Quickies

That's Life

An omelette of lemons.
A suitcase of tricycles.
A pocket of walruses.
An enclave of Lithuanians in Iran. A pillowcase of
echoes. A camera filled with
photographs of oceans. That's life.
What's life?
It's a four-letter word.
It's always given me everything I've wanted.
What's it spell?
Life.
What's that?
It's a cannon loaded with adjectives.
A staircase painted with peeling lives.
It's a bottle of old lovers. You splash
the liquid from it on your face
and smell of their bodies forever.
That's life. What's life?
It's a time bomb
loaded with pleasure,
set to explode this evening;
also, it's nature's way of
making sure that
everyone's not all dead at the same time.




That dream again

The other night I had one of my
recurrent dreams again again:
I was back in Guapulo, I was
back in Guapulo, my old neighborhood in Quito,
walking around its one winding street,
the 3-D labyrinth of its crowded slope,
and, as I say to myself
every time I have the dream, I
said to myself, "So
many times I've dreamed
I was back in Guapulo, and
now I really am"; and
then I woke up in Vienna.



Labyrinth of Mushrooms
(Product placement poem #1)

1000 giant mushrooms are standing in a field.
You have to run between them as in a
video game. A giant centipede
is chasing you. On the other side
of the field is an Austrian bank
called Creditanstalt, where you
have to open an account and
deposit the double armful of wriggling
salamanders you are carrying, before
the centipede can eat you.



Labyrinth of Memories
(Product placement poem #2)

That year, both the second and the third
of September were Sundays.
It was the year she left me.
One dark Saturday in November
I walked up Graben (shopping street in Vienna)
compulsively buying products from each store:
Meinl, Palmers, Morova, etc.
Each purchase was the most wonderful.
Suddenly the economy shifted and
I resold them all at a stupendous profit.
I invested in a breed of walruses
that could live in polluted rivers.
My people began to hunt them, and
prospered, carving and selling the tusks.
Years later, we retired to our ancestral homeland
and developed the infrastructure,
deep in the labyrinth of memories.



Complaint

Waiter, there's an insect in my galaxy,
a city in my beer,
a sorrow laced with cunning
in the pleasure of my fear.

This table burns like Everclear,
this chair's infested with lice,
there's so much cappu in this damn ccino
that I can't find the rice.

The air's too thick with sunbeams,
the smell is way too loud,
and the way yo head's on inside-out
would make yo mama proud.

I can't see nothing anyhow,
so tell me what you hear.
And when I vanish silently,
just wipe away this tear.



Surreal

A flock of golden bicycles
is dripping through the trees.
They won't hum nothing silently,
so listen to them tease.
The ants are thinking thunderously,
they're drowning out the bees.
And I'm writing it all down with daffodils
in a notebook made of cheese.

The bicycles are savage now,
they're smashing through the trees.
The stones are sneezing rhythmically,
they've all caught the same disease.
Incapable of inducing ecstasy,
they endeavor simply to please.
I write of them with empathy
in my notebook made of cheese.

Two cats are typing, carelessly,
with calculated ease,
some poetry they thought up
while sitting on my knees.
Their style is nearly human,
it differs by degrees;
I'll write their words in orange peels
in my notebook made of cheese.

The world is dark, and older now.
It trembles in the breeze.
The future's coming silently,
under sail upon the seas.
The past is a shimmering memory,
the present slowly flees,
and I write in the dark with a steady hand
in my notebook made of cheese.



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