Dressed in a black and white polka dot dress
You eat pie while sitting on the floor.
There is a table at the center of your one-story house with three bedrooms in the living room.
It is somewhere up north.
I left
For the department store.
Airplanes, cars, President, everything.
A department store worker helped me as soon as I walked in.
“I saw an image of myself on a postcard yesterday.”
“Last night, I dreamt I was playing basketball.”
“Maybe it’s space.”
“with fuzzy hair,
“To father time: jealously.”
Like a woman and man,
the soccer game is over.
I wish you knew
that it weren’t.
And that life can be described as baking a cookie.
That there are several ingredients.
First, you need cookie dough and a cookie
Roller.
II
A ghost is in your living room.
We are speaking two different languages.
We are arguing.
There are books spread out on the ground.
Sarah is painting the inside of her first house.
She places a ***
For a plant
On a table, outside
her house
Her house is painted white.
The trees are slightly blowing
When I leave the department store.
III
I wore an apricot shirt
Made my way to
My grandmother’s house on Freeman Drive
Then left for my apartment on Broadway in San Antonio, Texas.
IIII
“We are doing the same thing
only you’re much
more beautiful
& I’m a thief
looking outside
my window.”
I could lose everything
And there would still be
Billions of people I’d never
Meet. And millions that
Would never like me.
V
“Can you paint?”
Your body is enough.
Follow him:
the music, jobs, eighth grade plays, backyards, an increase in salary, a doll house, the broadcast on FM radio tuned into channel 153, compacting everything into a jar, a very delicate and antique jar, cranberry juice inside the jar, a doctor, the maximum amount of money a lottery winner can win, jackpot, retail stores, a playground, leaning into discomfort.
May 9th & 10th 2018
taste
is what Emily wants
so she thinks of ships that set sail
and attempt to reach the edge of the earth
but she finds no refuge only what you bought her
because before I left for home
a person who is assumed to be a bike shop owner and who wants an increase in salary
would be better for Emily, than me, why would I think, to write that Emily wants to taste the paint of a ship?
Emily rides her bike and plays with dolls
and is full of life
but she
does not want to go to the bullfight
she
closed her window
last night
before going to sleep
&
To my right is a warning sign
& last night before Emily closed the window
she thought of the ship and how it would taste to tear the paint off of the ship
and eat it
In Emily’s dream,
she
wore an apricot shirt
I know this because I used binoculars to peer into her dream
from my apartment’s window
but I felt strange so I began to laugh and
left my house
for Broadway
& took 410 to a bookstore called Chevers, which houses
3500 books of a variety of sorts
and I drove past a hospital and
was satisfied with my fuzzy hair
and the image of Emily eating the paint from a ship
It was 11:46 am on a Tuesday and
after passing the hospital,
I passed a soccer game
where 13-year-old boys played against each other
then remembered I left the oven on in my apartment.
The trees were beautiful on the way to the bookstore,
but I ignored them, I could only think of Emily.
But still thought,
“if I focus, I can thoroughly
pull all of the petals off
of the flowers
from the side of the road”
And at the bookstore, Chevers, I picked up a book of psychology:
I learned about
the factors that increase the risk for youth suicide
and self-harm.
I stole the word ‘coercion’ from a book of poetry
I thought, “this word is my insurance”
But still hated and that’s why I drank too much alcohol
in my youth and why I’m weening myself off the drugs I stole from a group of teenagers
who lacked the awareness that by the breath of a distant friend and the light that shines on me
& Adam and Eve, & gods, fin, who in their day could go home to their cloud and see the sunset
or beach, from heaven, or maybe it’s the ocean, or maybe it’s the skin of the sheep I skinned
where upon you asked me about the aromas, the smell of the sheep, after it’s skin has been removed.
I wanted badly to correct the wrong, that was why I was doing drugs and drinking and lying on the 50-yard line of a football field.
“it is supposed to be metaphorical,” you know, it allows me to cleanse myself, I think, sitting in my apartment, thinking of my day at Chevers.
“to cure the illness that is a lack of self-control and poor impulse control.”
Because obviously I should have taken the drugs from the teenager and given them to a police officer, that’s what greater men do, anyways.
