on the day i cry in front of a television set

On the day I cry in front of a television set
Maybe I make a pie, maybe you make a stew.
Maybe we don't instead and order chinese food.
Maybe we crumple up the menu or return it to the register.

Maybe there are two white cars and then a black SUV,
and we are naming them and then the cab says yellow,
and maybe I think the cab says yellow because I said the first two weren’t yellow,
but maybe the company is called yellow cab.

I've been in a lot of cabs before but never once was I found in a limousine.

Its true one time I drove the cab.
Its true I have this way of getting along with junkies and also old men.
Maybe the cabbie that time was both.
Maybe he kissed me on the cheek & handed me a five.
Maybe he was full of it or tired or neither.

I lost all my belongings then.
It was all I had. It was hilarious. Markers, pens, receipts, crayons—
some thief with a fistful of watercolors,
5 cigarettes or so, a 20 dollar bill I hadn't planned on spending,
it was my whole life! I lost it—
every receipt, every stolen coaster, every delicatessen in Paris.

After the pie explodes and the stew has burnt a hole in the ceiling,
we get to the bottom of a brown paper bag.
Maybe at the bottom of the brown paper bag there is just one fortune cookie & this could be something
cut in half.

Maybe the fortune in the cookie says "your winsome smile will be your sure protection."

If saying things casually can make them happen, then everything was beautiful & nothing hurt.

Then, no i take it back.

Then, bring me to the money-man pawn and notice my back is sealed with clear electrical tape.

Give me back to myself.

You know, Andy Warhol made more religious paintings than any other American artist?
He kept them in a secret room.
You know my dad once ran a road race alongside Larry Bird?
You know you're wearing my pants and I thought I'd lost them.
I can tell by the two small blotches of gesso by the knee,
So I guess I spend time looking at knees and not just my own since you're wearing my pants.

No smell has stayed in my left nostril longer
than the smell of a dead puppy that I couldn't keep from dying.

My neighbors lived on a farm & came from Ireland. They knew
There is more than one thing in this world that reeks of dead puppy.

I knew that puppy was dead right after I got off the school bus.
I knew it right when I got there, I knew it right when I smelled it.

So maybe I make a dead puppy-pie, eh?
Maybe you make a cat-stuck-in-the-fence stew?

Between the two of us we come across like a full meal.

I thought maybe there was an outhouse in the upstairs hall
because I saw it in the middle of the night.
It was a genu-ine outhouse, went all the way down,
through what, I don't know.

I'm not sure I said much of anything.
We are never sure is what I wanted to say.

There is an urge in me, I know it.

It was nice though the way it played with your eyelids & pantomimed time travel and you got it on the first guess. I was imagining the apocalypse.
There were three scenes I couldn't sleep through.

I was thinking about art, about instruments of art, about decisions, limitations, decisions, what little change I'd ever have sparing.
I saw a fire & the mountains made of paper,

They gave up like they enjoyed it,
the paintings, all gone in a fell swoop, easy.

I thought of a life’s work, of instruments breaking and burnt guitar strings,
I thought of voices singing and the words left,
to remember,
to sing.

I thought of voices singing without strings and the rest of it gone. I thought of Peter, Paul, and Mary.
Bye, bye, miss American pie, and if I'd bet on poor Stewball, I'd be a rich man today.
These are the things I remember.

Every sight I'd ever seen lives in this naked space— there is color here,
there is an old man pumping gas in a yellow cardigan,
a black lab crossing through the pine trees,
stewball and I on the front porch saying GOD & god,
my mother traipsing across the backyard with a half empty bottle of gin,
my mother sloshing towards my father's back bent over in the garden,
my father's back bent over in the garden,

your face on the floor through the dark
moving in & out with the glow from some far-gone commercial
on the t.v. set—
and you're shaking you say, its ok.

This is real, can i tell you?