PROSE POETRY

I feel frazzled. unclean. unkept. irresponsible. a doddler. rickety. soft & at the same time too sharp. This morning, while I woke, sprouts crept out of the 7th vertebra under my neck — that one that hasn’t been quite right since the fall.

Later, I was a trumpet, howling. To be a trumpet, you must be shameless, and so for that moment, I must have been unashamed. But, it seems that shame grows like ivy out of the broken bits. Overwhelming, if left forgotten. And I neglected my sight. “I am unkept,” shame says. “Not on my skin, but in…

HUMOR

1. Digging a very large hole
2. Sitting on a yellow-jacket
3. Taking a shower with a broken water heater
4. Slowly sinking into the very large hole of shame I dug in step one
5. Bringing the yellow-jacket with me into the hole and naming it “Fred” so it can sting me indefinitely
6. Filling the hole with cold water
7. Complaining that, for some indiscernible reason, I’m stuck in a large, muddy hole filled with cold water and a yellow-jacket that insists it is named “Fred”
8. That one time I had the flu on a hammock in 95-degree weather while hundreds of mosquitoes surrounded me…

POETRY

Cinnamon in cake — a room —
familiar — coals — that burn —
people — hearth — showers of —
fire — children — laughter—
— the girls — dead now.

There’s smoke. Whistle, warning,
the streets — tea. Not now. Will there
ever — again? That man — who begs —
— fire — frozen — hand out —

Now. Feet. Trample. A dream? Back
before — the street I grew in was —
everything — earth — sea —
bloated — to expulse — bits —
— of body — boiled — a thigh —…

PHILOSOPHY

Author’s note: after writing this article, I noticed that Roy Sorensen published an academic paper, The Egg Came Before the Chicken, in the philosophy journal Mind. The premise of that paper is sufficiently similar to this article that you might take what I say here to be an accessible (and relatively amateurish) summary. When an idea is thought up more than once, it may very well be onto something.

The phrase, “the chicken and the egg,” is so hackneyed that it invokes its own abstract meaning: any cyclic, unending process with no beginning. If you like math, the limitless series…

HUMOR

I love cherry blossoms, but I’d love them more if I didn’t suspect them of attempted murder. Something or other is leaving me breathless, and those blushing guilty petals are just in the wrong place at the wrong time — or, the right place at the right time, if they do in fact have criminal aspirations.

How could I catch them in the act? Any wind of suspicion would send those petals fluttering their escape into the sky. And even if I did manage to get those rascals to court, no one would see them as the dark masterminds they…

PROSE POETRY

Who are you to tell me that I look like my skin and not what I see?

There’s choice in seeing, you see. Only so much can be seen, and with every sense available, there is certainly more creativity in seeing than in photography — more permutations of experience to pick from, that is. An itch here. A crack there. Coolness. Each leaf, I pluck off with my eyes. Is this not a choice? And have not some perfectly sane people said that you are what you choose?

Now, I see a plate. With crummy remanence. A plate, in my…