#94

mary rose standing in a blizzard heat wave in shorts and a down jacket with hair covering her burning legs in a sprint to apartheid south africa around the time madiba is released among great burning civil unrest in a country thats cold in our summer with the blood diamonds of the mind dripping red into the pelvic consciousness thrusting about in the snowstorm dodging snowflakes like cornflakes in a grain silo emerging unscathed only to find herself before john the revelator and his gates of heaven that are each a single pearl harvested from the life force of oysters by angry sardines and strung and given to girls on long island as holiday presents to take up to newport when the weather turns warm at the midnight hour when the crotch is so hot you must let the steam escape before your insides boil in the freezing rain and your string of pearls burst onto the ice at her feet shod with diamond soled shoes as durable as a papier mache dump truck on the sun five light years from another star in empty cold space filled to the brim with void and burning emptiness and soul trash jettisoned into space because the ghost world is too full here on earth where mary roses lungs are burning from the cold air at midnight on new years in new york alone in the vomiting crowd on forty second street and cold and cold and cold

#93

subway preacher brought a crony to shout amen and hallelujah to his sermon like johnny carson brought ed mcmahon to laugh at his jokes but it has no effect on the subway crowd of commuters staring past each others heads at the walls at the ads at the headlines on other peoples papers half curious about whats playing on other peoples ipods but certain words power through the banality due to emphatic decibels like church and lord and jesus and awesome and then they step off the train and disappear into the noise of the station bound for another train to preach their words and i wonder if either of these fellows would have come up with these sermons and words of praise if no one had ever drilled into their heads from the time they could comprehend the irrefutability of gods word and the power of jesus or if instead of being born in crown heights they were born wealthy and comfortable in a mansion in beverly hills with celebrity fathers and the ability to make their whims reality or in that case would they be fat on a couch or on a date or in a private plane or on a chartered sailboat in greece or would they be right in the same place on a seven thirty train from brooklyn to manhattan stumbling over the words of their inspiration and doing their best to convince themselves as much as anybody else that what they are saying is true

#92

i evolved from a communist botanist who studied flowers at the north pole so she had plenty of time to dilly dally with the natives like walruses and humpback whales and other snowy sea creatures which i have no idea exist in her neck of the woods and then one day she met a mystical fat drunk in a red suit with a drunken reindeer and he cast a spell on her and took her back to his lair where he filmed the botanist being sodomized by elves then posted it online for all the world to see but that was three thousand years before anyone else had the internet and the language that they spoke at the north pole is no longer around nor are their old keyboards with their languages letters on it so its impossible to get to the web address where the video is posted but anyway one of the elves impregnated the botanist who i forgot to mention was a giantess and their offspring were middle sized folks that neither the elves nor the giantess botanist cared for so they put about two hundred of these middling children in a boat and the boat drifted to the white cliffs of dover where the passengers got out and kissed the soil like it mattered to them and then they went forth and multiplied and formed religious factions and some sailed west for freedom and the religion part was pretty much forgotten so thats really where i come from

#91

time has a way of putting you in your place even if your place is a highrise penthouse in a concrete jungle of crackerbox toy guns and holy rollers in a turkish bath between the wall and a black hole ten micrometers wide that sucks you in like a vacuum cleaner with jet engines that took leonardo da vinci from zero to genius in three point seven seconds on a bull named fu manchu after a desperate parachuting venture designed to make you appreciate the life you threw away into a fluorescent cubicle on the fourth floor of a seventy six story building in midtown next door to your penthouse apartment built on the grimy souls of the rats in the subway huddled together in scarves and desperation on new years eve with nowhere to go but drunk and forgetting all the time that nobody saw passing by until it was too late and youre dying of cirrhosis on your nephews couch trying to get that liver to split on open but your shot after shot is just messing with your mind so you get a gun for a real shot and fill the barrel with vodka and put it to your lips and realize that the cool metal on your lips goes nicely with the hot filth in your gullet so you do it over and over again until you cant see and you wake up the next morning with a foggy memory of the good time you had the night before