You know how you can sometimes tell a person's car from their personality? In my experience I find you will only have success with certain types of people, but when you meet one such person you will be so struck by the resemblance of car to human being that you float thereafter in this strange dematerialised state where every human has a corresponding car, and that person's choice of car is paramount to their grown and achieving self-actualisation. Do you remember where you were as a kid when you first realised that different kinds of people drove different cars? It is such an important lesson that i'm sure any official first realisation would disappoint you. These days the parents are desperate for their kids to learn this lesson so that they shut up and sit silently in some sort of reverence. Some guy realised one day that TV is the only thing in which kids will sit quietly in front of and invented headrest TV. From then on, their kids were enchanted with the things that really had only become enchanting because of adding TV to them. So enchanted that they never spoke of it, but simply understood. Cars with TVs in them are way better than cars absent of TVs entirely. Who wants to be bored when Spongebob is on all damn day.

Returning to the paramount aim of humanity. It is one of two things: Finding a car that perfectly suits your personality, or using your car to define your personality. It's this strange chimerical hybridisation of car and human. You might not realise at the time that you are being moved in a direction that is infact, 'wrong', or simply one on which you hadn't planned on being. I am quite simply astounded by the fact that these walkways are not used more extensively. You could imagine one carrying a certain high class of graduates up to the clouds on the steepest incline imaginable, as steep as Everest, and them just standing there disenchantedly, like they were glued to it.

Those moving walkway, the purpose of which is essentially the same as the plane you are catching, as well as the taxi you have signalled down before you've even landed. You 'voluntarily' leave your arm up in vague hope it will impart a threatening message to fellow passengers--that you will not be beaten to the first taxicab. 'Not in this city, sister'. The agressive commuter dimeanour will not work to your favour; you will recieve your baggage in order, and of this order you may never truely know. It is an order that knows to plant drugs in the bag that looks the most granola, and one we have all at least once imagined, especially if we happen to have had china or glass, or god forbid, a bottle of wine, in our bags. The image is one of pure mirth, like they're making it a competition who can be the most negligent with customers' bags. Fucking bag people, throwing around my bag and screaming boy howdy when they hear something break.

There is no formal order, or if there is, it's probably better to just presume there isn't so that you may successfuly dam the rivers of rage that will spill onto the buffed marble airport floor when you happen to be one of people left waiting for their bag at the carousel for longer than fifteen minutes. Or if you're a melancholic person, you might haplessly wonder what you have done to anger the baggage arbitrator so. There has been a misdeed or a transgressive act, of this everyone is agreed. But how far back are we talking? And who is it that get's to decide how far back we're talking, anyway? We are all that person at one time or another, as though this was some great philosophical statement--nobody gets through life without their bag being one of the last ones out of the carosel. To wear a grimace while everyone else goes to the terminal McDonalds to spend quality time WITH the grimace. whose bag was at the very back, unimaginably confined (you start to moralise as thoughit were a living thing and not just a capsule for storing your travel possessions. To passers by who are in no mood to hear it, they exclaim how I will not be getting into the first taxi on the rank, so that I may sit comfortably for the next half hour as though you were paying for your transport in the form of not standing up.

A broken down jeep in was discovered in Ancient Rome

They found the strangest things in the most public places.
They found a broken down jeep in Ancient Rome
this shiny new thing that glinted on the horizon
and sat in park, so stubbornly out of place
like it ought to have been on a rested incline
as a feature in some game show
and they didn't know a thing about this car
they called it a commanded box of steel
they didn't know that Jeep meant general purpose vehicle
or that it was an SUV
and that people from our time bought them because they wanted to
be prepared for purposes most fuel efficient vehicles couldn't handle
purposes most of them would never really need
like off-road, skidding and four wheel driving and listening to music
travelling at the speed of
chariots on crack
The jeep made things pretty bad pretty early
they got the motor to run
and decoded basic English, finding it suspiciously redolent
of their own
in order to read the owner's manual in the glovebox
the part most of us ridicule for even having to explain
'Fill the gas tank (picture bellow) with petroleum'
but that great endevour met a great wall
and the greatest philosophers
politicians and alchemists looked embarassing trying to figure out
how to work the damned thing
And the man who finally suggested that the 'gas tank'
must be filled with a liquid fuel
went on to be proclaimed
a god among men
And the man who extracted the fabled fuel from the gas tank
without damaging the vehicle (there was one political faction
who wished to destroy and incinerate the machine without caring to preserve or study it, and yet another who wished to leave it in it's place without studying it,
saying that they themselves would not contemplate destroying the machine
fearing their legacy to be one of ignomitity if they did)
And the man who


and, by some miracle of inspiration,
replicated

Keep it down

Today has been about
keeping my thoughts and liquor down
breathing as though air were a scarce commodity
damage control of the mind
be still, and remember that you are a person
who doesn't hold anyone's hair back
True, she is
a tiger in a nursery
brutal without ever meaning to be
but not evil, never evil

One to nine

The other day an old friend from high school
comes to my house
a sad character with whom
I hadn't heard from
since graduation
and would you believe
that after all these years
the first thing he says to me is
that he's too drunk to stand up
so we sit down awkwardly and he starts talking about this
and that, until finally he admits that
He has fallen into a sorry state of disrepair
he is a morbid caricature of his former self
There are large gaping holes in his stomach
something, I observe, has been eating away at him for years
‘Do you think I will ever be able to get my life together?’
is all he asks, then just stares and awaits my honest
reply, for I was always someone he could trust to give
him my honest opinion
he might as well have handed me a gavel
I didn’t answer him
I just told him about these concrete statues I once saw
at a bus stop in Portland
like me they were sullen, waiting for the bus
that had not come;
one man was scratching his concrete head over a
sudoku
in the back of his concrete newspaper
another was frozen in the act of lighting a concrete cigarette
and years later,
when I went back to that place
they were all still there
every one of them
waiting
for the bus
for the nicotine hit
for all the numbers to align
from one to nine

the colonist and the native

In my experience, the interplay of love and sex is extremely one-sided. It is like when the Colonist tells the Native to sit down and speak the language of business, that is, the language we believe to be universal. ‘This is some fine soil you’ve got here’, he says, taking up a handful of dirt and appraising it as a jeweller would a zirconium. He conducts himself coolly, without giving away his intentions, much like a collector considering an item for his already extensive collection. ‘What say we make a deal: a nation’s worth of this terrific, cultivatable stuff in exchange for more liquor than your virgin liver can handle!’. And when that pen is placed in her hand and she takes her first deep swig of brandy, she might be forgiven for thinking that she’s just duped this delightfully naive dandy for all he’s got. ‘Dirt for liquor!’, she will exclaim, blurt out as it were, once the liquor has rendered her thoughts as transparent as the bottle she drinks from, ‘what a one-sided exchange!’. And the Colonist chuckles quietly to himself.‘Indeed’, he will say with an affected, car salesman grin.

Faux flowers

The flowers in my house are changed often
And at great expense but
I have no trouble telling what’s real from what’s fake:
Flowers, even the ones in full bloom, are not without their
Imperfections
browning, fraying edges which
Remind you that they will soon be
Replaced.
A flower that gets watered and preened is real
Just like a dog that walks on it’s hind legs is real
Accept, for the moment, that they are there,
Poised and perfect
But always remember that some manicured hand has gone to
great lengths
to make you itch to reach out and touch them
Just to make sure

Runway

This weight fell on me
like an airplane onto a runway
I could see it coming
but when it happened
it was louder than a bomb
in my head