Ars Poetica

There are lemon slices and lily pads in the waters of the pond. Rocks peek out of cracks in the boxes, and bees are busy in the weeds. At the park on the Street of Clocks men are reading the spaces between the words of their books, and chess masters at the benches play backwards. Tie-dyed shamans divine our future, and study our past. Our term for far, far away (in the lingua franca) is: “there, where a child cries mother, mother!” Our word for here is: “here.” Eternity exists in a heartbeat; the multiverse within your pretty sister. There is a bordello in the basement of our church, frogs and crawdads in our aqueducts, and fire hydrants have taken to pissing on the dogs. There is mariachi music, and the cordite cologne of live ammo, on the yesca scented breeze. Hep cats sit in the windowsills, sniffing. Small brown men walk around whistling. Mormons ring the doorbells two by two. In the morning, songbirds sing so loudly the pictures on the walls go off kilter. Nightly, we are serenaded by sirens. Everywhere, all around us, there is breathtaking beauty – which seems to be the reason the newest fad is suicide. Our mathematicians do the Macarena; our theologians do the Antler Dance. Our philosophers are all hollering: “Ollie, Ollie Otsin, free, free, free!” By day we work the mines. At night we sleep in the whorls of our lovers fingerprints.