Category Archives: Prose Poetry

239. 12 Steps of a Tradeshow Junkie

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1

This is my life. I’m on a plane. The plane is going down. I’m watching this on TV. The TV is off. I have friends over, in my hotel room, people I’ve never met. I have no friends.

Let me start again.

2

I work the company tradeshows. They send me to Florida, San Antonio, Toronto, the moon. I wear a nametag enclosed in plastic, hanging around my neck by a string. I could strangle myself with this. Just joking. I would never do such a thing.

3

In Atlanta I get into a line of people, and we take an escalator up to the next floor where we half-circle to another escalator going up. When we die, this is how it will go, escalator after escalator, until we reach the floor of our convention center lined with gold. Or a hole leading down into a fiery pit. Or neither. Or both.

I’m not telling this right.

4

A man steps to the urinal beside me and pees without hands—very uncouth. I’m in Denver, Delaware, Duluth.

5

I’m in the Midwest somewhere or San Francisco. Memphis, Seattle, Tempe. I’m in New Orleans with a bag of jellybeans. I’m sitting in a kiosk or in a Turkish bath or in a taxi. I’ve just paid the fare or the person behind curtain number one and am about to step out, to push the door away and parachute down.

Quad grandé extra vanilla soy mocha with whip and sprinkles (please).

6

In the morning I comb my hair, I brush my teeth, I shave, I put my smile on.

7

I’m staying in Dallas at the Marriott Courtyard, which is just down the Freeport from the Marriott Residence Inn, which is just down the Freeport from the Marriott Mothership. Over there is the Earth, a big twirling ball of blue. Strange that I should notice such a thing.

8

On the 3½ hour flight, they feed us a granola bar, an 8 oz. cup of blueberry yogurt and a shiny miniature packet of raisins. Am I full? I never really know.

9

I slide my keycard through the slit on the door and wait for the red flicker to go green. I step away from the toilet and it flushes for me. I stick my hand beneath the soap dispenser and a glob of whitish soap like jism squirts neatly into my palm.

10

I’m eating a cheese steak in Philly. I’m standing on a cement ledge staring at ice patches in the Detroit River and thinking of drowning myself (not really). I’m in O’Hare. I’m in my underwear. They tell me I’ve been selected by the airport for a security check. They rope me in and wave me with a wand.

11

On behalf of the captain and the entire flight crew it is a pleasure having me on the flight this morning. They’re pleasured. I pleasure them.

12

I look out the window and oh sweet Jesus one of the engines has caught fire! (I’m only joking.) I’m in a cloud. I’m in a crowd. We circle around and go down, circle around and go down.

233. The Mosquito

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The mosquito comes into the barn. She was hatched, had spent her young larva days, and had been raised to her pupa adolescence, in literal goop, in stagnant rotten sludge. But now she was flying, and this made her crazed with the taste, for whatever reason, of blood. She lusted after it. She had high hopes, indeed, a tad grandiose as they were, of sticking herself into the gluteus maximus of the universe, into the very buttocks of God, and drinking until she was drunk.

They had taken no preemptive measures, these fatty and sweet, blood-smelling humans. They had not eaten their garlic or sprayed themselves with Off. She felt hardly bad then about her unilateral approach. Their cracks were showing as they were working at the back-end of a horse, helping to deliver a foal, in the hay of a stall. It was almost laughable for how easy it was, therefore, to land at the edge of a flannel shirt here and just —mmm-hmm, yep—and to fly over there for another—yep, uh-huh—and a—Oh, God, does that feels good—and then for one more little—mmmhh, yes, that’s what I’m talking about.

218. After a Near-Perfect Season

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The top organic tomato-growing farm in the county had a near-perfect season, the best in the last ten at least, when the green hornworms—monstrous caterpillars—started showing up and eating the tomatoes right off the vines. Shortly after, or concurrently with, the caterpillars, came a strand of fungus known for causing the Irish Potato Famine.

Some thought these unlucky, late-season nuisances were part of a larger conspiracy but that was stupid. Who would conspire against the farm just because it was voted “The Best Organic Tomato Farm” four years running by the citizens in the city thirty miles south, and was written up twice in the free city weekly (circulation approximately 200,000), and had experienced an increase in business over the last three years by sixty-five percent?

The season had two weeks to go, three weeks max, after weeks and weeks of tender care, and what does the farm manager do? Let’s call him Bob. What does Bob do? Bob buys pesticides is what he does, and not the organic kind, but the real horrible for all sorts of health reasons and for the adverse environment impact type of pesticides, mixes up these nasty chemicals in the farm’s industrial vats and goes out at night with his crew to spray down the vines.

Later, when brought the first tomato from the last September batch, his boss—let’s call him Tom—the farm owner, slices it with his pocketknife, puts a wedge of it into his mouth and says to Bob, the manager, “That’s the best organic tomato you have ever made.” Still later that year, at their county’s October festival, the farm wins first prize for their organic Beefmaster and Early Girl and Brandywine, the other varieties taking second or (more rarely) third.

The farm manager, Bob, it should be noted, is also the farm accountant. He quote unquote works the books in his favor on occasion but nothing that anybody would notice and only because his wife has late stage cancer, she’s hairless, the whole bit, real sad, one kid in elementary school, and the bills are outrageous.

“Wait! What?” I said when Bill got to this part in his story. He was dealing out the cards with an unlit cigar in his mouth. “This isn’t okay. It’s a major crime what Bob’s doing, a big deal.”

“But the pesticides and the press and the prizes are nothing, Tim?” he says to me. “Just everyday procedure, that’s what you’re saying?”

“No, of course not,” I say.

“Pay attention,” he says.

“But you’re confusing me.”

“What if I told you,” Bill said, “that I had certain insider information about the farm owner, this man we’re calling Tom?”

“Would it make any difference at this remove?”

“What if I told you it was the farm owner, in fact, who sent this farm manager, Bob, for the pesticides, to a farm co-op in the next county over?”

“Do we even know what we’re talking about anymore?” I motioned for another card.

“What if I told you as an extra precaution this farm owner instructed his manager to wear a meshed-back hat emblazoned with the insignia from the second most popular organic tomato farm in the county when he went in to sign for and pick up his order?”

“I still don’t get it.”

“What if I said that manager was me?”

“Okay, fine,” I said. “I would probably say, ‘That’s the best organic tomato you have ever made.’”

211. Hispanic Man Working a Weed-Eater against the Bank

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Before the session, you find yourself sitting in conference room Spruce, next to Pine and Fir and across the hall from Aspen and Birch, when a Hispanic man in goggles approaches from outside with a weed-eater, working it against the bank just beyond the patio doors in a determined and somewhat aggressive manner.

As difficult as this is now proving to be—the man as welcome as a yellow jacket at a watermelon feed—you and the other early arrivals decide to sit politely through his display. Don’t panic. Certainly don’t swat at him; that will only make him upset. Ignore him, basically, pretend that he’s not here—pretend invisibility—and eventually he’ll fly away.

210. You Are Here

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You get lost looking for the sign that says, You Are Here.

As the good Girl or Boy Scout that you are (or suddenly wish that you were), you think to stay calm and to shout on occasion and then to shoot your gun (thankfully you have that) twice in the air to signal your friends when they come out looking for you as of course they will, eventually, or so you sometimes say to yourself (and write in your journal: they will come out looking, they will), until it gets completely dark and only a distant fire can be seen, flickering on some ridge, accompanied by a soundtrack with strings.

After the fire dies out, a moon appears, in real-time, which takes years.

208. Sometimes a Mountain

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But imagine what it must be like before it all begins, while standing at a second floor office window, for instance, while holding a mug of painfully strong coffee in one hand and in the other a glass of water. Imagine slowly pouring the water from the glass into the cracked dirt of an unknown office plant left behind months before by someone who had been laid off, someone you were recently hired to replace. Imagine what it must look like to any of the others who happen to see you there, as if you are simply standing at the window to water the plant.

When the truth is of course that you are having a sort of bulletpoint moment.

The dwarfed trees spaced equal distance one from the other in their square plots up and down the sidewalk just outside the window have yet to bud. Are these dogwoods? Through these trees, between the frame of the Ben Franklin Parking Tower on the left and the Marriott Hotel on the right, you can see the river, slow and brown and full of secrets. Beyond this river is the interstate and then more of the city queuing out from the city and much farther out sometimes a mountain.

Imagine seeing it if you can, on this clear midmorning in winter, through leafless trees, between the tower and the hotel, past the river, the interstate, the city beyond the city.