At Oscar’s
This man walks out of his shoes on the heel; his ankles are tattooed gray, a thousand pores confounded with dirt. He reads the simple list of hamburgers again and again, or once or not at all; he has a strange confidence of delirium, the disarmed sanpaku stare, a shuffling in place, a sinking. Like many people he pours sugar forever into coffee; his lips start faintly with anonymous utterances and untoward violent remarks . . . Like many a stunned child adrift he lives without history, confusing memory and sound, and has no questions, suggestions, intimacies or results. He is lost in the inner ear: intricate, confining, peopled with echoes.
Lester, On The Astral Plane
his concentration & singularity leading to sudden easy abandonment, he drifts nonchalantly above the drawing board and the skeleton, muscles, skin & brain bent over his work. how peaceful he feels: the body and mind learn and progress below, the essence floats over and approves. for this reassuring moment he perceives his larger and smaller work, how the body is in tow to the soul by the silver translucent cord through which the two beings, both himself exchange a purposeful questioning like an oboe & English horn singing together, nearly echoing, the sounds wrapping each other in their odd purity.
Untitled
Even among this maze of lighted houses Arises the disorderly smell of raccoon: the bandit, the fierce organizer, one-who-walks-in-a-huddle. They come down from the dry hills By who knows what paths — surely not along the road — Come to overturn garbage and seethe at the dull and domestic: dogs, cats, people’s toys. They freeze in the sudden light and growl with a body improbably deep. Late in the night They and their energetic children root and roust beneath your house As if building a place of their own Down there. Their tricky hands turn out halfhuman noises which time and time again Poke cleanly through your dreams.
