from AN OLD MAN NOW
by Robert Perchan

Ho! What do I here behold? Were you brushing the cobwebs off a few quims? Joyce, Ulysses An Old Man now. Dirty one. Dirty thoughts. Dirty memories. Tattered coat upon a stick and all that. Should have said old goat, Yeats should have. An old goat upon a stick. Makes no sense. Unless a hard on is a kind of stick. Makes sense then. Poignant too to those old goats among us who get hard ons at the drop of a mask. Didn’t he have some sort of monkey gland transplant, Yeats did. So he could get it on with his less-than-half-his-age wife or however old she was. What if they discovered bonobo glands cured human male impotence. Can you imagine how that would set the PETA people howling. But they’d be right of course. We have to protect the chimps. If I were a chimp wouldn’t I want to protect human beings. Hell no, I’d want to tear their faces off. That’s their nature. What is our nature. To stand around asking ourselves what our nature is. But we’ll get to the Hamlet shit later. The subject here is I am an Old Man now. What was it Hemingway’s younger waiter said to the older waiter. An old man is a nasty thing. In the story about insomnia and suicide. That was Hemingway’s shtick. Here’s one of mine. * CARROT AND SHTICK Because we were boys we didn’t want to study our Latin. You will be sorry one day, said an exasperated Father Perney, our Latin teacher. Because all the best pornography in the world is written in Latin. And you will not be able to read it. So we studied our Latin. Nyah, Nyah, taunted the boys from Public School. Latin’s for sissies, Catholic School sissies! In the end we had sex with their sassy sisters before they had sex with ours. After which we lost all our Catholic School hair and teeth, went blind, and donned our leper’s bells. Which of course was nothing compared to their Public School dicks falling off. Or everybody’s sisters all running around with these smart ass shit-eating smirks plastered across their faces . . * That’s a Prose Poem. An expression as oxymoronic as an Old Man now’s Time Grows Short. And it’s full of other lies too. I didn’t go to Catholic School. I went to Public School. Sure there were taunts and even a few scuffles. But I was on the Public School side. And Father Perney was just a Latin teacher named Mr. Perney. Does Perney sound dirty to you. It does to me down to this very day. Even perne in a gyre sounds dirty to me because of him. Maybe Perney sounds dirty just because he was always looking down the girls’ middy blouses to check out their boobs nestled in the wire cones of their bras. That’s a fact. My sisters’ friends talked about it all the time. Were they ever so flattered. No doubt. Anyhow that’s the connection between Latin and sex. And the leper’s bells is another stretcher. I never saw one of them except maybe I think on the mother and sister of Judah Ben Hur in the movie where the eponymous hero hid behind a rock. Voyeurism in the Valley of Stone. One wonders what Actaeon and Moon Goddess Diana would have made of that. Or Mother Teresa of Calcutta for that matter. And the bit about the kids’ dongs falling off. That’s a Universal Fear, I take it. What do women worry about falling off their bodies. Probably their faces. Or just their noses. Perhaps their boobs. If you are a woman you can answer this better than me. At any rate three cheers for bilateral symmetry which gave them two breasts. If women were starfish would they have five. One for each armpit. Whatever the case two boobs is the rule for hominin chicks. And there are moments when two boobs can be one too many: * MI-JA In the past, Korean men who married women who were sisters referred to themselves as Goo-mung Dong-suh, or Same Hole Brothers-in-Law. Sisters, it seems, were but extensions of one fleshly entity, identical ripe melons on a single familial vine. Times change, however, and with them morals and the meanings of popular figures of speech. Today, men are Same Hole Brothers-in-Law when they happen to be sleeping with the same woman, like a pair of golfers (or even a threesome or a foursome) on the same pristine, dewy green stroking their tensed and dimpled balls toward a shared cup. The Korean word for female breast is yoo-bahng, literally “milk room.” One imagines a mosque-like dome filled with sterilized stainless steel canisters. One imagines a closed cell filling slowly with the precious white liquid until the penitent’s nose bangs against the ceiling and there is no more air. One imagines a woman built like a house. One imagines walking down long darkened doorless corridors, lost. One imagines meeting her other lost lover on a staircase. One imagines asking directions, trusting. One imagines giving directions, and lying. One has known from birth that there are two breasts, two “milk rooms,” and that a single pair of lips cannot occupy both of them at the same time. One has known from birth that one must go from one nipple to the other, checking, endlessly. Mi-ja! * Now that one is loaded with lies too. Though the Same-Hole-Brothers-in-Law trope is true. And Mi-ja Not-Her-Real-Name had incredible knockers. And another lover. A car salesman on the big US Army base in Seoul. Can you beat that. A poet getting dumped for a fucking car salesman. I never got over that part even to this day. There are pecking orders everywhere. She phoned the other morning some twenty-five odd years late. She’s married to a Physicist on the Asberger end of a spectrum where the colors of your own brilliance blind you to your wives. She’s invisible to him. Or perhaps it’s because she was never a good lay. Just the tits and the excellent English. More likely she was a good lay with everyone but me. I couldn’t make her come and I tried HARD. Did make her drool once. Right in my face. That’s the danger of big titted women. You want them up on top so you can bandy with their dangling jugs. And then you get drooled on. Major uncool. * UNCOOL PASTORAL In high school I dated a Phrygian but she was phrygyd So I switched to Brigette which is French for Little Bridge Across came Phyllis with her chancres and her sheep (She called me Don Coryander and ground me in her meat) Next I shtupped stage twin Vaudevillians and napped happily in their slap-sticky laps Then Jewesses and nurses an Algonquin shaman’s niece Of course I’m lying out my ass now I never got a piece (Except that night beneath the bleachers when gazed I up at skies and glimpsed the preacher’s retarded daughter’s furry slice of humbling pie) * Do you remember the day you discovered you jingled while you walked. Like you had a pocketful of loose change inside your head. Like tinnitus means nobody else can hear it but you. That’s how I am with certain facts of the past. I walk down the street with one hand in my brain fingering the faces on the nickels and dimes of my misdemeanors and the small favors I did friends. Yes, I lied about that. And that. But on the other side of the ledger there’s that and that. I scour the recesses of the pocket in my brain for a face I can be absolutely sure of. One I know I can count on to bail me out when the chips are really down. But that’s it. Save for the lint in the crease. I probe a little further among the lobes inside my belfry. Cranio-proctologist palpating his own self’s pituitary – that prostate of the brain. Ho, what shape’s this – tumescence or tumor. Eros or Thanatos. Ball or bat. * FIN DE SIECLE BASEBALL Snort lines of white powder ninety feet long. From home to first, from third to home. In between, smoke infield grass, outfield grass. Who has shorn the mound so shamelessly smooth and nude? O let no man crease it like a fuzzy summer peach – lest the diamond reach that pitch of perfection from which it may never recover! * Poets and Baseball. What a joke. Baseball as Metaphor. Worse. Even the players admit it is a kids’ game. And the ones who don’t are truly cases of arrested development. That’s Harvey Stone to Robert Cohn at the Café Select. But there may be a similarity between a poet’s brain and a baseball player’s after all. When we’re in the zone we tend to see things slowed down. Call it instinct though no doubt there are better ways to express it. As a poet once wrote: The true measure of a man is a suicide squeeze. I don’t remember where he was going with that but I kind of get the drift. Just as a batter has to see the ball sail over the plate before it gets there a poet feels the next word, the next phrase, the next line swim into ken before he has moved his pen into the downswing. But that’s true even if you are writing a goddam softball thank you note, so: Do I contradict myself. Very well. (I contain platitudes.) And the poem was about intoxicants -- and a shaved mons Veneris. It wasn’t really about baseball at all. If you want to write about baseball you should stick to sportswriting. And the biggest difference between an onomatopoeic whiff and writing a poem. A poet gets to revise: * REAL SAMMY SOSA STORY Chicago Cubs baseball star Sammy Sosa was ejected from a Chicago brothel Tuesday night after the brothel madam found cork in his shattered dick. Sosa had already banged his whore twice in foul territory when his dick broke on a third try. Brothel madam Wanda Humphire called Cubs manager Dusty Baker from an adjoining room and together they examined Sosa’s dick. Cork inside a john’s dick is thought to help him last longer and get more bang for his buck. “Unfortunately it’s a dirty mark against Sammy, when you consider all he’s accomplished,” said a chagrined Dusty Baker. “It’s really unfortunate for the game. Everybody’s scratching their balls right now and wondering why, why. It’s embarrassing. Sammy’s too good of a fucker. It’s too bad.” Chicago was the scene of one of Major League Baseball’s most notorious corked dick scandals in July 1994 when the dick of Albert Belle, then with Cleveland, was confiscated. Brothel madam Humphire, who was on duty that night as well, took Belle’s dick to her dressing room before a resourceful Indians dickboy crawled across the ceiling and switched Belle’s corked dick with a normal dick belonging to another teammate. Once the caper was discovered, the original corked dick was examined by an American League urologist and Belle was suspended from the brothel for ten Saturday nights, a penalty that was later reduced to seven Saturday nights. That suspension was one of the most sensational since Graig Nettles, then with the New York Yankees, was ejected from a Detroit brothel in 1974 after six superballs came flying out of his dick one Thursday night and almost put out the eye of the whore who was servicing him. (Special Thanks to the Associated Press for this one.) * Sophomoronic, sure. Freshmanic, absolutely. My first semester as a Duke Blue Devil back in the day I rewrote a classic short story by substituting naughty words for the genius author’s clean ones. Then I walked down the hallway of my dorm and read the opening sentence to a cheerless audience of lonely soul engineering majors whose sole wish – engendered by a letter from home and the girl they went to prom with promising the hand job she neglected to give that warm June night -- would not be granted until the summer after graduation and even then by a someone they had thought of as just a friend. A substitute, as it were. The story by the way was “Eveline” by James Joyce age twenty-two: She sat at the window watching the prostitutes invade the avenue. Prostitute as substitute. The hand job by Nora Barnacle on 16 June, 1904, Ringsend, Dublin: It was you who slid your hand down inside my trousers all the time bending over me and gazing at me out of your quiet saintlike eyes. Bloomsday as it happened. Hand job being substitute for head job being substitute for actual sexual congress. Pinch hitting for a pinch hitter, so to speak. Cork a substitute for Viagra, the substitute. Don’t know grits from Granola a substitute for Don’t know shit from Shinola. Durham circa 1965. So watch out: A listed side effect of substitution being the enigmatic “vision changes.” * Had my eyes examined last week. Turns out I have these things called floaters. Lacy black lingerie-like skeins and webs that slide blithely across my field of vision as if I were underwater. Sometimes it’s like living inside an Aquarium surrounded by Leafy Dragon Fish – those seahorses in drag. But these floaters have no means of locomotion yet locomotion they have. They always go from left to right or up from down. Never the reverse. My doctor tells me they are just the flotsam and jetsam of old worn-out tissue detached from the wall inside my eyeball and I should ignore any regularities in their behavior. They have no purpose. No design. No intention. No destiny. They are just there and crap I have to put up with because I am old. They are there when I get up in the morning and they are there when I go to bed at night. They are particularly active in their aimlessness when I stare at a sunny blue sky. That kind of weather gets them particularly riled. I say particularly because that’s what they are if nothing else – particles. They refuse to assume the shape of anything I am intimately familiar with except lacy black lingerie, like I said. But what if I had been born into a world without lacy black lingerie. How would I describe them then. I suppose I would just have to go ahead and invent the stuff. Imagine an Old Man now on a lingerie label on a curvaceous, willowy mannequin in your local Victorious Egret. Later I might branch out into His & Hers gift bath towel sets. Towels with poems embroidered on them sharing a couple’s most intimate thoughts. * GIRLFRIENDS Sometimes we hang on to them so long we have to fuck them once a week just to let them know they’re not our sisters BOYFRIENDS Sometimes we hang on to them so long we have to fuck them once a week just to let them know they’re not our brothers * What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, eh. Sitting in the back seat of a taxi with my grandfather when I was twelve. Port-au-Prince. The taxi comes to a stop at an intersection. Standing on the corner a magnificent statuesque Haitian lady with a huge woven basket of laundry balanced on her head. A stunning woman, imperturbable in her composure, even to my untrained insight. My grandfather turns to the Catholic priest who is sharing the ride with us. Wouldn’t you love to goose her right now. The first time I had heard the word goose used in that sense by an adult. I didn’t know you could goose a woman. I had thought it was only something grade school boys did to other grade school boys to establish their rank in the pecking order. I don’t remember if the priest said anything back to my grandfather. I know I didn’t like him though I knew nothing of priests and their little island catamites back then. I do remember I thought Haiti was akin to Hell because it sounded like Hades. With Voo Doo Papa Doc and the Tontons Macoutes in power perhaps it was. The next day on the road back from the Jane Barbancourt Rum Distillery my grandfather let me throw one gourde coins to the kids chasing our car down the mountain. One kid was half my age and stark naked with a dong the length of a ball park hot dog. It slapped giddyap against his thighs as he ran like the barrel of a Buntline Special. Gosling. Gonsel. Gunsel. Gunslinger. * COWGIRL OF MY DREAMS The gloop she puts on her pussy hair to achieve that handlebar effect and always knocks me out she calls her “bushwax” * Did you ever have a rival with a moustache exactly like your own. Someone who smiled at you like Montresor at drunken Fortunato as he planned your immolation down in the crypt. Who bricked you up in the wall so you were never heard from again. Who drank your bourbon and screwed your woman and took credit for your poems. Who cashed your paycheck and savored the loyalty of your friends. Who chewed your food and swore he took one in the gut for you at Buena Vista which you both miraculously survived. Who laughed your belly laughs and sighed your belly sighs. Who came down to the crypt each morning and spoonfed you thin gruel through a slot. Who offered to free you if you would just fess up to purloining the words coming out of his mouth. Either that or solve the riddle of a single electron passing like a bullet through two slits side by side in the same instant of Time. * LATE NIGHT THOUGHT UPON CLOSING THE MAGISTERIAL PRINCIPLES OF QUANTUM PHYSICS So Max Planck isn’t the name of a real male porn film star after all * Ah the Laws of Physiques vs. The Incredible Shrinking Man. Go ask Tiny Alice. I think she knows the story. As a grade-school kid back in the days of tailfins on cars and backyard bomb shelters I had a curious habit of wishing myself about three inches tall and camping out all night on the puellesque omphalos of any one of my female classmates, or at least the pretty ones. They would help me into their bedrooms through a window via a contraption of clothesline and pulleys and a little Easter basket of woven rushes, like the Apostle Paul in the Sunday school Bible pictures, though of course He was just trying to get his ass out of Damascus. I wouldn’t do much once I reached the campsite, just poke around at the dark till I had sated my wonder and maybe play something mournful and sweet on my two-bit harmonica to keep my fears of Nature at bay. I even managed to fake a little campfire down there beneath the blankets by rubbing my homuncular palms red together and blowing upon the imaginary sparks. From time to time the girl’s parents would enter the bedroom to gaze lovingly down like Adoring Gods and whisper endearments to their Little Sleeping Angel in the Flesh while I wolfed down slabs of beef jerky and whole sourdough biscuits and listened to the cricket sounds and chthonic gurglings of hidden springs and The Honeymooners airing on tv in the other room. When I proposed an assignation to Glumdalclitch, the tallest in the class, in excited red crayon on Manila paper, she responded in kind that it was okay by her but I had better give up on the kiddy fake campfire crap and bring along a flashlight instead, which I thought was pretty advanced for our age. She neglected to inform me that her parents let her sleep with her cat F. Pussens, and that, needless to say, was that. * THE HEAVENLY BLONDE IN THE MOTEL SWIMMING POOL doing the breaststroke is, to God’s One Eye, a bacterium on a microscope slide: Infinitely tiny, short lived, possibly even deadly. In that red bikini. * The eyes of Mr. TSE, ABD, brood over the ash heap of his Waste Land. Did he have floaters too. That might explain some of the bruised lingerie imagery therein. Dr. Eckleburg, what are these floaters doing inside my eyeball anyhow. I believe that’s the backstroke, Aged P. Either that or someone once threw a fistful of stardust in your face. Let me think back: Was it Sal who caught me on the rebound after Lilith, that muncher of designer falafels in the ruined shadows of Baalbek, dumped me back on the trash heap. Could be. But that was angel dust and not my cup of tea. Let me think backer: No, not she. Nor she. Nor she. And that’s as far back as it goes. That’s the end of the line. Time to stop thinking and just start seeing. Good old Sal. Let it her be. Was it 1973. And now it’s 2013. You do the math. And for the record, the Lilithic muncher belonged to G, not me. I was the asshole and deserved what I got. Life in Korea with days off in poesy. Good old Sal. Just thank God you didn’t get stuck with me. But for old time’s sake let me show you what in my mind’s eye (where the floaters can’t get to me) I still can see: * MY GAL SAL Her tits sit so high up on her chest they look like epaulettes with nipples * Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind. A smitten but thwarted Sir Thomas Wyatt wrote that. It’s about venery and Ann Boleyn. Venery means deer hunting with a bow and arrow in the time of Henry VIII. It also means pursuit of women for erotic ends again in the time of Henry VIII. Back then the word was handy as a nimble trope. And venery even rhymes with Henry if you pronounce the name Cockney. We don’t hunt deer with bows and arrows very much anymore because it is easier to hit them with a car. Like Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan ran down Myrtle Wilson with Gatsby’s yellow circus wagon and left her left breast swinging loose like a flap. That’s venery with a vengeance, I guess. Of course sometimes venery is just plain old fashioned pastoral bestiality. Like the horny but thwarted Texas kid in The Last Picture Show had what might be called a Sir Thomas Wyatt Cinematic Moment: I know where’s a heifer. It belongs to my Uncle Hank. * THE COMING OF SPRING Well, Word hit town it was coming packed a pecker strummed guitar chugged beer even quoted (drunkenly) from James Joyce “Oxen of the Sun”: with the help of that good pizzle my father left me-- Nothing new, but the way it hit town. Word had it liked barnyard antics: Heifers, in fact. This was not good news. It was not natural. It had to be weird wired wrong or stupid or else it was just trying to make trouble. And if it was trouble it wanted trouble’d get. Unless, of course it really wanted the trouble’d get. Then, it should be ignored which was not easy, heifer humping beneath the statue of Winter, well it just wasn’t done until he did it. And this turned some people on others off and some just watched and waited to see what the bull thought of His Exuberance. Dear Your Bullship, one girl wrote I saw you in the pasture with Spring. How is it? And another thing, they say you can’t beat Spring. Which is true. But if you do and there’s any thing left over can you save a note of the Song he sang like he meant it for me. The bull, of course, couldn’t read so he wrote back in cave wall pictograph detailing the bellowy tauromachy beneath the statue and left the rest to her imagination. Spring, he drew, he’s always before you, and then he’s behind you but coming around. He’ll wear you out with his damn Song. * Sometimes my brain speaks to me in an accent that is not quite my own. And a foreign one to boot. So that I am not at all sure just exactly what I heard. This is a hard of hearing part of I am an Old Man now. For example did I just hear “pinnacle of” or “pinochle love.” Did I just hear “g-spot” or “jizz pot.” Did I just hear “Baltimore Orioles” or “bald demure aureoles.” Did I just hear “Ulysses’ prow direction” or “Ulysses’ proud erection.” Did I just hear “though seemingly false” or “those Semen Leap Falls.” Did I just hear “services” or “cervixes” rendered. Well obviously I just heard them both. Maybe one side of my brain says one and the other side the other in a sort of Julian Jaynes intracranial shouting match. Which is also known as Talking To Oneself. Which is the first step on the path to Madness or Genius. Whichever comes first. Which is simply not true. We all talk to ourselves. Hello me. Meet you. * HACK SONNET Okay I say to myself lifting this selfsame self out of its chair in front of the keyboard You’re not a genius and looking up at Miss April Heidi Hendrickson of the Playboy Calendar on the wall beside me who from the positioning of her squat appears to be taking a dump with the cool precision of a pool shot that reveals momentarily the real and ultimate forces of the Universe which are sexy, commercial, false and precisely aimed at only me. I understand the charges against me. * Do you remember the gangster in Gatsby who wore human molars on his wrists. His cuff links. There’s a bar in Bangkok’s Patpong called Pussy Dental Hygienist (they’re running out of names) where the dancers have little plastic molars glued to the nipples on their bare tits. They call them their Tooth Pasties. But most people choose to wear their teeth in their mouths. The only problem is that’s where they get worn out. I know. I’m an Old Man now with a jarful of extractions and a thousand hours in the Chair. Sometimes I take them out of the jar and lay them in a row on the table and pretend I just dug them up from some Olduvai Gorge or Awash Valley prehistoric site. I try to puzzle out from just my choppers what kind of Bad Ass Missing Link I looked like back then. Lucifer to angelic australopithecine Lucy perhaps. Pure grim grin. * ON FALSE FLATTERY I’m getting a blow job tonight and you’re not. Perhaps among the cruelest words ever spoken by one man to another. So because I had known for years Berenice was a grand mal epileptic, I was glad. So glad I almost neglected to warn him. But he was my friend. “Bull shit,” he said. “You’re just jealous.” When I saw him next he was still walking on air. “I see,” I growled, “she didn’t have one of her fits while she was—” “Oh but she did,” he crowed. “Then how can you possibly be grinning like that?” “First she took out her teeth!” I walked home in gloom and called her right up. “Why the hell didn’t you tell me you could take your teeth out?” I roared into the mouthpiece. “Because,” she sighed, “you told me you were in love with my smile . . ” * If Pussy Dental Hygienist sounds like the gal you go to in order to get your Vagina Dentata buffed, there’s nothing unnatural in that. There are Little Cleaner Fish in the Great Barrier Reef that do exactly that for Big Mean Killer Fish that have what might be the grimmest teeth in the world. The Little Cleaner Fish swim blithely in and out of the mouths of the Big Mean Killer Fish nibbling a smorgasbord of hors d’oeuvre debris and don’t even know they are doing the Big Guy a favor. But they are. And in return the Big Guy doesn’t eat them. He likes being doted upon even if the doters don’t know they‘re doting. This is the cooperation angle of the capitalism of the sea. The competition angle is more of a smack down and much more ubiquitous. Only the strongest teeth survive, said J. Claggart to Billy B., who simply couldn’t or wouldn’t see. We are stubborn this way. We bathe in the sea on a beach in Phuket and ignore what we cleverly dare not see. Which, floaters or no, is also pretty much everything you cannot NOT see. * INTIMATE LIVES OF OUR NEAREST NEIGHBORS IN A NUTSHELL Young sailor lured into back alley by over the shoulder, come hither glance of estrous female rat. Follows, mesmerized by sway and lift of her tail and promised presentation of her hidden parts. Deed done, emerges onto sunlit street, whistling, new bounce in his step. Decades later, bellied up to bar, expands upon thousand such furtive encounters in foreign port cities: You see, the females really like us human beings because of how we treat them. Their males just hate us for that. Now cockroaches are a different story. They don’t give a shit who their womenfolk go off with. And flies? Don’t even get me started on shagging FLIES . . . * The doorbell rings and I interrupt my musings to traipse across the room and answer it, expecting X and the bottle of rejuvenescent mulberry mushroom rice wine she promised. But framed in the doorway is a young Korean man in a white t-shirt with rolled up sleeves and spanking new army camouflage workpants. He sports a post-adolescent fringe moustache that one associates with unpredictable hormone surges and teen-age streetcorner menace. BUG, he announces shrilly. DIE. Were this a story of criminal mayhem and gang revenge he would no doubt lift a shiv to my belly and plunge it in. Instead he politely allows himself into the apartment and commences to spray the baseboards under my kitchen sink with a small brass nozzle connected to a white plastic jug of insecticide strapped to his waist. Sorry, he smiles shyly and shrugs. No English. * OR MAYBE IT’S JUST MY IMAGINATION ACTING UP Well, what is it this time, O my Imagination? What does the dripdrip of the faucet remind you of tonight, O my Partner in Crime? The dose we snagged back in ’84, O my Betrayer of Secrets? Discovered upon a Christmas morning piss—of all days of the year, O my Strange Bedfellow? So that all the doctors’ offices in town were closed, O my Opener of Doors? And we sat at table and smoked and drank the last beers we’d be allowed till after New Year’s, O my Scourge? And I couldn’t look you straight in the eye, O Ghost of Sweet Clean Lays Past? Because you thought I felt guilty and was ashamed, O my Immaculate Confessor? And we’d never go out roaming again, O my Guide and Interpreter of Lewd Gestures? Instead we’d stay home and write true poems of love and pain, O my Swinging Censor? Or Poems of the Imagination, O my Severest Realist and Critic? Is that what you really thought? Is that what the faucet’s dollops suggest to you tonight, O Rememberer? When what we need is a plumber not a urologist. And little less back talk inside my head. * The disinhibitions of the early stages of dementia may have led to the late efflorescence of his poetic muse. A Struldbrug high, as it were, on Paradise and the Milk of Honeydew. That’s what you’re whispering, I’m sure. Well let me disambiguate a little here. Sometimes these floaters look like they were cultured in a Petri dish. One moment they are shreds of leopard panties and the next they are paisley bait ravaged by fish. Don’t know for sure. Better heads than mine have been thoroughly scratched. Could my brain be looking through the microscope of my eyeballs and discovering a new species of evolutionary success. Whatever is eating my muse she refuses to say. Spirochetes on a glass slide. Martinis on a glass tray. But deep down inside me a man dead from the head down is being constantly tossed out of a train. (ACKS: “Fin de Siecle Baseball” appeared in 5AM; “Whoso list to hunt” in 5AM as “On Venery”; “The doorbell rings” in Pearl as “A Visitor: Pusan”; “Hack Sonnet” in a chapbook by Backwaters Press.)

Robert Perchan, Pusan 2014