An Apology For My Dereliction

I gotta be honest with you, I'm living stuff right now that's just flat out better than anything I could write. Not saying much, I realize, but I'm in a situation where the truth's just so damn good and mind-boggling that I spend every free moment trying to process it.

It's a good place to be, I believe, but it's also frustrating when words utterly fail me.

Tonight is typical of so many recent nights. At 3 o'clock in the morning I find myself so cross-wired and swamped with all the things I saw and heard over the course of the previous eighteen hours that my mind just shuts down and I can't shake any words loose to save my soul. The upshot: I've been sitting here for over an hour staring at a box of Triscuit Thin Crisps and mulling the mysterious words printed there beneath the brand name: "Weave Some Wonder."

Yes.

Do that.

And --if you can-- explain to me what the hell those words could possibly have to do with a snack cracker.

My Days As A Produce Detailer

All day I made things oranger.
If the purple of a particular plum seemed
less than succulent I shot the fucker full of more
purple and buffed it until it glowed like the chrome
of a muscle car. No shit, you could stare into one
of those plums and tweeze your eyebrows.
I didn't exactly airbrush the bananas,
but I might as well have, and still fantasize
about it sometimes, fantasize about airbrushing
bananas with the image of Jesus, or Elvis, or the
Lucky Strike cigarette logo. I was lauded for my gifts
with green, the whole spectrum, and it was hard to get
me head around the idea that a head of lettuce,
say, or a cucumber, or a pepper could all be somehow
considered green, but they were, and each needed to be
radiant and unreal in its own way. The Mexicans and
Vietnamese all thought I was some kind of magician,
which obviously I was, even as they also clearly thought
my brand of magic was pure batshit craziness.
If they looked at my labors as criminal --and who,
really, could have blamed them?-- they never let
on, God bless them, not a one of them ever let on.