I Dream I Am Walking the Streets of an Unknown Metropolis with Anthony Bourdain and He Thinks Me a Bit of a Doofus
Rent from DeepDyve- I Dream I Am Walking the Streets of an Unknown Metropolis with Anthony Bourdain and He Thinks Me a Bit of a Doofus
Asleep, the night after Father's Day when my kidsDon't call me, I dream I accidentally meet Anthony Bourdain.
I am on a bus to a bus to another bus to a departure."This is no accident," he says. "Ditch your adverb.
I made some calls and I have to say I am prettyDisappointed. I mean based on what I was told
You were less American Gothic; I was expecting conversationAbout the redistribution of wealth in post-Utopian autocracies
Or a drunken brawl atop the tallest building in the cityWhere we get arrested for putting at risk the only,
If relatively average, daughter of the Sultan."What can I say? I was stumbling around the aisles of a dream.
Bourdain and I ascend toward silvery transits.He looks me over with what I think must be disdain.
"Look, the hero, the anti-hero, the priest, the doubter,They all depend on self-righteousness. Avoid that." [End Page 121]
He steps away. I wave and descend the stairsAway from him. Now aboard he grabs the handset
From the engineer and over the intercom says,"Dude, that Dean Yeagle T-Shirt is for someone
Fifteen years your younger. What can I say?I kind of think you're a doofus." Who is Dean Yeagle?
Beep. Beep. Beep. This is the sound of this poemBacking up. I hear a piece of the house singing.
What's the rule? Never write about a dream. Never.I guess some people are just born to be assholes. [End Page 122]
David Koehn's first book, Twine (Bauhan), won the May Sarton Poetry Prize. He also edited Compendium (Omnidawn Publishing). His second book, Scatterplot (Omnidawn Publishing), is forthcoming. Koehn's writing has appeared in Kenyon Review, New England Review, Volt, Carolina Quarterly, DIAGRAM, McSweeney's, the Greensboro Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere.
