Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Reality is Subjective

Holding doors for women at corner stores.
Watching children watch an ostrich at a zoo,
I could have been different somehow
if I would have stuck with sports in high school.
I admit I like Jagemeister.
If provided, I would take all the Jagbombs in the world.

The black light makes your drink look alright:
Vibrant-white and breathing like dry-ice
on the set of a science fiction movie.
Intrigued, I say your name
(a gesture) as you remember me
long enough for a hug
while I forget what to say.

One can never read the same thing twice.
One week in New Orleans
cannot be replayed
as it were a tourist
experiencing grand new things.

Album, film, and short-story collections
span entire continents.
The you I was then is the me you are now.
I’ve thought about beats happening,
I slipped on my way here.
A national disaster of memories
colliding
where we were the first time hands were held.
The kiss before the Tower fell.

Yeah, I've been catching up on the last ten years of hip-hop.
The pop-variety, not the hard stuff.
Something to say for number of albums sold.
Accessibility transcends art form.
Intelligence boiled down
to an experience shared.

I’m the pervert I’ve read about
in the southern gothic pulp.
The rag with the cross burning,
fate just as questionable,
notoriously ill-suited
to be read but ogled
beside a New Yorker water color.
Lifeless in the sense of imitating narrative struggle.
Ebonics as metaphor
for the gin
and the juice
as the body of Christ now.
A veritable masque of bad decisions
made light by all the young people
worshipping them.

Life should be so reckless!
Smoke a cigarette at a gas station,
roller blade a bridge on ice skates,
the direction of a bullet moving
toward a Midwest deer opener.

I’m the Stephan King of literacy
walking on water-tight profits.
Knowledge: my income.
Engorging the heads of young men
becoming twenty-something adult types
gentrifying off the train stops
near the Urban Outfitters of their mind.

I should have left the memory of Pacific Northwest rose bushes,
contemporary museums,
that river walk with an old acquaintance,
and bicycle rides through unfamiliar streets
next to the Pynchon on the shelf
and the religious texts I’ll never read.