Rock Creek Park (Wednesday, June 15, 2016)

laugh wiggle, the creek is clean, then shit infested

the herring highway, next to the parking lot of early morning Beach drive,

the big beaches, towering among the rocks, slowly birthing out of the clay. What grace among the rock maples, viburnums, low blueberries, asters, sorrel, pipsissiwa, partridge berry.

No swimming behind the zoo please.

.....


Single person in single car single person in single car single person in single car single person in single car ... you get the idea.

tree roots buckle the old asphalt, the fat tires are nice for bouncing, and the bike trailer gets some gees weaving up over the bridges, I hope Oona likes it. At least she doesn't complain.

We pass a cop, slow pedaling, unsteady as he gets onto the gravel to make way, knobs crunching, apologizing.


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so many new cars so many new cars, old cars, new cars, single drivers single drivers (again? you might ask)

yes. the decrepit indebted materialistic soul of automotive culture is infesting the floodplain, driving over its own funneled feces, preparing to spectacularly explode into the drop pool riffle sequence as the rain clouds lower and lower and lower.

grill weather

It was an overly pleasant sunday evening in Northwestern DC. The day had started to cool, and the birds filled oranging sky with a muted, cheerful song. It was a fine night for a barbecue. Going to start the grill, he noticed the propane tank was empty. No matter, he thought, I’ll just pop down to the Shell station for a new one. Not wanting to drive, and fully conscious of the irony of burning up the diesel to get the propane, he grabbed his skateboard, and cheerfully swinging the empty propane tank he headed off down the road. He pushed up the short hill on 41st street. Carving downhill along the fall line towards Wisconsin Ave traffic was light, and drivers, caught up in the bucolic nature of the day, waved him on as he mellowed through several stop signed intersections. At the station, the man motioned through the window to leave the tank next to the rack, and he put it down with a soft clank before heading in to the store. 

After giving the attendant twenty nine dollars, they both went outside to the locked cage. Sorting through the 'cleaned and inspected' tanks, the man picked one out for him, considerably heavier than the empty. Oooff, he thought, well maybe this wasn’t the best idea. No matter, too late now. He pushed off, slightly wobbly with the new load, scooting out across the Avenue, beating a pack of cars off the green light, and swooped back into the residential neighborhood. It was a bit onerous going up hill, so he got off and walked a few blocks north to Harrison, where it was flat enough to start pushing again. He made the turn back onto 41st and started to speed up a bit down the hill. Just then, a woman in a black BMW SUV rolled through the stop sign at the end of Huntington and started to turn left immediately in front of him. Fuck! He carved hard to the right, just barely making it around the rear bumper of the SUV. He looked backward to see if she had even noticed, and just then hit something, a rock, he will never know what. Immediately airborne, he had just enough time to look back and catch the startled expression on the blond woman’s face in the side view mirror as he sailed, the propane tank carrying his arm up over his head. Catching his fall on his left forearm on the sidewalk, he started to roll as he had down so many times before, and then the tank connected with the grooved concrete of 41st street.

a crappy poem written while working

i had a friend

who told me

what’re you gonna do?

write a poem?

so I wrote this poem, for this friend

who doesn’t have a job, since he told me so long ago, that we had to work, 

and not write poems.

no one has a job,

we just steal time, 

from the cosmic uncertainty, press it into dollars, and smug ourselves rich while others hunger

starve, on our words, proffered after the tips of our rifles

is this it? civilization? built on the fence and the sword?

I might as well write a poem.

or build a house, and as I think, where does the money come from?

i dig a hole, into the gleyed matter below, extract the minerals, it fills with water,

and the pipes, freshly unrusted, carry it to the factory

belching smoke, as the wheels turn, toys for tots … it still doesn’t answer my question.

at the edge of the vegetable patch, by the sea, fish dry in the sun. and the lawyer fills his wallet with words words words, does this answer the question??

maybe it does, it’s all made up!

by that monkey with a gun.

or, by the poems that are dumb (like contracts), or ugly (like newspapers).