LITTLE WRITTEN THINGS,
UNATTACHED,
PRESENTED IN REVERSE CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER
7/16/10
Earthworms: a poem written in 30 seconds at the Tin House Writers Workshop
Limp, like
segmented pink
penises plowing
the deep, damp
earth
Aerating
Grow!!
-----
5/27/10
It has been a morning of strange congruences. I was walking back to my apartment after running several errands. On the way, I passed a man on a scooter. He reminded me of my friend Michael. He didn’t look much like Michael at all, and certainly his little blue Vespa in no way compared to Michael’s Harley, but there was enough, in the beard the glasses the posture, to make me think of Michael. I rounded the corner, passed by the brunchers out front of J. Christopher’s, smiled at the cute blond girl (surely a SCAD student, so only a smile, no chance of anything more, at least not without entering into an admittedly familiar moral gray area). A voice from behind called out my name, and there was Michael amid the brunchers, rising from his seat. We half shook hands half hugged, exchanged a quick recounting of recent personal details, and then I walked on, agreeing as I left to choose a date for the drinking of single malt Scotch.
Earlier, among my several errands, I had stopped for an oil change. Paying the man at the counter, he commented upon my t-shirt, a Threadless number featuring an astronaut with a boombox. He asked if it was an MTV shirt, and I said no, so we talked about MTV back when it played music, when it was a crude cable startup, pioneering pop culture before the great pop culture beast it helped create gobbled it up, along with everything else, and regurgitated a homogenized, soulless culture that represented corporate interest at the expense of youthful expression. But no, my shirt had nothing to do with that, but several steps after I left Michael at his table, I passed a cute Latina girl (again a SCAD student, again cuteness wasted on the young and unappreciative) who was wearing a shirt that very clearly represented the early years of MTV, emblazoned as it was with the classic MTV logo, in the bright and gaudy (and pleasing, as a memory) colors of the 80’s. This girl wasn’t even born yet in the 80’s. She had no memory of the era but a cultural one, passed down by older siblings, and maybe (is it really so long ago?) by parents.
Even I’m too young to remember that MTV, except as a longed-for enterprise, an ideal of an idea, executed poorly, unprofessionally, just like all things approached with energy and without caution. Did it all come together in a conversation over a drink, between two old friends, between sips, when one said to the other, “You know what would be cool?”
-----
5/7/10
The shirt was new and smelled of dye – purple dye, deep and royal, like vestments, robes of kings and courts, solid and stolid in their solidity, uniform like a drape across the eyes, too close to focus on the waver of the color, the echo of the ripple of the dark water into which the fabric had been dipped, but this shirt already washed, or died unevenly so the purple was blue here, violet there, a texture like stone (like the walls of the palace, not the king inside them), still stinking, steaming with the aura of its creation.
-----
March 2010
a story
Suddenly we were in Pooler.
Fuck.
-----