look - I want you to quit being such a try-hard about your
whole life and let me tell you a story
about the dream that I had last night in
which
bad guys who were trying to kill us in the
mansion got caught
and we pulverized their evil bodies to dine
upon and we did indeed eat them and
just as we were doing that
some other bad guy came and I ended up in a
glass room with a giant porcupine
slash anteater-possum that was always just
about to bust out and stab me with its
quills
because when I was scared, it got scared.
and I knew that the requisite manifestation
of
fearlessness was to gently pet the beast on
its pink snout.
there was a man
holding the large giant porcupine
for which I was to soften my fear and touch
its pink snout in his arms
but I did not
quite. and anyway the point is
the porcupine represents innocence
***
I guess tonight I’ll do what I did yesterday
which is have fun and eat tostados
and then fall asleep reading laura riding
jackson.
***
the picture of laura riding jackson as a
young woman with semi-circle eyebrows
I first wrote of disparagingly only to
recognize
later, as in just now, that the round of her
eyebrows made a gentleness
simply frightening to me
in the same way perhaps
that her obscurity makes
me uncomfortable about
her genius vis-à-vis
a notion of justice
I’ve suffered
both ancient and naïve
in which good
is rewarded with posterity
***
or we could
in tight tank tops make palpable our fat and
sexy bellies
eating cheese
with the starch and fruit complements of
cheese
beneath a leafy, grandmothering tree
gathering leaves, let us
gather leaves in floppy baskets anointing
our soft
bodies in velvet
letting the corners of our torsos touch
eating cheese wearing velvet
***
like the photo of the happy bulldog
with porcupine quills all over his face and
tongue even
