little stories
forgive the paragraphs but i was in a prosey mood--
salvation is a team sport
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i never understood the part about sin-- i wasn't about that, so much as the forgiveness idea, and i think someone put two and two together and came up with a pretty staggering sum. we are all broken, sure, but we are all so holy. no one wants to talk about that part as much. and i never understood why they make me out so scary, so dry. i'm a nice guy, got a sense of humor even. once i came back as a little baby chicken jesus, and sang a while. that saved a whole diner. you never can tell about salvation.
you gotta be really rich to buy the whole dinger
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she got pieces of it, sure, here and there-- the chrome fenders at a porch sale, the white walls from a flea market. her dad gave her the engine; the rest had long been parted out. an old boyfriend threw in a doggy-style "form over function" windshield. she had the map too, little colored pins flagging out a route through beautiful dangerous back roads. but you
couldn't call it a road trip yet.
i never get credit for the good things i do in dreams
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sometimes i am flying, and maybe i am trying to teach nena. but she says i am bossing her. sometimes i open those doors into those rooms in my house, the ones i didn't know about, and go deeper and deeper and find tons of really great stuff, but it just raises my real estate taxes. sometimes i save the world, wearing nothing but a chimera spandex suit and lousiana hot sauce toenail polish, but all i hear about is supermansupermansuperman.
some side effects may occur
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life is a cherry pie, and you are a greedy, greedy girl, face smeared red like you have slaughtered a bear and feasted on it, raw, in the forest. there are clouds gathering, dark and angry anscestors, shocked at how little the family line has evolved. you wipe your chin on your sleeve and lower your face, not in shame, but toward the pie.
what's you real haircolor
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and who's your daddy, and is he rich, is he rich like me? i can take you back to your stolen roots-- hop in, don't worry, i'm licensed. look at this road, slick like a river, and you just waiting to swim upstream.
susan's resolution
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she was a teacher, but she figured out she didn't like kids really, she just liked stacks of books, and new pencils and the smell of chalkboards, so she fixed up her basement to look that way. every day for three months she sat there, writing equations like: s=w-l where w is woman and l is livelihood.
after a while she missed her paycheck, so she got a job at a cell phone store. she never looked back.
from here to duluth
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i'm a stranger to myself, so i travel. once in a while i bump into someone familiar. a smile i think i recognize, eyes like mine. in duluth they have a coffeeshop where the waitresses all dress like your mother. i'll get there tomorrow afternoon. i have a few questions to ask.
x-mas in hua hin
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it was christmas in hua hin and the food was real good; they had phad thai with tofu, carved of sandlewood. sorry, john. but the real thing was: eye contact, bright and shiny so i could hardly stand it, and teeth big and shiny too, everyone smiling. no room for melancholy, people people everywhere, alters spilling fruit and flowers. i could breathe deep there, first time since the towers fell and everything went dusty. i'm coming home soon. i'll bring the shine with me.
stupid shuckers
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my best job was detassling corn, best cos i could do it, and i don't do much else good, like spell or speak or even think. i got an eye for it. my hands flew like god, and i danced the rows, king of my own tiny village.
Overt Cooperations
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unnaturally kind, lena gave the shirt off her back. barebreasted, she nursed hungry passersby. arrested, she told bedtime stories to the old whores at precinct 6. for 12 magic nights no one complained at lights out.
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