Acting twee under the gumbolina tree
with Notorious Matt, the cashier
of the local sub shop. The field of
blue grass is laced with the noise crickets
make & Matt is telling me that vision
quests are his métier, his psyche’s ugly bailiwick.
The latex sky is hanging out its white cotton
drawers, whose waistbands Matt plucks & jangles
like stratocaster strings shot through
with sonic orange. He tells me about a guy
who’d coat dental floss in eel’s fat & pull
it through his face from ear to ear, & also that
clouds are children of the arctic’s breath
trying to talk to us here in the psychedelic tropics.
How is it over there? Matt asks.
Is the feedback loop stalking your slinky of a cortex?
Your thoughts crack’d & wording like Scrabble?
A bat in the cranium’s shiny pink bathroom?
When I don’t answer, he goes on.
Y’know just as well as I… We could be speaking
muddled patois on a patio in Panama, or back in your
mom’s kitchen with wine, trying to hold the word
bitchin’ in our palms. The whole thing’s ugly as beige
snuck in a neon palette. There’s the ham the customer orders
& the slabby pink handled with plastic gloves. There’s
the 7 dollars I ask them for & the money I stuff in the drawer.
Matt’s talk blends with the noise crickets
make as I remember a tantrum I threw over a boat
making its way out of the harbor of Blue Town
when I was a boy, call’d Katty’s Rider, ‘cuz I knew it
could’a been call’d anything, knew any dummy
dean or king could’a slap’d its stern with any name.
I think what Notorious means is that association’s wake is finicky business
& trying to get anyone to sit in the same rocking chair corner
as your thoughts is like practicing scales on some futile attic piano…
— T. Garrison O’Donnell is a poet from Virginia. His only regret in life is that he is not a character in a Ronald Firbank novel.