Words for Empty and Words for Full

Do you too always feel differently the same?

113 Do you too always feel differently the same? For two days I’ve been saying, that’s just the way I roll. Try things on is a good philosophy, and look outside yourself is advice that smells of lilac in the morning. I would experiment with a tractor for my heart if I could, the blood plowing, the rooting around for love. It’s embarrassing, though. Are you sure you don’t want the medium fries for a penny more? That’s just the way I roll. Why don’t you crawl off and die? That’s just the way I roll. Daddio was before my time, I was born into far out, psychedelic, man, but the vernacular rejected my tongue, cool was as hip as I got but everyone says cool, our grandmothers, Caesar, I can hear Manson, it was cool, how they begged for their lives. Revolutionary, such tiny changes as using the red cup for coffee, as sleeping sideways on the bed, then there’s sharing, noticing all the chicken noodle soup I have, then there’s not swatting the fly because any killing’s the beginning of all killing, but when I open the door to let it out, two more come in. Like nature or God, whatever, is saying, that’s just the way I roll, fuckboy, and so I’ve named them. That one’s Ellen and that’s Kaisha and the one flying upside down is Frank O’Hara, who I warn, when he lands on the lampshade, beware the dune buggy ride. Do you know flies fly backward? It’s tragic, that out of the billions there’ve been, not one fly with its sesame seed brain has ever thought, cool, I’m flying backward, maybe next I’ll fly inside out until I’m pretty hicok pages i-120.indd 113 1/7/10 3:23 PM 114 as a bee. We don’t get to know what we don’t know, like right now, every other direction this poem could have gone is lost to me, like this, “the orioles are saying copasetic,” or this, “the night was a cliché of crickets and humping,” I know that dirge, I am that applause, the grinding, the slapping of thighs against ecstasy, and a Mobius strip begins life as a flat piece of paper, a line, but add a twist, a bit of glue, and we have no idea where beginning ends or ending begins, and maybe they don’t. hicok pages i-120.indd 114 1/7/10 3:23 PM ...