Attend to tenderness, not premeditated cruelty.
Attend to joy, not infliction of pain.
Genuflect, if your knees do bend.
Send prayers via media mail, unsure when they’ll arrive.
Send books as prayers for a distressed catcher, forearm fractured.
No command for gratitude: it’s all being. Be grateful. It’s a state, like Kansas.
Be grateful feels like cliché, until you try it.
Have equanimity, as if it were a dog seated in a stroller, pushed down the streets of Waikiki.
Say words until they make some sense, like “inflection,” followed by “point.”
Say words like “infarction” and place your hand on your heart.
Milk those concrete details for all the abstraction they can bear.
“Abstract sensuousness” labeled the poster of a man wearing a Johnny Cash teeshirt.
He stands behind a pane of glass, as if you could buy him, along with the shirt.
One photograph that didn’t turn out was of a “tropical princess,” white manikin in a twist.
The tropical princess is but an ad for a store of that name.
If we could buy our own advertising for the brands we burn into our arms.
If we could advertise who we are, in the static and yet sentimental sense.
It matters not where you bat, you bat for us.
There are holes in the line-up the catcher fell through.
Call another up, send another down.
The administrative state defines tents as “unsafe,” demonstrations as “violent.”
When there is violence, the administrative state blames it on the peaceful ones.
If the trump trial were fiction, it would have a non-stop laugh track.
Since the trial is real, heads reel, fish at the end of a line, like punctuation.
Do fishermen fish for analogy’s sake?
Do we write to keep totalitarians at bay?
Lilith barked with the fire engine, dog siren.
Does she bark because sirens are emergency arias?
Is her bark a kind of music? How many tones in her scale?
What is the purpose of a line, but to catch at the end?
I catch your drift, said Montaigne to his pen.
I am adrift, I say to my screen.
Who’s pitching today? Oh, Sonny Gray.
The one-armed catcher’s been put away for now.
Long live the new one; may he hit and not be hit.
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