Almost Spring Poem

First you think of buying a colorful flowered shirt as a sign of some sort of symbolic rebirth.

Then you think, "Again, with the symbolic rebirth?  Or still?  Still working on the same one?"

After that, a glimmer of affection for that guy in college who ended anecdotes with "Just imagine!"

Just imagine!  It has been many years since you were in college, but if you let it, time folds like a piece of paper.  When you hear that one New Order song, for instance, or that one Pixies album, you could almost just step across the fold and stand there in front of your James Dean poster with that guy in his checked shirt saying, "Just imagine!," basking in your nascent glimmer of affection.

In one way:  Who cares?  In another way:  The slippery "you" of this poem does.

If you could have any power from a book, what would it be?  (A) Tesseract?  (B) Giving people's minds a little push so they'd acquiesce to your series of small demands?  (C) Letting your mind unhook from caring about any of it, even the flower shirt?  Letting it unhook from it all, like some Siddhartha or some sociopath from an existential novel, but without the murder?

Well, then.  Happy spring to you.  

Drawing #1 to accompany The Itinerant Girl's Guide to Self-Hypnosis

Drawing by Alex Lenhoff.  The Itinerant Girl's Guide to Self-Hypnosis is available here.

You’re in my Hall of Fame room holding a ginger seal pup with a fabulous mullet. You have the mullet, not the seal pup. I’m in your Hall of Fame room going all post-apocalyptic child star, killing and roasting my own venison while wearing glorious deerskin gaiters. If I had news about my plasma, you’d be the person I’d write to, to take my mind off the news about my plasma. If you needed someone to hold the sides of your head to keep your mind ok, I’d totally write you a poem that metaphorically held the sides of your head. In our previous friendship, back in time, we were some of those proto-human toddlers who took painting lessons in a cave ritual about painting lessons. As a middle-aged man of fifteen, you invented dung sculpture, blowing everyone’s mind. I had my own project, blowing on fiery twigs to create shapes like those little brass angels that fly by the heat of candle flame at Christmas. But nothing like that at all.

News about The Itinerant Girl's Guide to Self-Hypnosis

I was very happy to hear that my book from Brooklyn Arts Press sold well at the AWP conference in Seattle.  Thank you to BAP editors and staffers!

The book is available from the BAP website, as well as SPD and Amazon (in paperback or on Kindle). 

My brother, Alex Lenhoff, and I have begun a project in which we are choosing pieces from the book to illustrate.  We previously did a drawing and poem collaboration here.  Alex is a talented artist and I'm delighted to talk about my work and images with him and see what he comes up with.  The first drawing will be posted shortly, with five more to follow in the coming months.