earthworm

Sightless, delicate
nudge entropy detritus tree roots

Since waking

Here are the things I have thought about since waking:
Whether birdsong would stretch like taffy, or echo like whalesong, if our atmosphere were thicker.
Whether prize-winning hogs, teutonic midwesterners with fast food habits, and pick-up trucks would all have evolved for balletic flight were the atmosphere thicker, and whether a group of WASPy Minnesotans, soaring above, casting sturdy, Germanic shadows on empty fields below, would be referred to as a herd or a congestion. And would it cost even more to power the flying pick-ups, because certainly we would HAVE to have them.
Then this thought sprouted: Did he regret it, with the ‘he’ and the ‘it’ being specific–though having small-town-sized sets–correlated temporally, more cemented than by the bonds of bloodlines by virtue of being past.
Did he regret it? Or did he merely flee the city because of the tattooed bodybuilders (who thought of her like brothers) and he knew his rabbit scent had filled the air, that ink stained knuckles, and possibly a steel pipe or baseball bat or some other instrument had been imbued with a new purpose that might be his back or might even be his skull, because who can predict these things that happen in the heat of the moment of the possible and fueled by alcohol and chemicals? (Though certainly he could say a lot about the aphrodisiac of opportunity.)
But, as if our sprout now began to veer toward the sun, my thought returns to the original ‘he’ of the morning and I answer myself with more, if agonizingly incomplete, certainty: No, people like that don’t regret things. They conjure absolute certainties and then use these to build a scaffolding life that haloes their actual life: certainties about who they are, what foods they like, which movies suck, whether I am the type of girl to cheat, which of my friends are intolerable and which merely inexplicable.
My life has been full of men in possession of what I might now call ‘abcertainties’: There was one, this bastard, when he wasn’t taking ecstasy and making sex tapes (he was in his mid-to-stale twenties at the time), would puff on his cigarette and insist that Joy Division, for instance, was a ‘great’ band, objectively better by far than Bauhaus (in spite of the latter being more prolific, innovative, lyrically challenging, and skilled at playing their instruments.) He was full of such pseudo facts. Belief in God is silly. Conservatives are evil. Bands begin to suck when more than three people like them. He is acting freely. 
All contradictions: the rightness of his thoughts (as a starting point), and the concomitant lack of any thing known as rightness or wrongness when his actions were considered wrong. The utter intelligibility of the primacy of the self, except where that self is another in need of his being kind or decent or reasonably moral, or a self to whom he is somehow historically obliged because of an outmoded and probably religiously generated notion of responsibility or reciprocity (in which cases the world reverts to its amoral state and waits for him to do something ethical or sense some society-wide injustice (ie people who drive suvs, conservative politics (again), Darfur, Fox News, etc, in which moment morality will skitter from its shell and snap its claws before being thrown in the roiling pot waters). (Morality is the most obedient of creatures.)(Hobbes is there in case, though.)
Later, and at this point I am out for a jog, I thought: E, don’t be one of those people who is certain of everything.
Don’t follow one philosopher or another. Consider the limits to what the rich and elderly can tell you about a world. Sure, you can say: these people knew some suffering. In the prefaces and the biographies much is made about the influence of their sufferings on their thoughts. Losing a child to cholera in some drafty Roman hallway. Etcetera.
I agree. But where is the preface that asks how much their thoughts on the world were stunted by the dimensions of the windows from which they viewed it? That is to say that we celebrate and elevate all the pedestrian trials of these men (usually), ignoring, perhaps, that the starting point for all philosophy is the acknowledgement of ordinariness. The socioeconomically elevated life is less rational, or at least more imbued with a sense of fate, of entitlement, of better-ness. If reality were democratic, this would be a vast distortion. If there is alterity between men, these men are the heart of otherness. On top of the other heap. Is it brilliance, or mere access? How can they have your welfare in mind? They who would steal the peasant God to justify their teenaged lovers.
I mean, you can and perhaps should ‘believe’ in whatever. Season your life with beliefs, even. Believe the first boy who broke your heart was a bisexual sociopath; that fervency in atheism is ultimately indistinguishable from what is in the hearts beating at the tent revival; put on the kaffiyeh and march to the capital chanting ‘free free Palestine’ or else comb your hair and wait patiently outside until the hall opens up for Netanyahu’s talk.
Or believe all of it, at different moments, depending on how much wine you’ve drunk or what company you’re in or what paper you must present.
Be never certain. Instead remember, and this is the key to happiness as I see it: Remember the doubt of Descartes, who taught us not to trust any certainty completely beyond that we exist. That the material world has betrayed us, and that the fraction of it that we are capable of perceiving, much less of grasping, is unknown to us, so that neither belief nor disbelief is half as silly as certainty.
You may also recall that Descartes was a devout Catholic until his death, and so, apparently, more opposed to certainty than belief.
Ex nihilo nihil fit.
Or remember as I do, in this order: That we are all flickering specks on a whirling pebble, itself destined for the intergalactic orphanage. That we are titans to cells. That we are unknown to ourselves.

Ode to Blemishes (in Three Haiku)

Like some larval soul
Encased in a milken pearl
You rise, ingrown hair

Because when ripe you,
Vesuvial, test our will
Little red pustule

Past the comedo
Furuncles and carbuncles
protein seas below

to the unsung pamperer

As more prestigious fingers scratch out sonnets to true love
and other would-be profundities
I tip my hat to the soldier
Concealed beneath the dungarees
Dear diaper

Oh pardon me, thou swollen lump of pulp
Lying there at your inglorious end
Slumping pale atop the bin
Cumuloid heart swelling with the fetid detritus
Yet another wonder
To leave splendid men unimpressed

As hungry they labor to rub a new shine
onto the will of knobs for burrows divine
Yet is it not the nature of hands to find breasts
The impulse of arrows to be crowned in flesh?

(Strange things by which to be impressed.)

But you were not so foregone
What part of fate
resulted in your polyacrylate
resealable tape?

What synapses were fired and how many paychecks expired
To build the factory that was your womb
How many tankers set sail to sea creatures impale
Through haunted lands to reach my hands
And over unfettered bowels prevail?

What disgraceful tautology
To disdain a marvel like you
For our sins of scatology

kitchen chair

Kitchen chair, kitchen chair
Imagine if you were covered in hair

No one would sit on you

What would you do, oh kitchen chair
In the eventuality that you were covered in hair

Would you go to the zoo
Write a novel or two
Perhaps even learn
To play the kazoo

Would you embrace your hair
Style it with flair
Wear it with pride
To the market and fair

Or would you whine on
About how deeply unfair
Is life in a world
Where a chair can grow hair
Such that no one will sit there.

The Belch

The belch was sentenced to forever ridicule by the court of Western values.

The same that gained fame by ruling that the literature would depict the Almighty as a pillar of fire, rather than pink and fluffy cloud.

(and who could put a number on the procession of values which emanated from that call.)

The belch, like many of his organic brethren, lacked the intellectual capital

For a good defense.

Slunk up into the chamber from his slick gray alleys.

Where everything is so wet with determination, that one might think…

This gaseous millipede, offered up from below by throngs of bacteria.

Rubbing hopeful hands from seas in crannies.

Would be coronated on his way

Up he rose, into reason, rigid, unforgiving.

Erupted in a ripe mew, freeing the kernel souls

Of stewed potatoes,

Releasing the beef from the injustice of the buttered pan

From within him they soared, spectral, on the backend of an instant

Hooting for homes of their own, less crowded than the soil

Not imprisoned in the bowl.

But like so much grace they were

Dispersed, with a grimace

A blush, a wave of the hand,

A belly clutch

Thus disrobed of their pleasure

Cast into the ether

Disinterred alongside more formidable plaintiffs

The NAP

He is napping. Until 4:30, he asked. It is now 5:36

I feel so powerful.

I think:

Maybe I’ll let him sleep all night.

Maybe I’ll let him sleep into next week.

While the shoots of baby’s teeth push on up into that angelic cavern.

Maybe I’ll let him sleep into a bud, which I will plant in the ground,

And wait for spring until a new husband emerges.

Maybe a smaller husband with a leaner face.

Maybe a more saturnine, mercurial, martian husband.

Like Schopenhauer said, we purpose after new problems.

(Schop’s purpose was, in part, diminishing ‘women’ whilst chasing teenaged tail. One wonders if his views on the former were shaped by his experiences with the latter.

Who could hardly be called women.

Too perfect and complete and capricious, are teenaged girls.

To be called women.)

I hear thuds. The wooden door shushes back in the periphery and in the perpendiculary to the triangle of my leg.

My husband emerges. In blue underwear.

It’s 5:30. You didn’t wake me.

It’s 5:39. And I was not going to.