Fiftieth Entry

Hello everybody.

Quite a lot has happened in between posts as always. Some highlights:

I rode a bike for the first time! Well, the first time with no training wheels. Jackson and I were going to a show at Northsix and he made me ride one there, and I was scared crapless. But I did it. And the show kind of sucked.

Played probably my best games of ping-pong on Sunday EVER.

Uh, I thought there was a bunch more stuff. I didn't go to AWP, I'm broke and I don't exist in the poetry world in any definable way. I got my copy of the Tiny and am enjoying it. It's even better than the last. Also, Dan Majers gave me some new stuff of his and I'm really enjoying that.

Here's my poem:

A SOGGIER DAY HAS NEVER SQUISHED

Wet wet shoes shake off on the mat
up the stairs
hold my hands because I feel very young
hear the rain
pummeling the little window in the hall
turn to face me
I doubt I have ever met you before
it is gray
snow on my feet, I look up at groggy clouds
don't wake up
keep shuddering under the blanket like a fish
I fell down
the back stairs while you knocked on my door.

We opened it when no one answered. It turned out to be a garage, with dim lights dripping on our faces and turning us into melting snowmen. Our faces became bright and colorful after that, we became American burger advertisements. We left the garage back into the dreary afternoon, it was really beautiful inside your great big meaty heart, which I lived in before I ate. Then we lived in Cincinnati, sharing a two-bedroom apartment with two lesbian step-sisters who left weed scattered all over the coffee table. I found a hole in the wall. I drove my green Volvo out of the garage into the mist and past that into the shadowy woods.

These woods had biology professors and evil wizards. I slipped in a ditch and buried myself in mulch, filling my mouth with slick damp leaves. But I couldn't sleep, and I developed a thin sheet of hypothermia. This is what has kept me alive through my many travels, once I forgot how to hear your ghostly voice. I often sit at the coffee table, flicking bits of stuff off of my clothes, waiting for you to return. When it rains, the man who lives across the hall screams. New books come in the mail. I mail them all back. The envelopes get soaked and look like whale fins.