler, he won't be there

Because of what he did in Poland

There's lung cancer in heaven too.

Type

I was on the porch a few minutes ago and could see the moon move because I had the reference point of a power line. 

On the internet I could find a man in seconds bending down to lick a woman’s vagina at a party while he masturbates.  Never try to subtract words, or anything fancy the time for that is over.  And God, if mothers were sexual what could we rely on!  Even if it’s light out or chemicals are on your hands take someone else’s food right out of the saucepan and put it in your mouth. 

It is right to talk about time going backwards because we just did.  And not playing with time is the wrong thing to do.  This is Georgia font.  A new one.  Invented in 1993 specifically for the internet.  There's really some awful stuff on the internet.  

Georgia is tall.  Look how high that IT goes.  Love, oh be with me, you know your name, say it, type anything, because they're just letters TO SHOW THE VARIATIONS, but you're saying something without saying something because where this is black are noises and people you've never met.  

This A is in Times New Roman and has 4 serifs.  See the little knobs jutting out from each leg?  These are serifs. Serif letters create the illusion of a pen-stroke.  A sans-serif a looks like this: A. This is Verdana.  Notice how the bottoms are flat?  I find these letters are more honest.  True to their formation.  For there was never a pen here.  

Verdana was designed to be easily read on computer screens (so this is the time for looking at pictures of Goldie Hawn on the internet). Verdana is a portmanteau, a word made of two preexisting words:  verdant means “something green” and Ana is the eldest daughter of the inventor of Verdana.  

Smog is made because the eye perceives smoke and fog together. 

Chatroulette.com is a website that pairs strangers from around the world for webcam-based conversations. Visitors to the website begin an online chat (video, audio and text) with another visitor who is chosen at random.

Recently we’ve been talking about the noises in our house: the little clicks and nudges that accompany the clock when you're alone and nobody else can say exactly what anything means.  
 

At any point either user may leave the current conversation by initiating another random connection.

There’s one from Tunisia.  And a little farmboy who looks wistfully away from the screen.  Behind him a fake fireplace shows the image of fire.  There is a shirtless child sitting all the way across the room.  There is a man dancing in his wheelchair, a furious masturbator, a shadowy room empty in Costa Rica.  And with a flash, a Chinese boy takes a picture of my face and turns the camera on himself.