my posture is never good enough
always catching my back in pain
trying to support my head
too hunched over

you look up at me with sad eyes
hoping for forgiveness
you're never good enough
and i'm angry because of it

For Tom it started at 30.

A baby, a business, bread

always to pull from the oven.

Rick asks logistics

filler or intel

how important are the machines,

do you know the formulas?

Recipes you mean?

Yes all the pastry gets pulled

the night before.

Keep the spirals fingertip clean,

crimp the edges with a fork.

Is hell an overcoat and tiny dog, 

a downtown bistro with no meatless salads.

Or are you a lounge singer on a cruise ship

who passes all the primo fishing spots

and never gets to dock - -

Collars Run

Noel thinks my shovelling is a bargaining chip,
he offers me a deal on the space I rent from him,
I can't be there anymore,
I scratched someone's car with my shovel.

I don't fancy my wipers bent,
I don't fancy the sad descent into tit for tat,
yes a historic fall, but I was out there for three hours,
pushing it around like food I'm being forced to eat
pushing and pushing,
and eventually it isn't even food or snow,
it looks like it's just something to do,
no-one will care where it goes,
everything that must be set up
in order to abscond.

31

What am I doing.

Amazed by the speed of sleep

my father says he's afflicted

only with nostalgia, while

everyone else's depression takes

a windier shape, while mine is

generational but not from him or

is just dietary or is not even real,

is maybe also just nostalgia.

Do you ever just mean to get

the classic meal? I want to be

getting classic meals and also

really be on it, be a good person,

fight for justice and clams casino,

iceberg salad and remembering to vote

in local elections, a radical marriage of

Do you want to be in a radical marriage of

in it as like an idea that's part of it not

like a half of it. Even to say halves is not

radical I guess it would be a radical marriage

of classic meals and civic responsibility and

ALSO of generational depression, and that's

the radical triangle; there's no radical line;

It's three points or you're dead just regular

a 31-year old woman with a modest salary

in a big city.

Fate, Luck or Chance?

Nice conversation with Adams. He said some lovely things to me, how it must be New York City, which is why I'm not settled down already, pretty girl like me. Compliments me on my glasses, says, "Yeah, must be new on you. You look nice." He says that he looks at people, watches them on the subway. No one wears rings. 20's, 30's, 40's, even 50's. It's not like that in Burlington. Not in rural areas, everyone wears a ring. He keeps a BMW, a Corvette, a Hummer, and a Japanese motorcycle, a brand I forgot to catch. Last weekend, a car show just happened to be in town. He asked if he could drive his Corvette right up next to the others. They said, "Sure." Keeps a clean engine underneath the hood, everything is custom. Not something you'd just buy off the lot. They gave him first place. Always hustling, can't sit still. Goes to bed by 11:30, wakes up at 4:30, even on the weekends. Drives the Eagles in one of those big buses during training time. Real nice guys. Sometimes for fun, he will Uber his Hummer for a few extra bucks. The way he met his wife, he was working the forklift at BJ's, part-time before he got the bus gig. She was on line, buying a rotisserie chicken. His friends knew what he was up to. He asked her, "You like the chicken?" She said, "Yeah, I do." He asked, "You like ice-cream too?" She said, "Yeah, actually I do." They went to Friendly's after his shift, a few months later, they got hitched.  For their recent anniversary, he bought $200 wheels and rims for her BMW, originally $5000.  He shows me a picture off his Galaxy phone. The guy selling it was down on his luck. 

Can I

I can't wait, the blip that makes anxiety latent
which stays as such
so long as the refresh rate continues to hold up
and there's something to refresh.

Can't wait, obliterated by comfort,
and then anxiety realises its boundless potential,
demanding your dream of being kicked out of
a car, in some backwater with a bag on your head,
any dream you can have of being reset,
so you can think outside of where the quandary of your comfort lies:
an anodyne coddle where your irradiating force
sucks towards you all the throws and cushions
from elsewhere in the house
and your lounge becomes a high watermark
for the packing industry.

That or comfort really is what you couldn't wait for
and it's crazy that we continually toe the line
where decision making is hemmed in
by the double resentment of having to wait
or knowing that now everything is typically religion
to the ascetic.

ON SLUSH ETIQUETTE

with the storm of the century comes the slush of at least the decade.
one hundred thousand park slope toddlers descended on Prospect Park
and their two hundred thousand tiny rubber boots stamped the fluff into hard packed stuff.
similar aggression took place on the sidewalks and streets
(although nowhere near as dramatically).
but the result was the same.

a secondary sidewalk of ice coats the regular sidewalk,
and as the temperature flirts with the other side of 32
that secondary sidewalk begins to relent.
the main issue here is that

THIS CITY DOESN'T DRAIN.

the sewers are too jam packed full of human waste and human talent and human failure
(not to even mention the waste/talent/failure of animals and plants)
to accommodate such an influx of meltwater.
so what happens?

slush happens, baby.

at every intersection a baby pool of slush waits to squelch over the tops of your shoes
and soak your socks and dampen your already surly mood.
snowbanks render these pools - the only navigable way to cross the street, i'm afraid -
impassable by more than one person at a time.

[rule 1:]
the right-of-way is never clear, so it's safe to assume you never have it.

as commuters storm through the gap and splash cold water on you as you stand to the side
allowing them to pass
they scowl and grimace and trudge toward their trains - which...

HEY BUDDY IT'S GONNA BE DELAYED ANYWAY WHAT'S THE RUSH
WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE ANYWAY SO WHO THE HECK CARES IF YOU'RE
10 MINUTES LATE TO WORK...

while you stand out of the way and let the whole neighborhood pass
and your socks are soaked and it doesn't matter that you don't have anywhere to go
because you still feel your time is valuable and your feet are best served dry
and you start to get that twisted feeling in your gut because you feel like a scrooge
for hating all of humanity in that moment,

and this only worsens until the four-hundredth and final person walks past you,
splashes in the puddle
turns to see you
cold and wet and dejected and miffed by your own passivity
and says "sorry!"as they keep marching toward wherever.

and in that moment everything is okay.
because somebody in this god forsaken place understands slush etiquette.