There isn't a mission. There isn't a goal. It's just words on fake paper, sliding and tripping and flowing all over the place, because we're all full up on words in here and there is no way we can keep them inside. Like Tony says, "Nothing in here is true."

Monday, March 27, 2006

mondaiku

haikus are the things
that come to mind on monday
the day that ends fun.

i be westerner
friday is the orient
far and alluring.

Monday, March 20, 2006

that star and you

i hope that you tear all of your important tendons,
and that you get what’s coming to you--
million dollar baby.
you’re not worth the milk dandruff
that falls to the floor,
when I pop the cap for some utter-juice
pasteur made safe to swallow.

that star and you are a sight.

if I had my druthers, you’d be the figures
in marty mcfly’s photo,
when his mom was hot for him.
but I don’t. and you won’t.
you’ll set records and get a ring.
because I’m from a once mighty town,
now only famous for sandwiches and a fake boxer.

Thursday, March 16, 2006

ignoring the sounds

If hitler were to return today,
my scarred face wouldn’t be to his liking,
and he definitely wouldn’t fancy you—
what, with the melanin and all—
i’m sure he’d return to driving his machine
of war, cleansing the earth of races obscene.
stamping countries like envelopes with the swastika,
his fun-sized-snicker mustache chortling at the myriad thwarted.
we'd get it like the rest of them...

while we waited for our imminent demise,
my foot would be saying hello to yours,
unwrapping you from a package of sleep.
you’re not awake enough for me to ask
if you want potatoes for breakfast, but I ask anyway,
our bedroom air filled with diner idiom,
ignoring the sounds outside our windows,
of innocents getting yanked and plugged like chords.
our neighborhood becoming a ghetto,
bricks and mortar making it so.

Tuesday, March 14, 2006

Behind the Wheel of a Large Automobile

We have two cars, and I enjoy driving them both for different reasons. 'The big car' isn't really that big, but it's a Japanese wagon that feels and drives like a family car. It balances a safe blend of zippiness with obvious size. I drive it like a dad, ostentatiously checking my mirrors, propping my hands in the 10-2 position, quick-spying my kid in the back-seat like I'm in an American car commercial.

It's probably important to note that this unconscious play-acting doesn't actually affect my driving speed, for instance. It would appear to be all pantomime.

Our other car is an older Japanese sedan that doesn't travel faster than any other stock Honda Civic or Toyota Corolla in my neighborhood. But compared with the big car, it enfolds me like a space capsule. The seat is devastatingly low to the ground if I hop in directly from the wagon. When I first get behind the wheel after my wife drives the car, I'm a pilot in a cockpit, wonkishly making small modifications in the seat position, tilt steering wheel and mirrors. During this pre-flight I'll often twiddle knobs on the stereo, slot in a new cd, meaninglessly pop open the glove box or close the slow-release door on the central cup-holder.

When I drive the little car, it is an extension of me in the way the big car can't be. I'm sitting astride the big car like a rider on a horse. In the smaller car, I'm the horse's brain. I think I'm probably more confident in the little car, which might be a dangerous illusion. But I know what it can do, I know exactly how far behind me and to the right the furthest point on the car is. And while I know this information about the bigger car, I never enter situations where those memorized parameters really get re-checked. I don't slingshot the wide outer lane of one of D.C.'s notorious traffic circles to beat stopping at red lights. I do that in the little car. In the big car, I decellerate like a tugboat captain. In the little car, I power-merge and drop speed aping the engine control I had in my old five-speed Toyota, then grip the handle above the passenger-side door and take a tight turn at a safe but daring speed.

When I take the little car into downtown D.C. is when the style really comes out. I jockey for position, light up taxis and tour-buses as enemies in the chess-game of road management, and perform smug calculations in my head about beating an asleep-at-the-wheel driver out of an intersection and getting into his lane before the row of parked cars makes mine disappear. I simultaneously pay more and less attention to the road as I meld with the car in these moments. The music is playing, a breeze happens through the slightly-lowered windows, a small engine rattle catches my attention for a moment. I juggle these sensations without ever taking my mind off the critical task at hand.

At these moments, I realize -- if I stop to think about it -- that part of this driving style comes from that of my Uncle J______. He drove a manual transmission Japanese automobile with an unsuitable stereo system, even though music was his life. He remains the only person I know to be cited for wearing headphones while driving his car. If you sat in the passenger seat, you would be hard-pressed to determine the exact moments when he was actually driving the car. He was fiddling with the portable CD player and the pair of external speakers he used when not driving alone. The little speakers -- a pre-cursor to computer speakers, I guess, but battery-powered -- would roll around on the dash while the first-generation and extremely skip-prone CD player was securely planted on a washcloth pilfered from my mom's house. J______ would be tracking through songs, drinking a soda, shifting into fifth, singing along, and changing lanes on the turnpike with the windows down. Driving was barely part of this ballet. He had more than his share of automotive mishaps.

When I started driving, I took up many of J______'s habits. One of my cars had a tape deck which no longer rotated the wheels in tapes but still technically still functioned in that the sensor would read music and send it to the speakers. I stole an elementary school-type tape player and connected it to the car's (extremely weak) sound system through a five-dollar tape adapter. I frequently handled large beverages while driving, and my cockamamie tape-player-to-tape-player was a downright dangerous distraction. I added smoking to the act in an attempt to one-up Uncle J______. I memorably drove my first car into a ditch severing a natural gas line and leaving three families without hot water for a week.

Another of my driving influences was a cousin named K______. He was legendarily irresponsible though I don't recall if any of his cars actually perished because of his negligence. Mostly, they rusted into oblivion before our very eyes. (Not by choice, I copied this in some ways as well: After a concert on the other side of Pittsburgh, Tracy Chapman if you'll believe it, I was driving home with a friend when he looked down to find a four-inch geyser erupting through the floor panel on the passenger side of the car.) The car I remember K______ driving was a grey Chevette. I believe it had a manual choke and was possibly only a four-speed. K______ drove the car like a worker-drone on a Russian submarine. He was constantly adjusting cranks and seemed to be operating pedals I didn't know existed in cars. As his feet worked furiously across the gas, brake, clutch, choke and who knows what else, at times he would release a pedal (clutch?) that would pop dramatically and send the car surging forward or lurching backward. His behind-the-wheel performance reminded me of the Wizard of Oz behind his curtain. Unlike my cultivated grownup combination of these two driving styles, K_____'s endless gyrations in the driver's seat frequently distracted him from the actual variables on the road. Driving with him was reliably risky. Accidental 360s and inadvertent contact with curbs and railroad tracks were not uncommon.

Driving is like life sometimes, I guess. The big car is my adult car, and it is the car in which I abandon the childish habits of driving like it's fun. It's a task, to be undertaken efficiently (and I genuinely enjoy the efficiency of performing the task in the big car). In the trunk of a Honda Civic I keep the harmlessly irresponsible youth, tucked away under abandoned blankets and a mismatched set of tools that don't correspond to the car in any way. The big car came with a sleek little toolkit. And that's really the difference.

Friday, March 03, 2006

wingspan

that fat white nerd at the company picnic
wearing a miles davis t-shirt:
you own stryper albums.

or that relentless we gotta hang out sometime guy
i barely talked to back in the day:
keep your card. i’m glad you consult.

how about the mayo-globbed mouth-corner of some prick
that just keeps talking. oblivious to situations me and he:
i’m not hungry anymore.

and there’s the barely employed guy on my block
it snows. his wife shovels:
quit the belligerent neighbor banter.

racist grandfathers.
the self-important noon time aid at my kid’s school.
the person that always wants to talk about brilliant oscar efforts.
the big guy on the train that thinks he can eyeball my girl.
ungrateful eastern-block defectors bellyaching about taxes, etc.

pegasus wings should painfully take root from me,
so I can shun you all, bloody and glorious—
wingspan in my periphery.