I gave four prompts to collaborating poet Eric Howard. He conducted three minutes of “fevered writing” with each prompt. Here are the results. These words comprise the lexicon I’ll use to create my dis•articulations poem.
Hurricane Harvey’s Stinging Nightmare: Floating Fire Ant Colonies
Revelation in the dirt that isn’t dirt, what floats on the linked waxy bodies of the colony is the waxy body of the colony, queen safe and dry, the soldiers taking turns on the bottom to prevent drowning, here is evolution, here is survival, nightmares and stings, a lesson in cooperation, matriarchal communists surviving in flooded Texas.
‘Sexual activity at our age can seem like a pilates class’
So much can seem like a Pilates class to someone who hasn’t taken one. There’s a machine, I think, sort of like a rowing machine but with ropes instead of oars. It seems to be for women who want to maintain a nice body but not put on muscles like a weightlifting man. Ballet, aerobics, weights, running, swimming, bicycling, all have their devotees, so too should this new thing, sex, that the coolest young people are trying. But sex and sexual activity are not the same. An activity is planned. It may involve colored paper and paste. It may have something to do with schooling.
American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin
Be my American, fly a P-38 sonnet, my past beginning with an assassination cheered by some. We keep having to say: This happened. Some Americans are rhymers, no-account mail-order weapons-grade idiots, online iambs, kill me now and yesterday, save me for later, provide me with distance unlearning. You scare me, but I know better than to run. America is as good a place to die as any.
Tested: How Fast Your Car Needs to Be to Outrun a Cop
Can’t outrun a radio, my wise elder brother said just once. He’s like that. We were in a yellow ’72 Duster with a 440 six pack, doing a modest10 over the traffic on the 805 North. He was driving, punching it now and then to show how far back into the bench seats you could go. It was sunny, and I was a kid in a fast car, so that hour is golden. He didn’t seem like a kid then. The car would never pass smog nowadays. Now I see how young we were. In that car he got away, once.
Collaborating poet Eric Howard gave four prompts to me. I conducted three minutes of “fevered writing” with each prompt. Here are the results. These words comprise the lexicon Eric will use to create his dis•articulations poem.
The Fermi Paradox
The fact is we’re lonely but nobody wants to be friends with us. We’re like the kid in the third grade who stank and who picked his nose in class. No one would eat lunch with him. The intelligent life elsewhere in the galaxy stays away from us. They play with the other cool kids and would never pick us for their team. Every time they see us doing something stupid—a war or the destruction of our ozone layer, for example—they steer their ships a little farther away. They laugh at our pathetic attempts at contact.
Donald Trump very much wants you to think he has normal size hands so he orders prosthetics, the finest money can buy; they are giant hands, big enough to wrap around the globe and squeeze, a global shakedown, big enough to pick your pocket too, leave you with nothing more than pennies and lint. Those hands seem to follow you in dreams, casting enormous shadows over the landscape, hiding the sun. Global eclipse. The lines on the palms reveal all the lies we’ve been sold, the ones we’ve mortgaged our future to pay for. Predictions are dire.
Sadie tells the story of her lost love to her lost love because she believes love cannot ever be lost, just as matter cannot be created or destroyed. Love is energy unleashed and you cannot take it back; it follows you like a swarm of butterflies, even when you shut your eyes and pretend not to see. That loves hums inside her at inopportune moments of the day and night, tickles her dreams. Sometimes she thinks it’s like a story she made up, sometimes she thinks it’s an enchanted spell. Sometimes she thinks her life is being written like a forgotten poem.
75 Bug Out Bag List Essentials
Some people spend their lives preparing to survive when the shit comes down. The stockpile equipment and rations; they have a plan. Me, I don’t think I care to survive the conflagration. I don’t consider it a challenge I want to be up for. I can imagine sticking around to help others if that’s needed, but I’d rather go in the first flash. Nobody says stockpile some pills to take yourself out, but I guess the guns could be put to that use. The cities will be wasted, I’m sure. Maybe someone in the country would have a chance.
