“Note’s on a Slant”

because I’m jotting too quickly – blue ballpoint
on a lemon paper square – impressions
of fragments of concepts, for
Later use, maybe not – on the way out, to:
Run errands
Waste fossil fuels
Curse traffic while gumming it up worse, making it shiner, more leviathan-like

Exploit “detente,” “expiration”; and what does “Grand Guliol” even mean,
anyway? It figures into so many disparate critiques of late,
anymore – gotta horn in on that action – and supposedly

Kazuo Ishiguro’s brilliant though I never heard of dude til this week;
Borrowed books unread: the Sontag, the Brautigan, pieces of the
one I should be assembling.

Frozen dinners circa Valentine's encrusted in ice crystals,
Corpse-battery forever mausoleumed in pocket-watch crypt,
Tires breaking down on the Neon, mechanic sez

And it’s actually true, per Everett’s Nirvana book:
Mary Lou Lord could’ve been Kurt’s everything, given a window,
a fighting chance

And it’s time, soon, to buy two Mother’s Day, one Father’s Day, a
Birthday, cards for more than a quarter of what it costs
Rachael Ray to feed her face daily in one fabulous American metropolis or another

And the Load Records mailing is a day late,
it’s suddenly too
humid for windbreakers;Yeltsin and Vonnegut roll dice in the afterlife --

It’s all minutiae, it’s all monument, it’s scratchings and dust I’ll have misplaced
Sometime between now and whenever they’d come in handiest.