When the stories I tell can change me, I tell them over again

There are three kinds of memory I’d provocatively tell myself if I knew which self to provoke and the provocative part isn’t what they are so much as who they make me There are the personal memories of course like that one of an early crawl with small fingers tugging at shaggy browns as they make for the Siamese who lies purring grays a world away Or another hand much bigger but less sure The temptation this time is maybe hers sitting close but distant and yet it’s more likely mine and where my hand wants to lie and how it wants me to keep it there forever I have to tell it its forever is longer than mine These memories are an always too slippery to hold and I've always let them go where they will There are also cultural memories the kind with lives and lessons they’ve unkindly kept in books but their lessons don’t live within the bindings clapped down with dust to lessen them They escape with each crack and they tiptoe their stories inside me Their stories that root and rise an idyllic garden leafing lush greens with one forbidden tree I’ve bitten its fruit and it's opened my eyes I’ve re-opened them often and what I see changes and I see in these changes there’s a third kind It’s kept deeper Deeper still Too deep to read or know well It’s written within each cell and it tells the same tales with a different head This head much hairier peeks between dense branches at reds suddenly grown sharper and it peeks for me A snake that can’t be so easily hid.

Rogers Park street scene

There's no present like the moment the used-up and tossed aside not quite dried out strawberry shaped juice container looking down on its luck like the Virgin Mary’s faded but still sacred heart whispers up not the least bit bitter or glum from its clump of weeds to the crow who's perched on a soon to be glowing streetlight’s sturdy arm and who's quickly losing interest in both never more and tomorrow morning’s preyed upon glories

Unrest for the wearied

What the to-do is is brewing a yeasty undoing of our dearest darlings’ daring finery finely done and they’re mostly up there in their makeup where you can’t see them and they’re all made up for themselves alone and you’re very plainly alone sitting in the in-between sitting in your plain and hard-backed chair and you’re slack-jawed as you view the crowds through your thick and illuminated glass wall a glass soon to be shattered but there’s no shattering the other glass the glass of this ceiling that's pressing down this ceiling never more classy than it is now with glass that may get thicker yet if it’s not the thickest in fact and that’s got you feeling jittery at what little is left and what's left has almost been undone it’s being bitterly undone by hosts of  lads and lasses with an anger like a hunger they're angry at the made-up most who are at most a few of the most well-off and these most haven’t been keen on hosting any airings of grievances because the cutting’s been done and it was needed that undoing no matter how cutting it feels and it’s all for the best even if it’s not in the least for the the best of these hosts of least who are the least of your sister-brothers, father-mothers and others farther along the family tree with its branches now withering everywhere but at the very tips and those leafy tips don’t reach down to those who may not bleed with you in a family sense but in every other sense they are your family most deeply rooted in you and they’re deeply incensed yes they’re incensed deeply enough to shed their blood your blood it's our blood.

Hey meek, your inheritance is waiting (and the anonymity will suit you)

What can you write when a bloodless rock and its bloodied people writhe pained by the squeeze of men like snakes no less than snakes less than worms not fit to be early or late-bird plucked from the rain-soaked ground but it’s not the ground soaked or parched they sit upon it’s an airy perch from which they spy us and it’s not that they’re not seeing the squirms and it’s not that they’re not making out the wriggles and it is that they’re giggling at the blurriness of the faces from so high and it’s then you write that it’s time and it’s then that you write of those times to come when we’ll take this anonymity to our advantage.

Oh, some prose to a woodlouse

The woodlouse, a bug come to you as pill, potato and roly-poly all rolled into one, wouldn’t want you to suss him out, all rolled up in his plated gray ball where he’s more susceptible than you perceptibly might think, and he’s depending on that, plus your general lack of enthusiasm for creepy crawly critters, to avoid the footfall’s crush.