some poems

attaining enlightenment via sleep deprivation

1.

Saturday evening I

I should be sleeping right now

I am looking at a purple wall

We discuss whether it is at all productive to manifest

“I don’t even know where to begin with my life,” the woman with purple hair says to the barista

One doll shoots down daggers, another looks up at god

Liz today said she would be painting tombstones all night

Swiped through dolls on amazon after work

When you were young you took Barbies apart—put them back together

This morning I left eggs out on the counter;

Warm when I got home

Last summer I wrote a scene into various films—

A woman on a bicycle, carrying eggs over to her friend’s apartment—

A performance artist, the friend, cracking eggs over her head

A car crashes into her—the eggs break

That is all you see, the eggs breaking

A new girl moved into my apartment, and brought eggs straight from the laps of chickens

One broken slightly

2.

Saturday Evening II

I try to bum a light from a lady trying to quit smoking

She is sucking on a stick

“What’s up New York,” the man says, working the crowd

He proceeds to discuss the intricacies of East LA, Northeast LA

Which we, sitting in the alley, are intimately familiar with

A man bounds past us towards the dumpster

“Don’t do what I’m doing,” he warns a child walking past, the child holding his mother’s hand

The man in his womens’ sunglasses, his swagger-sunk jeans

Leaps onto a ladder which propels him to the roof

“I wish I had a camera,” I say to the woman who is trying to quit smoking

The light is soapy violet

Her lover comes and gives her a cigarette

We watch the man throw his beer down to the dumpster

Then jump down and fish it out

3.

Seven habits of highly successful people

1.       Pay attention to optical illusions

Across the park you see a vast animal which may be a mountain lion. You are wearing sunglasses—it is in fact a large dog.

What look like shards of glass are confetti, someone’s finished birthday expounded upon the grass.

2.       Let the numbers lead

Your credit score may keep going up, mysteriously.

This is good. It is as if the bank is saying: you seem like you’d be good at having money, why don’t you try it out for a bit?

3.       Wake up before noon

If you can

4.       Decide what success means to you

Sit on the curb next to your apartment and breathe very deeply. Look at old notebooks. Find a passage about a dream you had about a red shirt: you tried to find the precise vision at the tchotchke market but found only other oddities. At the temple you found yourself surrounded by red, reading about several gods.

One god, who protects seafarers, did not cry when she was born. Another was a bureaucrat, who village people prayed to in times of famine. There were others. Red was the guiding color—red made sense there.

On a shady street below the market, you bought a prayer plant at a kiosk run by two brothers. One, the younger, complimented your eyes. He dropped the plant, spilling the soil, then graciously refilled it.

5.        Build your professional network

You were happy to learn the other day that the man with mold poisoning is still alive and well. He at one point claimed to have a degenerative brain disease, and was almost kidnapped in Colombia. The degenerative brain disease was the result of mold; he had all but gotten rid of the mold, cleansed himself of it, but there were still lingering nodules in his roommate’s clothing. Why did he refuse to throw them out, you asked him. “Well,” the man with mold poisoning said, “he’s a fashionista.”

6.       Make note of signs from the universe

A girl at Sunset Junction with flowers in her hair.

A dead lizard, winking up from the bottom of the pool.

7.       Put yourself out there

And then, if you need to, reel yourself back in

4.

Circumstance

On the drive up to Point Reyes

A painter perched like Van Gogh on a golden hill,

Tracing the details of a clear lagoon

Behind him, a cow

Black, with a perfectly circular, gaping white splotch on the center of its side

The painter never turns around

5.

Wisdom

That summer we let the grapes run wild and portraits were painted on all the trees

I spoke to you in silence

And in the winter months learned how to listen to whispers which had been shut out of the beaks which never bore fruit

A new ventricle in my brain developed

That which understands poetry

Wisdom is earned when you stop thinking

And understanding in the time when tendrils reconfigure themselves

Like fog descending on a city

Which in air looks like nowhere you have ever been before

And when you wake up your first morning away from home

You discover you can already picture the street corners, the women washing out their stoops

And the shade of the trees hiding those crevices where the birds develop their secret songs