.

I am walking down my street and laughing to myself
Because that is what I have to do,
To stay happy.
I’m thinking of the show Malcolm in the Middle,
How the
Little
Kid would run into the room
With a spider bite and talking about chainsawing someone to death
And then the dad would embody a total calamity,
Quickly entering and exiting the room and wanting his favorite tie, talking at high volume at no one in particular.
Everybody was crazy and in a way it was a unique perfection,
I’m walking on a sunny Sunday in the middle of an afternoon
Down my street which is densely populated with impoverished people
And giant roaming dogs and
Into my sight comes a stranger:
I see the open van and immediately I’m embarrassed,
Just hoping it’s not like the worst thing they’ve ever seen
And they’re gonna call the cops on me so I
Avert eye contact for as long as possible,
Look up and see a one year old baby there sitting in its car seat,
Perfectly still and
Smiling right at me
With
All the
Crazy naivete of a life of grandiose undertows of possibility.

I’m walking around in my Orioles hat. I don’t have a car, but I live close to what I need to go to, which is the two bars down the block, to see if they have concerts tonight. My car bit the dust back in ’12 when the oil ran out in Gary, Indiana, the worst place in the U.S.A., and the engine exploded.
I get to the two bars and see that neither has a show tonight, only that one of them has DJ’s on Friday nights. It’s an unfruitful endeavor, in other words, and I would have been better off staying home.
Two things happen in exact concurrence with each other on my walk back home. There’s a dude with this long-sleeved blue and red Cubs t-shirt walking a big dog. Terre Haute has a huge dog problem. There was just a man mauled to death in Dayton by a pit bull this year.
The other thing that happened is that I noticed that that abandoned hat on this one porch of this abandoned house isn’t a crappy blank Target hat at all, but rather a Colorado Rockies fitted. It’s out of style now — with the MLB logo on the back and the straight bill — but I decide to take it home, wash it and then plan to wear it anyway. I had been thinking about getting a new O’s hat, all black instead of the black back and sides and the white front. All of their logos are hopelessly gay and wimpy looking. Maybe I’ll take on a favorite team of a new frontier.
The Cubs fan with the dog doesn’t seem to be doing anything at all. He’s literally walking in a circle, glancing intermittently back at me in a most suspicious manner. You might say he’s got it all.

When you see something deep in my eyes
And smile,
I wonder,
Do you actually see the vision of my future
And does this whole huddled mess
Make sense to you,
Or is your spiritual enthusiasm marked by a
Deliberate, convenient blindness
To all the puzzling complications
And all the changes that lie in wait for all of us
Like pouring water without a cup to keep it in

Just thinking back to my favorite girl’s face,
I was wondering why I liked her so much,
Or if I even liked her at all —
.
Maybe the feeling was something deeper,
Like dread, or fear,
Of her beauty.
.
Her face reminds me of the
Allman Brothers song “Little Martha.”
She happens to be from the South, too,
Although she doesn’t talk in a Southern accent, even.
.
Eventually, for anybody,
The everyday churnings of life
Will suck the energy out of us,
As even she
.
Will stare at the same neon beer signs every
Day, which hum there with inhuman,
Machinated element, an ideal unwanted.

At the laundromat I see this girl I work with whose face reminds me of a flower. She looks hungover. We pretty much all drink a lot here in Terre Haute, Indiana. There probably aren’t enough bars here, incidentally, for anyone looking to corner the market. Anyway, as usual, the girl ignores me with a dutiful, mildly disdainful expression on her face. She’s about 19 or so. I’m 34. At work I try not to pay her much attention, noticing though that her behind is well shaped, wide for her slender sides. At the laundromat when I look up at her I notice her giant, perfectly rounded globes. She is working fast, bent over at about a 30 degree angle straight ahead of me 25 feet, so that the large, treeclimber looking man sitting 10 feet the left of me has her facing exactly. Shamelessly she lets her top fall, exposing the upper one-third of mammoth breasts. I am reading Collected Poems by Robert Hayden. The poem, “The Dream,” is so good that I decide to stop perusing it and pick it back up at a later time when I’m better able to devote it my full attention. It’s often hard to concentrate in the laundromat. Sometimes if I’m reading something and I enjoy it then some rustic looking person will come up to me and really glare at me, which is sometimes unpleasant, although lately I’ve been having so many unpleasant things happen in my life, such as losing my running water for a couple hours, having the net neutrality repeal fu** my phone service in the a**, going to Shoe Carnival and not finding a single pair of shoes that fit me and then calling them on the phone only to find out they don’t take phone orders hence necessitating another two mile walk over there, that I’m not so sure that such a glare would bother me anymore, or that anybody would even be willing to dole it. As I leave the laundromat I think that that girl I was talking about is in this giant SUV, although I can’t tell, since it has tinted windows. The motor vehicle is running and it is 92 degrees outside and cloudy. I flail my arms considerably when I walk. I see a girl walking a dog, Caucasian, about 21 or 22, the dog a tiny little shih tzu or something, whatever they’re called. I don’t really fully understand the appeal of dogs although I have met some with whom I get along. I know not to walk down sixth street, where one time I encountered a large dog, off its leash, foaming at the mouth, driving one young black, 18 or so, to charge up onto a nearby porch, taking retreat. I know not to run away from dogs. I slowly walk. Its owners call to it. And they call to it. And they call to it. And they call to it. It’s still walking after me with no expression on its face. My heart is beating about the boiling point of water, Fahrenheit. After about two blocks it turns down another street, still not going back to its owners. I say to the girl with the little shih tzu, “He sure likes that grass, doesn’t he.” She smiles and says “yes” in a somewhat loud voice. Across the street to the left I see a black. At first I nod and smile at him. Then I glance at his shirt, which is an Indiana State one. I think he says something about “that a**,” referring to the girl who had been walking the dog. She had indeed been exorbitantly attractive. I just laugh and keep going. One time back home in South Bend a black male, 50 or so, had commented to me, “I hope yo boyfriend eatcho a**.” I was really glad he said that. I needed someone to say something to me. It was freezing cold in November and there was really nothing much going on, anywhere, especially, to speak of. The Notre Dame quarterback once stood three inches from the female reporter, smiling ear to ear and looking straight at her, during an interview. Down the street, fourth, I see more dogs and one single cat, who is frowning down, as if it has seen everything that there is to see. The dogs are off their leash and big so I turn around, thinking I’ll go down, I dunno, something. Terre Haute has a lot of streets and giant, old houses. I think, if a dog comes at me, I’ll jump on a car. I think of the Jane’s Addiction song “Of Course”: “Of course this land is dangerous / All of the animals / Are capably murderous”. Perry Farrell has never chainsawed any kittens to death, as far as I know. Well, maybe that’s the problem. Anyway, how anybody’s response to life could be anything but humility is entirely beyond me.

The massive sea of humanity is today to me
Like a mountain, with all parties looking
Inward, intelligent but unconscious.
.
By numbing themselves with drugs,
Television, rape and carnage, they
Have doled unto their own devices
The strength they need to cooperate with the world’s
Plans for them, which was to be unwatched and known.

If finally
You
Should find
Or others
.
Should
Decide that your
Hating
.
Doesn’t matter well
Wouldn’t that be a celebration
For the processions full of
Bloody feasts in the
Well lit precincts of Gotham.

How
Does it feel
To hurt someone?
.
I wouldn’t know…
The last time I did it I numbed myself so bad
That you could drive a Geo Tracker over me
And I wouldn’t feel it.
.
Just observe how the moon shifts in the silent night —
It will not show you,
It stays stalwart in fear
As the cats on porches lick themselves
In preparation for exactly nothing at all.

Walking
Through downtown
Sometimes with the baldhead
On 52 degree nights
Getting off from my line cook job and
Going back home to my noisy apartment in the ghetto,
I stop into CVS for a pack of beers.
The girl working there I have a crush on.
She reminds me a little of the Progressive Insurance girl.
She’s there every night over night
And will brag about her little girly wallet.
Well now I learn that she’s moving.
She calls me “love” when I exit,
After she checks my ID and sells me beer…
One time I saw her walking down the street
In the sweltering heat
Dressed weird and
Blasting music from this little weird boom box thing…
I wonder if she’ll do that in her new place.
I guess it doesn’t matter.
I guess nothing matters.