MIXTAPE HAIKUS

1

in the olden days

I would have made you a mixtape

now we don't have tapes

2

cool kids still call them

mixtapes but they are just lists

of titles and artists

3

sequence, there and back

songs were easier to play

than skip, fast forward

4

end always abrupt

even when you plan

and when you know its coming

ASH WEDNESDAY, YEAR OF THE TIGER

It's the only day they admit anything inside the church, like a late Godardian addressing the camera directly, as the actor, as opposed to the the earlier examples, where the characters themselves stop the action to address us as characters, no less distancing, but, in its way, lengthening the fictional depth of field. The coming out of character exposes the thinness of the performance construct. The ashes on our foreheads give our buried cannibal his whiff of human sacrifice, more than enough to satisfy what little of him is left. Then they whisper the secret, that they can do exactly nothing for you, there is no purchase on the smooth face of time, that whatever "eternal" and "life" mean, there was a time before you existed and there will be a time when you no longer exist, and there is not much anybody, the baby Jesus, the greybeard Daddy in the sky, the Immaculate Virgin, or the feathered serpent can do about it. It may be the point of the whole exercise, this short moment when the star is offstage and there isn't even any music, when the most important line, the distillation in the movie, is thrown away as incidental noise at some transitional moment, and the obvious story exists as an illustration of our refusal to accept this indigestible truth.

Outside, we dress as ancient gods and set fire to the night to put the new year on notice we are not small and not to be trifled with. We are dragons and lions and we breath fire and we are not afraid.

JIM THOMPSON

JIM THOMPSON
One day, well after I'm dead,
something I wrote will become
fashionable, and you'll tell
everyone how important I was
to you, in the same way you
tell them now how I'm not.

TUESDAY; A Poem

TUESDAY

There ought to be a parade.

I should have a houseful of
guests from out of town
sleeping on my floor.

We should be hording
quarters for les flambeaux
and catching such fleeting
glimpses of such fanciful
Indians (black skin and
yellow bugle beads and
rhinestones and pink ostrich
feathers looking like they just
might kick your ass before
they vanish into the dewy
morning) that we question
the wisdom of tequila with
breakfast and wake-up
bongloads.

We should be sinning as an
act of faith, doing something
worthy of forty days of
atonement, worthy of our
Savior’s pain.

We should be on our knees
in the street with our heads
under the bleachers and our
asses in the air, digging in
that gutter dirt (from whence
we came, they will remind
us, tomorrow) and muck for
a strand of plastic beads.

There should be tourists to
fuck, cute girls from yankee
colleges, with navel rings and
loud laughs. And oysters,
there ought to be oysters on
the half shell and french fry
po’boys and boiled crawfish
and baked macaroni and free
red beans.

But it’s just Tuesday.

LIFE LESSON( for Cormac McCarthy); A Very Short Play

A banquette on MAGAZINE STREET, in the Irish Channel of New Orleans, late October, late afternoon/early evening.

A MAN, about 30, and BOY, about 8, presumably father and son, enter DOWNSTAGE RIGHT and amble slowly across the stage toward an UPSTAGE LEFT exit. They are middle class African Americans. The MAN wears comfortable jeans and an unadorned dark blue sweatshirt; the boy wears a school uniform, khakis and a short-sleeved oxford collar shirt, a dark blue sweater tied around his waist. They traverse the breadth of the stage at the same unrushed pace. Dialog should start about one quarter of the way across and be finsished by halfway, so they walk the second half of the distance in silence.

MAN: Almond Joy?
BOY: Got nuts.
MAN: Mounds?
BOY: Don't.

Lights should remain up for a few seconds after they have exited.