Wastoid

Wastoid

A neutered dog fell in love with another neutered dog. They chased each other across the dusty dogpark. Their black spots got hot from the sun. They have an address for a rooming house, but they cannot find it. The guy at the gas station does not know where it is. The guy at the 7–11 has never heard of it. The two dogs had been told that each room has its own private bathroom. They hope to find this rooming house. They hope to stay a while.

Wastoid

My lover rents my love out by the hour. Men book my love & during their hour they are in love how I am in love with my lover: like handful of caraway seeds, like a moon evermore three-quarters full. When no clients have booked my love it returns to me, abrupt & cruel, at the top of the hour as I stand on a pier. Love can be propaganda, a sonata over-practiced into prickliness. To be in love one must always climb higher on the mountain. But when I climb that high I exclude so much of the world & what is excluded itself I find most lovable. I would have been so unhappy as Mr. Nineteenth Century.

Wastoid

There are two moons, each in love with the other, but they orbit at opposite points of the same path. One moon, as a child, had an English Setter. For his father’s funeral this moon wore a new black suit, but the English Setter jumped all over him until the fine black suit was coated with long white hairs & the young moon found himself, instead of being saddened, laughing & he rolled on the carpet with the dog, who was so full of whatever it is in dogs that we call love. The other moon had never believed in anything until he saw the young moon rolling on the rug with his dog in his black suit lightened by white hairs. Because they can not see each other they leave notes: I saw a tree & it reminded me of you; I heard Glenn Gould’s 1982 recording of The Goldberg Variations & I now know timelessness; you are with me in the ever-night. Down on earth, beneath all this celestial love, a father left his son in the car with the windows shut in the Home Depot parking lot & the boy roasted to death in the heat.

Wastoid

My lover is a drag race that starts on a city road & then moves to a gravel road & then ends tragically as one car plunges off the wooden bridge into the flooded river, black with mud. He contains the bliss of elation & the bliss of misfortune. But it takes more than intellect to never return. I don’t hate my occupation, the furniture dead hands made, glasses dead mouths once lipped. I have a real bad problem & it attends to me incessantly. All my lover’s highs & lows mute in my problem. There is no goal for art but to hold the mirror of the drive-through window up to the world. When the boy who survived the car’s plunge into the river crawled out onto the riverbank he couldn’t remember a thing & everyone thanked sincerely him for this.

Wastoid

Now I recognize everyone I have ever seen. For instance, on the walk over here I heard two men discussing how hot one of them was one night—the one man thought the other was very hot but the hot-that-night man didn’t think he was at his hottest. I saw one man walking while holding a guitar & singing out of tune. I saw one man with long pantlegs. I saw sky behind the men & stars behind the sky & if I were to close my eyes there’d be nothing in front of me, a chasm awaiting my foot, & I’d fall into the eternal ball-pit of the Chuck E. Cheese & all the workers there on fire, neverdying. Medicine works in a way that: for me, like love, it is faith...