Album

The mental pictures I have of my parents and grandparents and my childhood are beginning to break up into small fragments and get blown away from me into empty space, and the same wind is sucking me toward it ever so gently, so gently as not even to raise a hair on my head (though the truth is that there are very few of them to be raised). I'm starting to take the idea of death as the end of life somewhat harder than before. I used to wonder why people seemed to think that life is tragic or sad. Isn't it also comic and funny? And beyond all that, isn't it amazing and marvelous? Yes, but only if you have it. And I am starting not to have it. The pictures are disintegrating, as if their molecules were saying, "I've had enough," ready to go somewhere else and form a new configuration. They betray us, those molecules, we who have loved them. They treat us like dirt.



by Ron Padgett

Light as Air by Ron Padgett

The Prose Poem

The prose poem is not a real poem, of course.
One of the major differences is that the prose
poet is incapable, either too lazy or too stupid,
of breaking the poem into lines. But all writing,
even the prose poem, involves a certain amount
of skill, just the way throwing a wad of paper,
say, into a wastebasket at a distance of twenty
feet, requires a certain skill, a skill that, though
it may improve hand-eye coordination, does not
lead necessarily to an ability to play basketball.
Still it takes practice and thus gives one a way
to pass the time, chucking one paper after an-
other at the basket, while the teacher drones on
about the poetry of Tennyson.

by Louis Jenkins

Appointed Rounds

At first he refused to deliver junk mail because it was stupid, all those deodorant ads, money-making ideas and contests. Then he began to doubt the importance of the other mail he carried. He began to randomly select first class mail for nondelivery. After he had finished his mail route each day he would return home with his handful of letters and put them in the attic. He didn't open them and never even looked at them again. It was as if he were an agent of Fate, capricious and blind. In the several years before he was caught, friends vanished, marriages failed, business deals fell through. Toward the end he became more and more bold, deleting houses, then whole blocks from his route. He began to feel he'd been born in the wrong era. If only he could have been a Pony Express rider galloping into some prairie town with an empty bag, or the runner from Marathon collapsing in the streets of Athens, gasping, "No news."


by Louis Jenkins

Football

I take the snap from the center, fake to the right, fade back...
I've got protection. I've got a receiver open downfield...
What the hell is this? This isn't a football, it's a shoe, a man's
brown leather oxford. A cousin to a football maybe, the same
skin, but not the same, a thing made for the earth, not the air.
I realize that this is a world where anything is possible and I
understand, also, that one often has to make do with what one
has. I have eaten pancakes, for instance, with that clear corn
syrup on them because there was no maple syrup and they
weren't very good. Well, anyway, this is different. (My man
downfield is waving his arms.) One has certain responsibilities,
one has to make choices. This isn't right and I'm not going
to throw it.


by Louis Jenkins

HISTORY

What with history piling up so fast, almost every day is the anniversary of something awful.

by Joe Brainard

FREUD

From Freud we learn that when a wife smashes a vase to the floor, it is really her husband’s head that lies there broken into many pieces.

by Joe Brainard