Or the Coyotes

It can be sweet
Tang Vermont

Like buttercream
Destination

They howl
They do
They make their noise

And you rock back and forth
On the porch
With your rocker

Ka-chush
Ka-chush

Making light saber noises

And two feet away
The cat's getting eaten
By what it thought was a shadow

Shadows don't have teeth
Didn't you teach the cat that?

The cat's soul rises up
And you go down, down, down

Pressured by the gravity
Of the situation

There's a Mexican word
For what you are
But you can't roll your tongue
So the word comes out wrong

Identify yourself
You can't

The rude roots leave your system
Four days later
Than you needed them to

The rent is sitting on the coffee table
White specks still clinging to it

That'll be your legacy
That you paid your rent on time

Ka-chush
Ka-chush

Light saber sounds
Scare the shadows away
Don't they?

Front porch stories
Keep the kids in line

DVR-ed bullshit
Makes life a little simpler

And when you fixate
You do it
On the poetry
Of your last five days

And if you don't
You could just simmer

You could just slowly
Come
To
A
Boil

Or the coyotes could get you

That's a possibility

That's a distinct
Possibility

One you'll entertain as you rock
And back
And forth

Ka-chush
Ka-chush
Ka-chush

Boy, 15, Surfer

You gotta go in to eat sometime
And to drink
Ironically

You get dehydrated
From being out too long
On the water

Got a nice stomach
Got a nice tan
Got a girl looking at you
Like she likes you
Because she does

Because girls
And boys
Most people
Are drawn
To lion tamers

And that's what you are

The waves are lions
And you beat them back
With your chair
Then ride them around the ring
Only falling when you want to fall

Only being bitten
When you feel your skin's too tight
And you need to let
Some of the air out

In school Friday they talked about futures
Various futures of various students
Because sophomore year will turn into junior year will turn into senior year
And then where the fuck are you gonna be?

Still out here?

Still riding lions?

Still spending every Saturday morning
At Vacco
Or Trade City
Or San Juego?

Still hanging out with guys three times your age
With skin like melted leather
Talking about how shitty the waves are now
How they were better twenty years ago
Before you were born

You wanna tell them to fuck off
That the waves are ten times better
And everybody knows it
And everybody knows the old men are just mad
Because they don't have the bodies
To tame the new waves

Not like you do, right?

Sometimes you get bitten too hard

You miscalculate
You misinterpret
You get too close
To shiny white teeth

That's when you wash up on shore
Like a broken board
Only to find that the watching girls
Stopped watching
Because they were too nervous

Your lack of fear
Makes them feel afraid

You laugh and notice
You can't hear out of your right ear

That's happened before
But this time it seems--

Fuck it

Who needs to hear?

Who needs to see?

Who needs to ride forever?

You don't ride and hope to stay up

You like to crash

You like the feeling of crashing

You like the break
And the slap
And the burn
And the blackness of it

You like knowing you may not wash up
This time around

That this time the lions may circle
And swallow you up

And then it'll be like you never existed
And in school there'll be an empty desk
With no note on top of it
To tell anyone where you are

'Cause you're nowhere

No more future talk

You'll be a part of the water
The waves
The crash

And in that way
You'll live forever

As long as the Earth doesn't dry up
And if it does
You'll go into the air

You'll be the new San Juego
And other fifteen-year-old's will take you on
Thinking they can unlock
Whatever it is you put away
The day you went under

But for now the lions are calm
They're not that hungry
Not today

So you ride
And you tame
And a little part of you
Feels let down

Feels like it's all getting
Way too easy

Bland

I am a secondary character

And so
It is crucial
That I remain
Bland

Even using the word 'bland'
Is dangerous
For someone like me

A good vocabulary draws too much attention
It makes you seem well-rounded
Fleshed-out
Circular
Round
Whatever

It makes you seem like a lead
And I'm not a lead
I'm not even a supporting character

I hide in the back
And contribute
With my...space

This self-awareness is tricky
Because
Again
It makes me seem interesting

The moment I'm interesting
My workload increases ten-fold
And my creators get angry
Because suddenly
They have another character
They have to write for

Suddenly I need a story-line
And a love interest
And deep emotion

Suddenly standing in the background
Is no longer an option

It might not sound like much of a life
But it's easy
It's comfortable

There's absolutely no chance
That anything interesting
Will ever happen to me
And that's...

Relaxing

I may live forever
Bland people have been known to actually
Provided they don't step out of their--

Would you call it a comfort zone?

...I did love someone once

Briefly

We, uh, we used to stand together
Next to trees and in the background
Of parade scenes
Stuff like that

And so we got to talking
And before we knew it
We were...

And I wanted to keep quiet
But she, uh...

She wanted to upgrade
To own what we...had
What we were
What we were in

She wanted to be in love
To just...do it

And they got rid of her

The, uh...

She got put in some movie
Where she died of a terminal illness

I was a doctor walking by
When she died

I was staring at a clipboard
I was emotionless

I felt...nothing

There are benefits to being bland
And there are...

Drawbacks

But if you focus on the benefits

If you just look at them
And never look away

You fail to see the drawbacks
You fail to worry
You fail to want more

You never know joy
You never know passion
You never feel or experience anything

Not really

You just stand in the back
And watch other people
Live their lives

And sometimes you think--

Well...

That looks nice

And then you just...

Think about something else

Something else
Entirely

My Breakable Heart

It's not a secret
That it's here

This breakable heart
This beautiful cross
This crutch
This cancer in me

It's not too much
When you carry it right

When you know how to hold it
When you're smart about it

You put a suit jacket on it
And suddenly you're a grown-up

With grown-up habits
And grown-down
Drag out
Lunacy

Stitch it back together
And they won't see the seams

Hold it in your hands
And you won't see the wrinkles

The nice shoes
The soft music
The tender trial period

Before the testing
Is done

This crack
This snap
This break break break

It's just a heart
It's just my heart

This believable
Blue
Rich
Kind
Vulnerable
Strong
Soft
Strong
Soft
Breakable
Heart

It doesn't get tougher
But the walls around it do

That's how it works
That's the trick to it, you see?

That's all you need
To know

Ava Does Things and Thinks About Them

Ava comes home

She always forgets
Which key lets her in

Maybe one day she'll have a brain tumor
Maybe that's what it means
When you can't remember which key is the house key
And which key lets you into the supply closet
At the office

Ava takes off her shoes near the door
She puts her coat in the hall closet
She takes off her earrings and puts them on the table
Next to the bowl full of spare change

She doesn't own a jewelry box
Because the earrings
And an old rusty band
Are the only two pieces she owns

Maybe she should invest in a jewelry box
But then she'd want to fill it with jewelry
And that wouldn't be practical
At this point in her life

She grabs a container from the fridge
And throws it in the microwave
At high for three minutes

That's just enough to make it hot
But not scalding

It's pasta salad
With red onions

Eating red onions on a Friday night

It seems like a sort of surrender

Like saying--Nope, I'm definitely not going out tonight

She scrolls through the DVR
And finds nothing to watch

Oh, there's plenty to watch
But there's nothing
She feels compelled to watch

She thinks about getting a cat
But that would be an even bigger surrender
Than the red onions

A single woman with a cat
A single woman over forty with a cat

At least she still wears high heels
Nice shoes, that are in no way sensible

This is her fighting
The cliche
She is on the verge
Of becoming

One cliche she will not fight, however:

Wine

She pops open a new bottle
Her third of the week

She looks around for someone to judge her
But even in this, she comes up short

So she judges herself

The red onion steams her mouth
But she likes it when it gets hot like that

She likes seeing how long she can go
Until she takes a drink of something
To cool it down

She fantasizes about going to the city
To whatever the nearest city is
The nearest impressive city

One you'd see in a car commercial

All dark and lit up
At the same time

She imagines walking down a street
In her not-at-all sensible shoes
Swinging an expensive purse at her side
Laughing to herself
Because some man just necked with her
And smelling bread
From a nearby bakery
Because that's how late it is

(In her fantasy, anyway)

She doesn't actually live near an impressive city
And necking is something nobody does anymore
At least, nobody does it on tv

And where would this necking man come from?

Where do women over forty go
Without looking pathetic?

She lays down on her couch
Which is the ultimate surrender
The real surrender

Ava may as well drape a white flag
Over herself
And close her eyes to die

She is going to fall asleep on her couch
Watching bad television
With an empty food container
Mere feet from her
And an empty glass with wine lingering at the bottom of it

This is how they're going to find me
She thinks to herself

One day I'll die like this
And they--

Who is they?

Somebody

Somebody will find me like this

It'll be incredibly sad for them

Not so much for me
I'll be dead

God this was all so morbid

Ava gets up

She goes into her bedroom

She finds a dress at the back of her closet
That reminds her of the nineties

Are the nineties back yet?

She missed the seventies coming back
But she didn't have all that much from that decade anyway

Her mother used to dress her
Like the third wife
Of a cult leader
So she burned most of that stuff

But the nineties were supposed to come back soon
Isn't that right?

Give it twenty years
And things become vintage

Ava puts on a nineties dress
And lo and behold

It doesn't fit

Not at all

Why were the young so effortlessly skinny?

And why didn't she enjoy being young
More than she did?

More than she remembered anyway

She put on another outfit
This one from last year
And she looked much more presentable

She brushed her teeth
To rid the onion smell from her mouth
Then mouthwash
To seal the deal

She went into the hall
And considered the earrings

Screw 'em

Who needs earrings

She put on the not-so-sensible shoes
And took her coat out of the--

No, it was warm

Who needs a coat

She had no idea where she was going

Maybe just for a drive
Maybe to the nearest cliff
To look out over it
And think up poetic suicide notes

Maybe she'd surprise herself
And bring back necking
With some man
At some bar
She was too old to be at

In her head it was like a car commercial

Her, Ava
Driving through a generic city
With some low-throbbing techno song
Playing underneath her

In the commerical
She'd have sunglasses
And her hair would be perfect
And she'd have a look on her face
Indicating 'don't mess with me'
And also 'I'm a tiger in bed'

But if that all didn't come true
It was no big loss

For now she just wanted out of her little apartment
And the 'now this will happen'-ness of her life

She wanted to say she did something
Without thinking

Without giving it even
A second thought

I Heard It's Good

So how long are you in town?

Two days?

That's great

You should really go see some theater while you're in town

So, let's see--two days

You could see two shows

Three if you caught a matinee on Saturday

Is there anything you've heard about that sounds interesting to you?

Ohhhh The Tempest

I heard it's good

One of my friends saw a preview
And said it changed her life
And now she wants to move to a deserted island
With a gender ambiguous twelve-year-old

Yeah, you should definitely see that

The revival of Call Me Madam?

Oh, I heard it's goooooood

Someone posted a clip of one of their rehearsals
And one of the comments said that Sheila Fenton
Is giving the performance of a lifetime
And that if you don't see it
You might as well just kill yourself

So that's a possibility, right?

That new play by Christopher Diaz?

You know what?

I heard it's goooooooooood

Someone on Twitter read a page from the script
And they said it was the best page of anything
They've ever read

You should definitely try to catch that

Oh, and the revival of his last play Confusion

I heard it's soooooooooo gooooooood

I know someone who's in it
And they said it's amazing

They specifically said they're amazing in it
And even though it seems like they'd be biased
They promised me that they're not biased at all
And that both they and the show
Are phenomenal

So you might want to add that to the list

You know what?

I'm probably overwhelming you right now
With all these choices

You should just enjoy yourself while you're here
And not worry about checking stuff off a list

Just go grab dinner somewhere
And relax

Where?

Well, do you know about that new restaurant Tori's?

I heard it's good...

The Clay Pot of 1997

I haven't made anything
Since the clay pot of 1997

Granted, it was a...

I mean, it was a stellar pot

It was featured in the "Up and Coming" section
Of Artists & Clay magazine

I was sooo intensely proud
Of that piece

And, you know
That was fifteen years ago

Okay, so--yeah
I admit
I haven't exactly been
What some people would call

'Productive'

But you know
When did the goal of art
Become all about
You know, pumping out piece after piece

I mean, I'm not--

My goal
When I set out
When I first set out
Was just to, you know
Do the best work possible

So, it was 1996
December
And I started working on this pot
This clay pot
And in, like, a month
It's finished

Done

Bang

Just like that

And I was--

I mean, I was shocked
At how quickly it all came together

But I wasn't about to say--

'Okay, that's my process

That's how quickly I'm going to work
Forever and ever'

Because it doesn't really work that way
And it turns out I don't work that way

Maybe I'm just one of those artists
Who creates something
Once every few decades
And when they do
It's this ground-breaking piece of progress
That pushes everything forward
In a new direction

And if that's the case
I have at least five more years
Until anybody should be expecting anything from me

So why would I even bother
Sitting down
Trying to force something out of myself?

I could still be in the germ phase
I could be percolating
I could be on the verge of something
And if I push
Forget it

You know?

Just--forget it

So I'm not pushing it

1997 was a great year
And I'm sure that probably
Two or seven years from now
Will be a great year

But what's the rush, you know?

I just don't see the need to rush