Ach! On the day of poet’s theater, my car’s clutch breaks, but my mechanic (a super guy) saves the day by offering a free loaner (a Mercury Sable). I was supposed to pick the car up at six. At six, there’s no car yet, and when it does show up, at 7 or so, it’s transmission is slipping so bad that it barely moves. Needless to say, I missed poet’s theater, several surely wonderful plays, and eventually found myself broken down in a foreign car late at night in Oakland. Sweet.

Okay, I know that was mostly unnecessary and long-winded, but please allow me to offer a fun exquisite corpse (we only knew the last word of the last line) I wrote with my girl, Ammie, as recompense:


Live/time

A rabbit breathes on a cold night
The steamy heat attracts an owl in the tree above.

And such weight pulled our eyes to the ground to the details of

A Romantic painting, soft and dreamlike.
So we began collecting curiosities—moths, robots, incantations.

The air was crisp and smoky
Then, we planned how we would react to rain. We’d only

Risen to greet each day out of habit.
It was all we knew. We’d visit, often,

The surface of the sun.
Ammie, you always were so stylish.

Flax, raspberry, ochre, and lavender palettes were
Stupefied, shell-shocked, aroused, fractured, but most of all

Lined neatly in a row, much like the famous
And dead.

But it didn’t stop there; a vast fleet of
Debonair obsolescence. Even far off cosmonauts
Settled nicely on the fourteenth star, and the forest was at peace.