Pigeon's Secret

Young pigeon,
Where is your nestmate?

Where is the drowsing huddler,
His curve your curve,

White down to down,
Gray flesh to flesh, one

Warm, dry, after egg's
Slimy solitudes?

Your hearts whirred
Like synchronized stopwatch's.

Each of you filled
The other's black eye.

You will fly up, pigeon,
You will perch and scan and peck.

He dropped, became a crooked scrawl
Of pigeon on his aluminum landing pad.

After eggs. White, round, the perfect
Thumbprints of emptiness.

A Little Logic

**Transcribed (by myself) from Sarah Palin's interview with Charles Gibson. I apologize in advance for any incidental transcription errors.

**"I think you are a cynic, because show me where I have ever said that theres absolute proof that theres nothing that man has ever conducted or engaged in that has had any effect or no effect on climate change."

Let's break this down.

Proposition A: You are a cynic if you cannot show me where I have ever said that there is absolute proof that:

2 sub-propositions:

y. Nothing man has ever conducted or engaged in has had any effect on climate change.

x. Nothing man has ever conducted or engaged in has had no effect on climate change.

Read statement y as equal to "Man's actions have had no effect on climate change."
And, by double negation, read statement x as "Everything man does has an effect on climate change."

Meaning, Sarah Palin has had no position on climate change.

And we end up with the simplified version of proposition A:

If Sarah Palin has had no position on climate change, then George Gibson is a cynic.

Well? To be fair, she's saved by the cunning "absolute proof" caveat. It would take a stupidity more monstrous than that of a mere backwater conservative to claim absolute proof of anything, ever.

"...we're gonna have to implement in Afghanistan a lot of the same successes allotted that surge solution that have been implemented and proven, proven to be successful in Iraq."

That's double proven for emphasis. But not absolutely, I hope.

Pigeon Song

Oh, young pigeon, nested underneath
A humming air conditioner.

Young pigeon, your scrappy feathers.
What points lie along the line
Of your pigeon future?

A million pecks
Each a flaw
For diamond city.

Oh young pigeon,
May your criticism
Be constructive.

Oh young pigeon,
Your god is humble and wise.
Pray to him with your pink feet.

Do not forget
That you have found the promised land
Of crumbs and quick escapes.

Young pigeon, do not forget
The whole city swivels
In your orange eye.

Un-till

UN-TILL

The ants should have come marching home by now...

There´s a baby carriage waiting, wheels grazing the damp tiles while mami rifles through a heap of ruptured trash bags. White shreds of plastic whisp through the humid air, above and around the eyes. A tiny head peeps from reams of recycled swaddle.

You -- keep walking on at the same pace.

...but they got stuck...

Stuff the metaphors (your fingers are crushed umbrella spines, the mind is a twin-headed worm, you are what you do, etc.) in an old shopping bag, tie it by the handles, chuck it in the street. It´ll get ripped, picked, sorted and carted away.

You -- don´t dally in the past´s pastoral, don´t linger in your reflection, posed over a glass display. Don´t unravel and re-weave canine confessions. Forget the details (passing headlights pulse like a bad headache, the double lollipop dismissal cast by twin lamp-posts, gossip laughter curling from candyland balconies, the batwing shadowpoints thrown by the green glow behind a doorgrate, sequined mannequins tinged glitter-jaundice); forget how to read anything but practical signs.

...on a dead duck.

You are not the ploughblade, splitting now from later from then. Get thorny. Contort. Smile like a cat, lick your lips. Calculate.

Un-till, eyes facing front, put the earth back where it was and walk backwards, happy from the untouched field.

Un-till up to the fangs of the city horizon.

My Mandarins

It happens that I like my mandarins just so.
Orange. Juicy. Flavorfull, with white pulp.
But above all, silent. Secretive. Still.

I can't stand it when my mandarins talk to me.
I don't like their jungle stories,
Stories of blue parrots and coarse, dark hands.

I like to eat my mandarins on September afternoons.
I slowly ripen in the sharp light of my white room.
I'm here; my mandarins are here too.

I don't ask them how they got here.
Let them not ask me.

It's not that I'm in a bad mood.
I'm not malicious. But I will be myself.
Let my mandarins be my mandarins.

That's it. Oh yes. The orange silence.
The curves like smiles in my fridge.
There in their room in the sharp, white light.

A gun asks itself

Is this what comes out of me when I squeeze?

Maybe I should load myself with dreams.

This is not a life experience

I've been out of the country for a year and three months now, just about, and what people usually call a life experience is beginning to cross over into a life.

I get up in the morning, I review what I have to do in my agenda, I take the subway, and I do my job; sometimes well, sometimes, well, not as well as I should. Like everybody else, I guess. But, as nearly everyone I talk to, here and at home, supposes, I am not living. I'm having a life experience.

And sure, that's probably how I'll characterize it on future resumes. After I apply the exact P.S.I. to that future interviewer's hand (neither dead fish nor former marine) and tell him where I'd been teaching English for so long, I may even smile and affirm his chummy small talk definition with "Yes, yes it was" with a voice as slick as K-Y jelly.

But inside I'll be squirming with a question. When did you stop experiencing life? Is that what I have to do to start living?

When the bull says no it means...

Advice to writers:

Everyone has a different metaphor to describe the writing process. And in the final product, if such a thing exists, traces of the process are always left over. Maybe for Conrad it was like trying to see in a dark room that gets darker at a proportional rate to which one's eyes adjust.

I usually feel like I'm trying to wrastle an angry bull. While wearing a superman costume and trying to look graceful. Better, I'm in a coliseum, surrounded by a herd of angry bulls. I have to choose my bull, but, as bulls can be deceiving, I mistake the least angry one for the angriest. A coffee and cream colored bull, lowering his horns and staring at me through one slitted eye. That's the one. There I go.

Most of the action, unfortunately for the viewer, is hidden by a dust cloud. The details are blurred; a toss, a rag-doll triple gainer, a face plant. Needless to say, our would-be hero is left face down in the dirt with his costume torn in an embarrassing spot, wondering what he is doing and hoping no one is watching. The bull stands off to the side, huffing a bit, but not very nonplussed.

Still, he gets up, dusts himself off, grins sheepishly at the crowd, waving his hands over his head for applause. None forthcoming. Oh well, its just him and the bull. Think like a surfer, he says to himself. Just be here now. Don't make it so hard on yourself. Come on, sprezzatura. It's just you and the board and the wave, man, and the wave, and the board, and the you, and the bull...

Oof. Well, maybe its the wrong bull. Don't get discouraged - there are many bulls in the... nevermind.

Anyway, I'm back.