Six Poems

First

........First, a train ran over me.
........Then I was killed in a car crash.
........Then I was killed in another car crash.
........Then I was eaten by a bear.
........Then I went swimming, and a shark attacked me and ate me.
........Then another train ran over me.
........Then I was on a plane that crashed, and also on a ship that sank.
........Then another shark ate me, and the shark was run over by a train.
........A tornado came and blew me away.
........And then a hurricane came and washed me out to sea, where I drowned, and was eaten by a shark, and also went down with a sinking ship.
........I was bitten by a poisonous spider, and then by a poisonous snake.
........A gun went off by accident.
........The bullet flew through my head.
........I even got caught in a dirigible explosion.
........Oh, the humanity!
........But before any of this could happen, I had to be born.
........I came out of my mother’s womb.
........My mother was still young and beautiful and desired by many men.
........But before I was born, my mother was run over by a train.
........She was pregnant with me when the hurricane came, and washed her out to sea.
........Then she was eaten by a shark, and then by a bear.
........The house caught on fire, and burned to the ground.
........They said it was children playing with matches.
........There was only one child in the house, only one person that it could have been.
........But I wasn’t playing with the matches.
........They just lit up by themselves.
........My mother was so beautiful.
........Her vagina was warm, and inviting to so many men.
........She became pregnant.
........Before she could give me birth, she was attacked and eaten by a tiger.
........But first, before all that could happen, my mother was run over by a train, just the way her mother before her had been.

Store

That was the day the sun walked up
and elbowed the moon
back into the land of darkness.
We got out of bed, and stumbled to the store.
We had to buy snow peas, gravel, lunch meat,
kisses, and remote control ice cream.
The rain began to fall,
like merchandise from heaven.
It felt like being in a cosmic shopping cart.
Our friends smoked enough cigarettes
to put a storm trooper in the hospital.
They had the nerve to ask us
if we had sold our children to the devil.
But that’s the way it was back in those days.
People just spoke their minds,
and later they would die of shovel poisoning.

How to Have a Dream

I dreamed last night that I was a saint.
Before that, I dreamed that I was a piece of paper.
And before that, I dreamed that I was nitrogen.
I dreamed that I was king of all the arachnids,
and that women were changing their clothes in the street.
My parents were still alive in the dream,
but they had the heads of ostriches,
and the bodies of policemen.
There were broken radios all over the ground,
and there was nothing we could do about it.
I dreamed I had paint on my face,
not a lot of paint, but enough
that I couldn’t hide it, or wash it away.
I was afraid that when I woke up it would still be there.
I dreamed that I was the color blue.
A limousine drove up, filled with jelly fish.
It was getting late.
I dreamed that I was music,
and later I dreamed that I was food.

One Day a Large Dog

One day a large dog
took a large bite out of the world,
leaving everybody in our particular
quadrosphere with only the words
of languages that we didn’t know.
All we could speak were empty
syllables of words made useless to us.
A young boy, waiting to watch
his babysitter get undressed,
absent-mindedly started to pee
on the carpet, forming a kind of map
on the rug, a map containing
several previously unknown continents.
The dog continued to bite.
The boy continued to wait.
The wind outside turned
brown from too much money.
The boy grew up to be a circus clown,
and saved the lives of many people.

Another White Man

Another white man is slapping his wife with a plastic octopus.

Some Days

........Some days, it just takes so long to get anything done.
........For example, it can take you most of the day just to blink your
eyes.
........You start working on it as soon as you get out of bed in the
morning, and it takes till almost dinnertime just to get both eyes
completely closed.
........Then you have to scramble around to get them open again in
time to put on your pajamas and climb into bed.
........But what if you decided to put all of your energy into blinking just one eye?
........Either eye, left or right—the choice is up to you.
........What if you devoted all of your effort, all of your strength, and
all of your concentration into blinking just that one eye, leaving the
other eye to its own devices?
........What then? I want to know what then?
........Tell me what would happen then.