many squirrels call Poughkeepsie Mecca [and] 2Pac Biggie and Larry Flynt

many squirrels call Poughkeepsie Mecca 

~

I endured the hopelessness & angst 
of my 20s by moving about once 
a year 
until I actually thought I could 
spend a considerable while, even years, further 
as a man who earns his money from the 
dirt & sunshine -- initially in Georgia -- 
until the creator of the Kenari 
beverage flippantly, spitefully 
turned me away from his doors (the 
same year Up In The Air was 
released as a film. ho ho ho.) 

after a period of inordinately 
depressing quality mostly 
sleeping at my father's and 
watching t.v./reading books 
at my aunt's respective trailers, 
I found myself with a couple lucky years 
working about 50-60 hrs. a week 
counting boxes of auto-
matically assembled goods and 
stacking the boxes and monitoring 
the machines for alarms. 

and 
another, part-time 
job in a rather polite kitchen in a school 
with coworkers who never spoke to me 
as a drunk or habitual pothead. 
it was a period of some memorable discipline: 
nerve damage hadn't set its dirty fuckwaste 
volition into those muscles, else 
that 
sweep from the eyes to the fingers 
and 
I tried to type up or improve 
2 or 3 decent James Tate/ 
Charles Bukowski-flavored story poems 
on a weekly basis. 
don't ask me where they are, now. 

maybe the brave, delighted squirrels 
popping out of garbagecans, dumpsters, 
crazy as snakes with surprising, 
athlete limbs & paws, calm, no, serene 
with the expanding derangement of 
the universe 
and its contents
could 
tell you 
what happened to those poems. 
it's been at least 10 yrs. since any of this-- 
and I'll scribble more letters words letters sentences 
on pages in light & dark & places inbetween 
yet. 

look: there's a squirrel asking if he can use your radio. 




**** 

2Pac Biggie and Larry Flynt 

~ 

blame the 1980s, maybe. 
this sordid figure portending himself to 
usefulness, or some visceral occupation of 
body & movement 
annoys and entertains me with violent things, 
like celebrities and performers and rappers and 
whatever other popular things 
your crazy brain sees fit to include 
in that. 

Tupac Shakur (like you forgot) survived 
the initial attempt/s on his dearly 
valuable life and 
 (fucking) recorded music preserving such. 
they say Biggie's enormous mass 
provided a surplus of time 
contained w/in it 
what even 40 yrs. in another, say, whiter 
person's body might promise. 

and Larry Flynt felt a rifle 
snap its contents 
into his own large, spare 
interiority... he survived because he'd been fasting: 
a sandwich or a PopTart could 
have separated him to the darkness. 

it's not a coincidence that rappers 
are called poets all difficult eloquent 
expression depends on the sanity of the reader, 
and in the algebra of our idiotic 
compositions 
a ruthless, 
and sincere, 
student of talent 
counts every spectacle in the wind, 
bullets included. 






**** 

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