Birdhead

Get your birdhead out of my face! I might smack you if you don't. Hey birdhead, you've got breath like an old pair of boots and I don't like the look on your face. Oh birdhead, let's pick apart the carcass of a dead bird killed on the road by a passing truck that was bound for a small town in the mountains. I wonder what thoughts are in your head? I wonder why I only see you in public and why my bedroom is birdhead proof. Oh birdhead, is it true what they say? That the world isn't waiting for you or for me and the only way forward is on the same road that everyone else is going on? Birdhead, you're not modern art and you're not simple and you don't make sense. I feel lost and violent and I don't know what to do with my thousands of weapons and legions of troops. Should I command them to bomb a poor desert country or a poor jungle country or a poor mountain country? Oh birdhead, I love you so much!

The oldest trick in the book

It was the oldest trick in the book. First I arranged and then I exerted and wouldn't you know, something happened! What that is, remains to be seen. It took me a long time to come to any kind of consensus on even this, the most vague interpretation of events available to either myself, others, or some third category of being that cannot be expressed by mere pronouns alone. What I would like to say first and foremost, is thank you. Thank you! Thank you for the ingenuity and foresight and all of that shit! Thanks for encyclopedias and how to manuals! Thanks for cook books and textbooks and seminars and lectures and all of that shit! And proceeding from there, we must congratulate all those involved in the process. Am I right? What else? I guess there is little left to discuss. This is the oldest trick in the book, but I am uncertain of which book and where it currently resides. Did I lend it to you?

I feel like this sometimes

Like a little ineffectual, inefficient, lost, somehow trapped in my position in life and the things that define me are just a kind of costume and an exaggerated one at that, and like a lot of people I tell my mom that I love her and I make funny faces when I'm concentrating on something, but I feel like this and I bet it would be more helpful if more people laughed at what I was saying and doing or at least, if people paid me to make balloon animals for them at company picnics and events in the park. I love the way this works when things aren't working. I like the way I feel when I don't feel anything. This is a balloon animal of the endangered Asian Moon Bear and this indent here is where he's been tapped for bile harvesting. This one is a puppy. And this is a giraffe. Like at least that would be a skill. I'd like to be called kooky by strangers and I'd like for them to mean it, without any sense of irony or self consciousness. Does this make sense? Are we recording things. Look at me and you and the sweat stains I left on the shirt you lent me.

I used to do a lot of things, now I only do some of them

Here is a list of things I used to do:

• worked in publishing
  
• rode a bicycle to work
  
• read my poetry in public places for real live audiences
• brewed beer
• baked bread
• taught ESL
• made sandwiches at a deli
• did data entry late at night at an insurance company
  
• made sauerkraut
  
• met with other writers and discuss writing, books, sex, and publishing
• got drunk with other writers
• lived with a girlfriend
  
• went on dates with women that I met on the internet
• performed my poetry with an experimental band called Active Crime Transplant
  
• helped set up charity art shows
• designed books
• played the banjo
• collected typewriters
• hosted a reading series
• went to art museums and art galleries
• got drunk
• put my tongue into people's ears
• corresponded with friends and strangers regularly