Pop Tart Blues
Greg Weiss

     

     Remorse is biting again. I feel fine: everybody lives in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, the 
great city of my pleasure, and I'm broadcasting hot water until the ladder on the roof rots 
out. Shadows don't change. The train blows on through. My knife-sharpener is in the 
Museum of Modern Art¹. Everything in Hattiesburg, without moving, runs into the train 
and falls down onto its back. I hope that I'm not being glib. I just put on my snorkel 
mask, I'm better than government cheese, you're buying me as is, and do you know that 
means you can only let me down? My pigment is dull and beautiful, either, because we 
say I love you and go check our messages, alone in a squared circle.
     But the best of us have been turned away from such parties-I, for instance, recently 
learned that hoop-snakes, which curl their bodies into circles and roll at a great speed 
after their prey, have never existed in nature. As the train blows on through an asteroid 
turns dawn into pink dinosaur goo. Drought wilts all of the leaves in my bathtub 
wildflower-garden as a squirrel stretches, upside-down, down a tree-trunk. The dogwoods 
blossom paper and after the storm the air was soft before the storm as a kelp begat a fern.
The chunk of the driveway's pebbled concrete on the enormous stump remembers 
metabolism fondly for the same reasons that the Tin Man is a totem-pole and vice versa.

 

 

 

 

¹I bought it for Nicole as a present when I was courting her.

//   Advance   //