April 12th poem

Notes from Today
(Or, Poem with Stolen Lines*)

Morning at the cafe there's a woman at the next table dying of consumption. Well, she's coughing and reading Renata Adler.  Coughing and reading, coughing and reading.

I am enraged at the cafe but why?  (Tiredness.)  I am looking at job ads I am looking up words I know the spelling of because reading final final proofs makes me look up words I know the spelling of.  Hello strawberry sweet cheese kolache hello iced Americano.  Everyone get out of my way.

What year was it that I read that Buddhist book that said to pause in doorways and think this moment or think nothing lasts.  (Which was it?  Both/either.)

Everyone is bothering me.  Everyone was once a helpless baby and they all still need so much love I can't take it.  I'm beaming out love and exhaustion.  I want to cry because we were all babies.  My gift is glittery and eternal.

I go to Central Park to see my partner's (?) good friend from high school and her baby who looks like my partner's (?) Aunt Catherine.  She (the baby) is named after a beautiful Buddhist concept.  I think she will be a wise teacher and learner.  I think if she had glasses on a string she would look just like Aunt Catherine.

On the subway, my baby touches a lady's fingernails, gazes at a lady, eats pieces of cereal, squeals, laughs, beats his head on my sternum, shares a joke, needs a nap.  On the subway, my baby.

I am singing us, I guess.  

I am eating dinner.  I am victorious and hurried, dinner-wise.  Listening to the music that fell between rocksteady and reggae and has innocent lyrics.  People just wanted to dance in the underground clubs and the politics were fucked.  Is what I'm told.  Please turn it down I'm tired.

If I had my mouth, I would bite

Once when I was a teenager I was sleeping in the small room upstairs at my grandmother's when my uncle Joe came home from wherever and started cracking pecans with a nutcracker at the kitchen table while I dreamed that he was eating knuckles.  I could see him sitting at the table cracking and eating them.  Then I went downstairs and he was sitting at the same table eating pecans, and I said, "Oh, I thought you were eating knuckles."  That's how I feel when I fall asleep from seven to ten while putting the baby to sleep.  "Oh, I thought you were eating knuckles."  I'm half-asleep, but which half I don't know.

Transformation transformation transformation.  It just never ends, you know?

Doors are tricky.

Good night.


*some of the italicized lines are from Brenda Coultas, Maureen Thorson, Eleni Sikelianos, Gregory Crosby, and Todd Colby.