The two short pieces I wrote today are the product of eroding confidence in a medium that wants to make money, and hasn't been lately. Both pieces contain some of the worst sentences I've ever written. But read them. You will be gratified.
Cooking Socially
The casserole had cooked too long, and was no longer palatable, as it might have been, in spite of it being tuna/noodle, had it not fallen victim to a nap. When I woke, the casserole had stratified, with the burnt portion lining the bottom of a dingy red ceramic baking pan, like your grandmother probably used. At the top there was a thin, crisp and unwanted crust, and in the middle was a soggy approximation of the American middle class.
I feel at one with all burn-out cases, at the bottom of the bowl. But still, it was not a good casserole. Not good eating at all.
His Inability to Come to Terms
Each morning I would begin as if bound inside a cocoon made of rare spandex, so the hope of exodus could seem real, if only for the first hopeful and then frenzied seconds. By 9:23 I would accept the type of bondage that is both intangible and a real fucking pain.
Years ago my fingers were broken by a Turkish airport luggage screener, for having only what looked like a false bottom in luggage. It was a sheet of composition
board intended only for use in a business presentation, about the advantages of fluoridation in countries with chronic bad breath, but his perception and my fingers met a smarting consequence. "You were thinking of smuggling some no-no into our land, you bastard," he said, before forcing my left hand beneath the canope of a Xerox 1090, and then sitting on it, his muscular buttocks applying the force of a hundred jackals. It is for this reason that I type slowly. But the dull feeling in my head is my own Turkish taffy. It is simply a bad day for the sublime. I surrender, and will limit myself to poems, sent to brethren civil servants at the welfare office, all of us in pain for not going to a decent university, as opposed to a state university in jerkwater.
No amount of scribbling can replace Ivy League schmaltz. I am a cinder.
Cooking Socially
The casserole had cooked too long, and was no longer palatable, as it might have been, in spite of it being tuna/noodle, had it not fallen victim to a nap. When I woke, the casserole had stratified, with the burnt portion lining the bottom of a dingy red ceramic baking pan, like your grandmother probably used. At the top there was a thin, crisp and unwanted crust, and in the middle was a soggy approximation of the American middle class.
I feel at one with all burn-out cases, at the bottom of the bowl. But still, it was not a good casserole. Not good eating at all.
His Inability to Come to Terms
Each morning I would begin as if bound inside a cocoon made of rare spandex, so the hope of exodus could seem real, if only for the first hopeful and then frenzied seconds. By 9:23 I would accept the type of bondage that is both intangible and a real fucking pain.
Years ago my fingers were broken by a Turkish airport luggage screener, for having only what looked like a false bottom in luggage. It was a sheet of composition
board intended only for use in a business presentation, about the advantages of fluoridation in countries with chronic bad breath, but his perception and my fingers met a smarting consequence. "You were thinking of smuggling some no-no into our land, you bastard," he said, before forcing my left hand beneath the canope of a Xerox 1090, and then sitting on it, his muscular buttocks applying the force of a hundred jackals. It is for this reason that I type slowly. But the dull feeling in my head is my own Turkish taffy. It is simply a bad day for the sublime. I surrender, and will limit myself to poems, sent to brethren civil servants at the welfare office, all of us in pain for not going to a decent university, as opposed to a state university in jerkwater.
No amount of scribbling can replace Ivy League schmaltz. I am a cinder.
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