You don't do anything

TUESDAY
“You don’t do anything.”
“Yes, I do. I do lots of things.”
“You don’t do anything. You sleep in until the afternoon and then eat and drink until you’re tired enough to go back to sleep.”
“That’s not true.”
“I bet you’re in bed right now.”
“I’m not. I’m wide awake and I’m even outside on the porch.”
The grinding buzz of the alarm clock on the bed stand revealed my lie. All I could do was breathe a sigh into the telephone. Even if she was right, even if I was still in bed and it was 3:30 p.m., I had set the alarm. I was being proactive. I wanted to get up. Didn’t my desperate motivation add up as anything?
Oh, and also, see this too, I woke to answer the phone. Didn’t I? I woke up earlier than the time set on the alarm to talk to her on the telephone. That’s motivation too. If I had known that on the other end there would be a telemarketer, then I would have knocked the phone through the wall in a somber rage. But the mystery hiding beneath the seemingly simple little machine nudged me out of my restfulness. Now I was slightly thinking that I shouldn’t have answered this no-longer-mysterious phone call. At this early hour on this day of all God’s green summer days I didn’t have the stamina to take criticism like this. I was too much. I wasn’t prepared so I stepped on the cat accidentally and hung up purposefully. She was squealing about health hazards or something when the click cut her short. 24 blocks north on 2nd and two east on 9th she was probably wondering if I had: (1) thrown the phone at the cat, (2) been eaten alive whole by the cat, (3) fallen down the stairs onto the cat. It would be too absurd for her that anyone even in my present state could hang up on darling Lillian Sandburg. Would she have to go to the hospital to see if I had stroked during our conversation? Had I hung up to dial for an ambulance or would she have to make that emergency phone call?
If so, would she bring up my sloth and good-for-nothing qualities in the hospital? She would. She might as well have already.
Well, damn her for that. No one kicks me while I’m down. She thinks I will propose to her if she deconstructs my lifestyle while I have a feeding tube snaked down my throat? This will not stand. I will not take this grim abuse. It’s over between us. I will tell her tonight.
But first I needed to find the off switch to this childish alarm. I had been tapping my feet to the solid tempo of digital honks in an effort to lower its exploitation of my nervous system. But the damage was obvious. It was going to take a lot of rest to recuperate from the damage.

Meter and rhymes just like old t****

Like a pineapple covered with frost,
I know precisely what you might look like
but in all my life I’ve seen you not.

When Columbus sailed the ocean blue
the natives could not see his mighty ships.
Their eyes did reach the sails, masts & crew;

in seconds all at once in fury
each Indian mind ignored what his eyes saw––
nothing but sea no need to worry.

Ignorant! How dumb! Those Indian men
must have been blind not to see the parked fleet,
or what alien truth their eyes had sent!

They could not have been much less prepared,
but I have been waiting my life for you,
for frozen fruit, for a new world shared.

Hemingway is a thief

Reading books has made the best of me feel like I am the worst.
I wish that I had written The Old Man & the Sea before Hemingway.
Even if I can’t get it published first because my name isn’t the name of a celebrity or because I don’t have the Warhol stamp of Charles Scribner Jr. at least, after Hemingway printed his copy in 1952, I can sue his brains out of his skull, literally. I would like to sue him and instead of money I would like to have, at gunpoint, his brains sucked out of his skull like the Egyptians used to do (and still do, at least I think they still do it. Well, why would they ever stop?). The civil trial should be quick & easy or quicker & easier if he settles out of the courtroom, which he’d probably do just to get out the headlines.
As long as I am writing the Old Man & the Sea before Hemingway, I should also write all of the Nick Adams stories before him, except the ones that make Nick Adams seem mysteriously gay. I would let Hemingway write those ones so that he gets the heat for creating a homosexualized Brawny man, even though I know in my heart that Nick Adams, even if I create him first, will always drink himself to sleep next to his we’re-only-friends, boy friend in a small tent next to the river, where earlier that day they had erected fishing poles and wagged their lines in a ballet with nature. Nick Adams is only a little gay, not slightly gay as Hemingway writes, at least that’s the distinction I make in court, under the accusation of copyright infringement, I sue Hemingway again, this time for the legal rights to anything he ever writes in the future that I might not be able to write before him because of his newly altered history.
I would also like to have written that one about abortion except in the original––my version––the young couple would argue during their vacation in the Swiss Alps about an unspecific operation that most obviously to the keen reader is actually the necessary surgical removal and careful culinary preparation of the women’s yet-to-be-birthed placenta for a ritual dinner to be presented to the father.
Later, when I finally reveal that Hemingway once again has stolen a story from me, I not only sue him for plagiarizing but also perverting my story of a beautiful tradition into such a morbidly boring, political topic like abortion. How vulgar to write about abortion when there was such a great opportunity to paint a colorful social commentary of the unfair stigma that has been nailed into the act of afterbirth consumption like Christ to the Cross.
After all of this, Hemingway is still a role model of mine, but I would rather have it be the other way around. I think if I write all his books before him, then he will only be left to realize what an impact I am having on his writing on an unconscious level.
I won’t acknowledge his presence though. Why should a writer of my importance answer his annoying letters? He never answered mine.

Pubic Hairs of a Flower near Sheep Meadow

Like the fresh Garden of Eden no sins are permitted with a small child.
And though the though of it is sick in this desperately original age, we must try out new foods and all of us should move on as we learn a little.

A man with leathery skin carefully transfers a flower from store-bought potting soil to the raw earth of a meadow in a park in a great city of the world and the first buds of sensation and pleasure bring joggers to stop and sleepers to consciousness. Opening a lip-licking eyelid, each realizes the beauty and primps her and grooms her.

With too much attention from the vicious lust of strangers, her leaves do need sunlight and don’t need so much pruning. When the pedals are less bright and too droopy and pollen stolen by beers, the leaves can finally grow bushy, but time’s almost done.

Pretty Girls & Below the Urinal

Most of the pretty girls
in the world have
no idea how
disturbingly filthy
the corners on the
hairy floors of men's restrooms
are.