epitapdancing,
eysenck's personality,
sight's epiphany

i have drooled poems
with suspect autopilot
lighted upon me

reductio ad
epigramophonetics
dippy's epistle

wash, wash and dry, wash
and dry, wash and dry, wash and
dry, wash and dry, dry

epithetic heat,
a red epistaxis sans
representation

content follows form,
the appearance of order,
a phlegmatic sham

apolitics by
epithelium balloons
this is called ballast

I have a beard now,
say, three quarters of the time,
but not on purpose.

It's funny but true.
I always feel clean shaven
though I rarely am.

It's like housecleaning.
You don't notice the carpet
until you vacuum.

It's like debt payment.
It's an ongoing process
not designed to end.

In college I tried
a number of facial hair
configurations.

It's unclear still which,
if any of them, looked good.
Arguably, one.

Just when I begin
to question the importance,
I look like my dad.

With the second sheet,
try to loosen the approach.
Think a little less.

They are there to help,
so don't sweat the simple rules.
Keep your pen moving.

This sheet is its own.
Set the other one aside.
Do not recreate.

Find a new object.
Trace its outline carefully.
The story will come.

Objects continue.
They naturally follow.
Let them also come.

Remember the trick:
When the paper has no lines,
draw them on by hand.

There are some who say
making one's own is cheating.
Ignore them and work.

showering again
swallowing mild sedatives
staying up all night

staring at the screen
pulling gently on the cord
fingering the stick

inverting the days
clipping toenails with scissors
staring through the bars

heating the iron
gobbling the carb-free breakfast
writing recipes

chipping a front tooth
starting awake sitting up
finding canaries

hiding pseudonyms
inventing compulsive tasks
biding time from time

huffing ammonia
lacking a true escape plan
packing carefully

(The most exciting,
always assumed by design.
Assumed perfection.)

(There are accidents
happening on a level
below the lowest.)

(It's hard to believe
at that place, they say only
"margin" of error.)

(If devices could
count the number of mistakes,
we'd have given up.)

(If we could even
record the errors we'd have
run clean out of tape.)

(These are things we know
we can't even know about
lest we stop knowing.)

(I am a student
of the school of Pretending
This Is Not the Case.)

I believe in dust
and serpents and volcanoes
and baskets of rocks

and dogs and ice cubes
and skeletons and asphalt
and jack-o-lanterns

and incense and lye
and tuning forks and Santa
and witches and ponds

and salad and frogs
and parchment and fallen trees
and art-for-art's-sake

and oregano
and dust bunnies and bike racks
and lighter fluid

and coed hayrides
and the invisible death
and baseball diamonds

and cotton and wool
and flame retardant costumes
and medium strings.

for Morissette

legions of molten
hearted college aged women
now grown, now doctors

it's never about
some "she" going down on you
in a theater

a gruff baseball bat
and the entitlement that
becomes the smart ones

still on occasion
one will appear who's sincere
having scruffed your flaw

this now well trodden
line item literary
term use rebuttal

asked if irony
is ironically misused
for irony's sake

one hopes for not "yes,"
but "I don't know" followed by
a bucket of slime

Ames told stories and
Ames rarely worked too hard and
Ames peed on the herbs.

Some skinny freakish
floppy titted trailer trash
twenty or forty.

Filling bags with dirt,
filling dirt with Styrofoam,
barrows of dirtbags.

Eating my sandwich,
the Mexicans and me sat
trying to converse.

Bounced a nickel so,
you could get those things to ping
and defy physics.

Giant skeleton,
a basil stuffed dinosaur
made me choke and gag.

That first summertime,
rides in Krishna's smelly van,
the mornings crunchy.

Today I started
practicing writing smaller
and more legibly.

When paper is scarce
or limited to Post-its®
I will be okay.

I will not create
new abbreviations, nor
adopt the old ones.

I will not renounce
the art of writing longhand
to reduce my font.

I will also work
on putting the lowercase
letters back in there.

I will never take
line items out of a plan
to reduce plan size.

Now my agenda
almost fits on one square inch
of brown masking tape.

had a cheap futon
had a telephone table
had a big oak desk

had a cordless phone
had that alarm clock ten years
still have one like it

had a cheap floor lamp
had another cheap floor lamp
had a cheap desk lamp

had pink index cards
had The Screenwriter's Bible
had scenes and outlines

had small ice cube trays
had a decent apartment
did have roaches though

had a faux routine
had a favorite diner
had a "usual"

had a flower shop
had an express train nearby
had a corner store

O unfortunate!
& though you are waterproof —
not from inside out!

O big laptop bag
& I put a travel mug
in the big pocket

O & I was sure
I drank my morning coffee
completely dry up

& O & woe &
when I got home the dampness
hang in the bathroom!

& the inside smells
musty now like the inside
of the hardest sneeze

O big laptop bag
& enzymes in a bottle
position nozzle

O, & luckily
PDA & headphones &
laptop all survived