I Am Insane, Yet Having a Good Day So Far. But It's Early...

I had to come to terms with the snow. I had to deal with the snow. Yeah, lots of snow. Have to come to terms with the snow. Come. To terms. With the snow. Yeah.

That's Rainman I think. Not me.

This is me...

"PLEASE HELP US BY COMPLETING THIS BRIEF SURVEY..."


RATE THE FOLLOWING OBJECTS BASED ON THE DEGREE OF DISCOMFORT YOU EXPERIENCE WITH THEM.

THERE IS A SPACE FOR COMMENTS.

TAKE YOUR TIME.

BATHTUB/BED/BOOKS/CAR KEYS/CHANGE/FOOD/LOVER/MAILBOX/MIRROR/PET/RADIO/STAIRS/TELEPHONE/TELEVISION/TOILET


TOILET

For some reason, I talk a lot here. Alone. I think of Marie Antoinette on a throne. I tend to feel a little divine, a star who only sits on porcelain. I feel rather like one of those bloggers who gets a ridiculous number of hourly hits. Not poetry bloggers. The fun kind! To a child, this is magical, a place to sail boats. Rimbaud probably wrote Le Bateau Ivre here. Well, his mother was obstinately peasantish, so I think they shat outside like bears. It's a friend. I would like to host a talk show sitting on the toilet. In Red China. Or possibly remotest England.


CHANGE

Slave holders. Men who fucked slaves and sold slave children. A man whose head exploded because he was the country. Where are the women? Being fucked, tortured or having horrible forms of "therapy." No doubt. It all stinks like somebody's metal crotch. The men look like cyborgs. Or transgenders with really shitty insurance. Maybe they are trying to be the Father and the Mother of their Country both. Rich people never touch change. J.Lo. couldn't tell you who's on the nickel. That's called "prestige ignorance."


TELEPHONE

People call and threaten me. Some of them are imaginary people. Well, they imagine they are talking to me. I always answer the phone as someone else. Now who's imaginary? People listen in on me. Sometimes I try to call dead people from my old Rolodex. Just to see who picks up. If you know Jean Cocteau's secret number, he'll have phone sex with you. But he hangs up as soon as he cums. Pig. Angel Cegeste is much nicer. But he's a poem pretending to be a skin job. One of those guys who is gay on a whim, but not convincing at all. Complaisant people are no fun for psychos at all.


STAIRS

Each stair on each floor of my house is named after a dead poet. I often freeze on Dante's step. And sometimes sway on the beautifully swaled one known as Stair Barbara Guest. Anna Akhmatova's step is near the top of the house and creaks and complains always about her tormenting lovers, but I think she is really complaining about the wind in the horribly tall trees which always appear to be suffering from migraines. Nutcase. Russia's tormented history was only a painting on some curtain behind her. The real tragedy was the balletic bursitis of her poem forced to complain and vaticinate, vaticinate and complain. On and on like Tyra Banks. A Modligliani gazelle neck! But then that eagle beak. Joli-laid like Vince Vaughn. It couldn't have been easy. Having Russia's period for it. Over half a century. STill you remain. The Steven Tyler of Russian poetry. You got Gumilev shot. And he was hot. So I'm still just a little pissed at you.


FOOD

I hate it when food fights back. It should be more docile. I'm certain clams don't feel pain or know they're alive. But they can fool you, like poems. Reason enough to believe God exists. If he had only stopped there. Sometimes, I see a gazelle standing behind me in the large foyer mirror, wiggling its ears in a frequency adjust, chewing grasses on the veldt, and I feel horrible. The original Twitter. God didn't give the gift of death to food. Repeat it like a mantra. It's hard to feel truly safe around a refrigerator, though.


BOOK

This is how I get out of the house. I spend a lot of money on fuel. Or used to. If I love a book, I sleep with my head on it. This is how I heat my house. I find foundlings in some books, and this starts a Tempest scene. I raise some witch's child, some Caliban. I know he's bad. I jsut hope he doesn't fuck my precious daughter. My milkwhite daughter.


MAILBOX

This probably confuses me the most. Every day it's like a courtroom where my existence is debated. Very Lewis Carroll. One side screams for my blood while the other side caresses my nape like a kitten. Very rarely someone sends me the gift of sleep and I'm always grateful for that. Very few sign their correspendence in blood anymore, but I don't think that means they are any less sincere. But some days I feel so damn unpretty.



BATHTUB

Nietzsche said that life without music would be a mistake. I feel the same way about you, Bathtub. I had hoped to be a mermaid one day, but my father probably ruined that dream for me early on. On better days, I can forgive him. Since he's dead and there is still a chance.



BED

The only way it could be better would be if I were able to submerge it in a giant warm bathttub and sleep with my head above the water. I have documented all the currents and cross-currents of Bed by now with the assiduity of Alexander Humboldt. I am the Alexander Humboldt of Bed.


CAR KEYS


They have a life of their own. They break off like teeth in a holocaust. Their sound is that of anxiety. If you shake them at me and I had a gun it could be dangerous. They're most friendly when they are taking me to a thrift store where I can go looking for temps perdu. I'm Proust crackers with Cheez Whiz on them. They sound like someone writing a mean poem about me and only thinly disguising it. People do that a lot. Some of them are decent poets, but I wouldn't trust them to give me a haircut. They a push a broom in an internet barroom, for crissake. Their avatars are as old as the deer on the walls of their parents' Naugahyde den.



MIRROR

Oh, I used to be Rembrandt when I drank. I'd always turn off the lights and take photographs of myself by drunken flash. Sometimes Goya. Now I'm more Frieda Kahlo. I walk in the sun and illness. I know how to amuse myself with monkeys and Diego. I identify with my continent. I am slowly coming into my own, like the avocado or gender abolitionists. I still hang garlands of garlic to be safe. And cover most of them in shrouds like D.C. after Lincoln's assassination. I find it very cheerful. I came dressed as John Wilkes Booth to a Halloween party once when I was a child. I was sent home with a small carton of Orange Drink. True sorry.



LOVER


Oh, you were all the joy and surprises in the desert of Me. You're a mountain I will be buried in. Gnomes will make bacon from my skin and feed me to you. Your feet trample the grapes of wrath in Hell and your hands steal pettitoes from Heaven. Can you tell I'm trying too hard here? For years you were a carp and I was a flummoxy river bottom. I liked the way your scratchy pubey armor slipped through my protozoa sludge of I have a brain tumor. You will eventually leave me, but by then I will be ready for the glamorous murder of crows that will accompany me everywhere. People will ask who I am wearing, and I will say "They're crows" in a very deadpan manner. My flock will have the photogenicity of bodyguards. It will be more glamorous than any mere lover...a Whitney Houston type tragedy. When she turned from a princess into America's First Bag Lady. I will talk to the crows as though I were Whitney talking to the ghost of Bobby Brown. "Oh Bobby, easy now..." I will mutter like an old woman and scare small rapping children on the streets dressed like hiphopistocracy who appropriate redneck clothing to prove that rich black people can be every bit as ironic and annoying as rich white people.




PET (CAT)


My cat is not mine. I am just a tad Christopher Smart-identified. Possibly C.S. gets reincarnated frequently. Last night, I cried and ran to him (my cat, not C.S.) I had foreseen his death like the Death of Shelley. He balances the negative ions in every room. Without him, the house would explode. This is scientific. He has a way of getting under quilts that is decidedly anaconda-like. In a fairy tale, he would transform into the worst sort of lover. The kind that makes you write ridiculous checks for things like guns, cologne and zabaglione. The kind who has kids and arrest warrants on every continent. But sleeps with the angelic vacuity of a model. He wants me to call him Moonraker, but I don't indulge him. He's a double agent for Slovakian poetry. He thinks I don't know this, but I do, as I've been intercepting the indulgent crap poems his people use as secret instructions. The Cold War is over. Get a new act, kids.



TELEVISION

Serial killers and reality t.v. shows. I've memorized tens of thousands of facts, but the only thing I've learned is make your daughters fat if you don't want them to get abducted, raped and murdered. Feed them lard and grease and dinners by Marie Callender. Teach them to sit on the concrete as a defense mechanism when approached by murderous pedophiles. This is the main thing to know in America. A fat ass is your best defense against what has become the psychotic American mainstream. Because serial killers believe the skinny hype like everybody else. They too are America. Reality t.v. exists only to develop a new type of human which exists only to acquire an agent. They are the new human version of the air plant. They don't fuck or eat or read or wonder or wander. I haven't seen a single human being worth talking to on television in years. When people on t.v. are cavemen or prairie pioneers or space aliens, they always have perfect teeth and gums. Except for Charlize Theron, I think. And she got an Oscar for her vagina dentata. But the rest of them. Their gums are like the pinkest vaginas and they flash them at me all day and all night long. I'm at peril of turning straight at this point. All because of American gums.



RADIO

The static between stations is the leftover sounds of the Big Bang. This was probably John Cage's favorite station. Sometimes if you listen to it and relax your mind, you can hear the pure sounds of space questioning its own existence and muttering. It's where Beckett heard all those horrible books he transcribed. He was really just a male secretary. It sounds like the lady who's always in front of me at the cashier the few times I go to the grocery store. She's always counting her changes and explaining it to herself or the universe as though it were a Hamiltonian equation. And I pretend to look at the breath mints that smell like Iceland. Iceland gives me dreams of breaking American's heart by sleeping with Iceland. Over and over. For the rest of my life. The puffins and museums there give me hope. I was born to stand on the Tjornin lisping a poem in baby Icelandic, inventing the new gay soft Viking tongue the world doesn't even know it's been wanting. In its pants. Those funny American "assclown wins hands down" pants. Nobody wears those in Iceland. They all smell wonderful as heather, because they use the same soap to hide that farty smell their volcanic water has. Men there smell like heather fields and you want to make them lie down like a bed and get into them and pull the covers over your head.