Monday, February 16, 2009

Move hand at yes

In Zurich, and while I talked about it/now the house is empty of romance except a potted flowering plant from my mother for Valentine’s Day/talks in NYC about a businessman in Brooklyn named James Johnson Sweeney/writes about Irish women writers and other Irish people/that “sex” had been referred to in her mother’s past as “rendering the debt”/and the other people in her world are much more active and engaged/something I was given to before that/our weekend was a love affair and/I like your Pendleton sweater/realized early but didn’t or wouldn’t that I was not replicating my happy days but creating a bomb that/it was Abe Lincoln’s 200th birthday/laughed it off, as if:/might add too much/when I thought I would refuse to finish my novel about/but he stayed in Binghamton, afterall/disappointing date with someone we picked out for her/and one of them told me he could move to Ireland merely/and he asked me to give him some paint/sat in the/immobilized in her apartment by her inability to make a decision about wrongdoing about which she knows/name was German/retained everything we learned/that I could at that point begin to/saw myself as beyond shaving when I swore it off (for the time being) and swore off haircuts and touch-ups/why wouldn’t his mother or his father have mentioned Irish blood/I sat in the back row with Deb/without writing it in the first person/male point/the reader might care very little about her/we learned more than usual for a seminar/Marie Ponsot told us in her talk about the writer’s duty/who writes three poems and contracts to write little or nothing/so I thought it might not add much to the conversation to report it/blood in their family/would last a lifetime and that would turn out to be no one’s fault/he sells cars now as the bottom fell out/it was to have had a/perhaps I’ll send a gift certificate for paint/happened and that contained its own happinesses/when I met the other Michael in Texas, I/the years I lived in/first row and smoked when Jerry wasn’t smoking/with whom I ate at Perkins many, many nights/to impersonate men movie stars in the mirror/no man has set foot in my museum since I moved here on Jan. 16/I told him he seemed Irish to me/later I wrote five short stories about him and about our plan to/the cupboards have a name that I can’t think of now but will/novel about writer’s block rather than about a rock band named ISM-GISM/he said he was three-quarters Irish and one-quarter German/he bought a house with a turret where his son/write male characters in fiction for the first time/other people smoked besides/it was awkward sticking to it all weekend -- I/so that is how I’ll remember it -- the/dubbed him Michael to remind me of my friend/he told me that he’d asked his mother whether there were Irish/story that introduces a novel that doesn’t exist/if only I hadn’t sworn off shaving/the woman in the short story is less interesting than the/Americans whose ancestors were from Ireland/brother to see about the gasket under the toilet/I wanted to say a few times that you are/even though we threatened it when Irish bars were/then he got a little pissed off that she’d told him that on the phone/he had his birthday on Feb. 12/translation reading in Chicago/I’ll compose a letter to you and then create a cut-up of it/the nights after he’d told me he was German-American/Tomas and Michael were done smoking and before Jerry smoked again/he was not enjoying his birthday in the least/before?/I might put myself in the position of having to iterate stories of Irish men/there was such an opportunity to see each/move to Canada/and we pretended to be bored by cloudy Binghamton/and this drawing became a/and that is how I came to avoid going in for salon/what we call love or banging/which distressed me/but in the third person male point of view/sold me the corner desk and cupboards/and I might have/a Harley Davidson salesman I met in AA/friends was in the original Jerry Rothenberg course/because she is emotionally frozen/something we never did or visited/Texas and leave it as a short story/cobalt blue with copper in it/he and our Greek-American friend/monument to friendship that started then/almost nothing/to color and facials and manicures and pedicures/she and I smoked when/and I’d talked to him earlier that day/it was the motorcycle salesman she’d found so one-note/one man has set foot/before I finish writing this to you/he was worried about the/after all the cuts have been made/that must have been how I began/a few men have set foot in/fat chance I’d send him paint/the next time I saw him/a novel that spans 30 pages/I’m showing you how I’m not always right/someone being funny might think it’s a/Binghamton/I told you that my aesthetician/that I had crossed over/complex chronological design/Michael drew my lips in his sketchpad/through his last/my presentation was on Dada/Irish, but you had said that already/let’s cut this up and send it/the Comcast installers, twice/other in the evenings/and she’d said there was/bathroom renovation/by proving his heritage/it/just something -- a timeframe -- that/and I had many Irish friends/not from Ireland/plays drums/the man and his son who/there was/my friend, Maureen/Kathy, had gone on a/I enjoyed your stories/the night we went to the/but/Tomas/man for the first time/the rest I told you/but that was nothing I could believe/my museum since I moved here on Jan. 16/to show you/out of his business/but I/the owner’s/but other people call him Mikey/really leave it that way/and she is a poet/closing/day, the time/I visited Irish bars in the evening/that/of view/I went to one of her/treatments/we/on one of/a man/

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