I’m feeling myself getting a bit poetry’ed-out.

Last night I found this file in my Dropbox titled “HotBagels.pages” and was all, “???”

Apparently, on December 4th (just this past 2011), I decided to type out a bit of a rant. There are moments which are not so bad.

Here’s the part where I stop at the Hot Bagels in Somers Point on my way to Stockton:

Hot Bagels (excerpts)

I stop at Hot Bagels. I need the communion of carbs.
I order a Super Wheat with full fat cream cheese.
I stand watching the girl toast the bagel
and slather on the cream cheese like a salve.
It is better than meditation, this.
She has performed this operation hundreds of times before, I am sure.
Slicing the bagel open,
and toasting it,
and then applying the cool cream to the
dessicated surface,
to something that’s been burned in the furnace.

In the car, like an animal, I devour it
as the engine snarlsngrowls.
The bagel with cream cheese is something
that can be tasted,
something real, something that is still good/true.
“I don’t know when you graduate, Jim,
what the world will be like, then––
it could be even worse than this.
But let’s just hope that
there is still Hot Bagels, at least.
Because if there’s not.”
(If there’s not.)

I switch on The Smiths.

I want the carbs to soak up all the upset,
to still and to silence me,
picking a seed from gnashing teeth;
pickling a creed.
“The world is too much with us, William;”––
what are all our words worth, I wonder.
“Really, William; it was really nothing.”
They are really nothing, these words:
little seeds that people eat up and pick
from their teeth. Maybe one slips in
to be digested. Maybe two.

Isaac says at the Rewrites meeting,
“I want to eat watermelon seeds and grow
watermelons inside my stomach. I want the vines
to flow up out of my mouth like tentacles.”
Each watermelon like a new world
exploding from a stomach where it has gestated
and grown full.

Each watermelon a new pink world,
fresh, coursing with white veins
and honest refrains: the Prelapsarian state
of the watermelon world, where people are never sad.

I want to place the watermelon on my shelf
in my apartment, on the apartment shelf
with all of the other globes (this one from the Age of Exploration;
this one showing the night sky; this one lights up) and
ask strangers to my apartment, “Can you guess which one
is the real world from this line-up of globes?” and
see how many of them choose the watermelon.