Poem Of The Day, Even Though It's Night, Here:
Because maybe ours is, in fact, a party at which work gets done, I present, I hope legally:
"The Vegetarians," by John Ashbery, from Shadow Train, one of those excellent books you are obliged to purchase if you want to avoid defenestration at the hands of my team of trained howler monkeys, who move through the night like India ink spilled across slick litter (perhaps a magazine; probably Vogue). And you'd better watch out: The monkeys have been lifting tiny, organic weights, and each receives a ration of one Clif Bar per diem, so, they have the strength to beat you up and the endurance to outlast you in a footrace, assuming you don't have a crazy rocket-unicycle (why would you have a crazy rocket-unicycle? are you that afraid of my ink-monkey death-brigade, that you'd purchase or build or force some poor Czech genius to invent a fucking rocket-unicycle?).
Point is... you know, read the fucking poem:
In front of you, long tables leading down to the sun,
A great gesture building. You accept it so as to play with it
And translate when its attention is deflated for the one second
Of eternity. Extreme patience and persistence are required,
Yet everybody succeeds at this before being handed
The suprise box lunch of the rest of his life. But what is
Truly startling is that it all happens modestly in the vein of
True living, and then that too is translated into something
Floating up from it, signals that life flashed, weak but essential
For uncorking the tone, and now lost, recently, but forever.
In Zurich everything was pure and purposeful, like the red cars
Swung around the lake on wires, against the sky, then back down
Through the weather. Which resembles what you want to do
No more than black tree trunks do, though you thought of it.
Therefore our legends always come around to seeming legendary,
A path decorated with our comings and goings. Or so I've been told.
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