Started a poem yesterday, handwritten, not typed. Feels different that way, even if it should feel familiar. It’s about 3 kids who find a dead dog in a shopping cart on Hoe Avenue, at the Hoe Avenue Garden. It’s based on a true conversation I had with someone. But it’s not a true story. Maybe I can finish it soon. The dog is freshly dead. No maggots, not even any flies. “Thing could still be alive in the brain, still aware.” No tags, no one recognized it from the neighborhood, no one remembered a shopping cart in this garden before. As a sort of funeral rite, the kids decide to wheel the dead dog through the neighborhood. The ritual, if we can call it that, gets some attention. A woman from a third floor apartment yells out at the kids, asking them to wait a moment while she comes downstairs. They wait. Moments later, she appears with a bag containing 2 dead birds. Freshly dead. She deposits the bag in the shopping cart. “Checkout’ gonna be strange,” one of the kids says. The woman retreats to her apartment, the boys push the cart forward. A dead squirrel falls from a tree, landing in the cart, which has become an ark of death.
Yesh… it’s getting too obvious. A dig at the annoying ritual of self-checkout is too cheap. What I wrote yesterday was more vile and dirty, which I’ll keep.
I feel fine today. I need that affirmation sometimes. Seasonal adjustment, bad diet, general anxiety made end of last week and the weekend feel like some kind of endgame. Insane dreams from which I woke screaming. Wake at 3am to heart pounding like a bass drum, filling my eardrums with the racket. Then it all goes away, heartbeat goes back to normal, I sleep until I awake with a snarl and fists ready to strange the intruder I am certain has come to yank me out of this unpeaceful place. A place of no peace.
I’ve often said, as a fair warning, that I’m fun in bed but no fun to actually sleep with. I do not believe that any two human beings are biologically wired to share the same bed. If I am correct in this assessment, then I myself might well provide the best example.
It will be in the 50s today. My day off tomorrow looks rainy. I should stay in and finish some of the projects I began. I went to Staten Island for payphone detail, and then to Flushing Fields for more of the same. Memory turned to a college friend whose troubles were concerning. So many ideas for how I want to produce my little videos but no time to execute.
Going to write more poems by hand today. The Hoe Street ode was not the only one. Some other warmups preceded. This is a job, not a writing fellowship.
