Freddie the Frog

Look at me. I'm so old and shrivelled and gross. But don't you
worry about that. I'm here to tell you about Freddie the Frog.

Freddie the Frog was the most amazing frog there ever was. He was
normal-looking, sure. But inside, he was special. Because I am so
old and shrivelled and gross, I am not going to be able to explain to
you in a way that gets across to you the fundamental truth of how
special Freddie was.

Freddie the Frog usually sat on a medium-sized rock down at the
creek, at the dead-end of an upper-middle-class neighborhood in
New England. He sat there, all through sunny June,
blinding July, and swampy August, just dreaming. Freddie closed his
eyes and felt unbounded space. The robins and cicadas and wind in the
birch trees echoed in his head -- textures in the emptiness that constituted him.

He ate things. He caught flies. Sometimes he swam. But Freddie
was magnificent for his flights of imagination. He did not realize
that he was merely a frog. He experienced himself as a thoroughly enjoyable,
surprising process.

Contact Points

My tires are deflated. They're flat and tired-looking.
I'm sliding around the road. I'm smudging everything I
run across. My contact with the world is soft, messy, blurred.
I make ugly turns. You hear the rubber smearing against the
asphalt like oversized galoshes. I lack air.

An Evening Alone in My Dreams

Wet cement in shadows
impenetrable haze and smog.
Everything dripping, it's
much too hard to go anywhere.
The lenses in my glasses popping
out and falling on the ground. I
step on them. There are no
optometrists left.

No Helmet

We have to get on the motorcycle now. The man driving the motorcycle
motions for me to put my hands around his waist. He's fat and
he smells like food. The motorcycle takes off and I have to press
my face into his shoulder, into the plaid print of his flannel shirt.
I have no idea where we're going.

The Tragedy of the Quotidian

Reading, writing, shitting.
Close the stall door, pull out the sanitary guard, sit down.
Reading, writing, shitting.


The radio, the paper thrown out of a truck with its headlights on
driving slowly down the street in the dark, the computer screen,
the newstand,the cable news program -- all of these people trying
to tell us what is happening.

Eat, sleep, drive, lock the door.

1989

Listening to Led Zeppelin on a walkman with four hours of batteries left
somewhere over Central Asia. On our next flight we'll see Everest, off to the
left.

Continental plates drifting and crashing, tidal waves erasing, mangrove forests sinking.
A tiger paddling through brown water.

A Grey Thursday

Freezing in my underpants. Half a bagel uneaten.
The crows outside are waiting for me to give up so that
they can eat my eyeballs. Ocular juice drizzling down their
beaks, matting down their mangy feathers.
It's just breakfast.