04
14
05
Film and Television Rights: Self-Portrait as a Memoir



Before what happens happened
it happened to someone else.

The Juarez puppet flicked its ugly tongue
out-the old carved vaquero with the forked beard.

Before what happened, I had the purpose
of hiding candy bars. Howdy Doody

hissed beneath trains, green and yellow tractors,
to let him breathe. Born, spine tapped, a man's fist

in my stomach-I am stomach. Mother-
pharmacological uptake system.

Ruddy neighbor boy cussed and beat me for living.
Skull rattle-soap-rock-jerky bathroom haircut-

uncapped handlebar fused its rust with mine-
prime grievous nuisances (the memory of).

Transpire means to breathe through-become known-
not to come to pass.

No open windows, never dusting-chicken pox vesicles
lined my dresser (right to left, by age) until disintegrated.

Limit missed each year without failing:
32 days absent: tardy, here, absent, absent.

On the gym floor-fast evaporating
body outlines of sodium and oil.

The guts of twelve candy bars shaped into a mutated apple,
eaten like an apple.

Before what happened happens
nothing happened.





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self-portrait, buying olives self-portrait as a love poem (riding a tandem)




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›post #74
›bio: john ball
›perma-link
›4/14/2005
›09:42

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April - National Poetry Month 2005

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April - National Poetry Month 2005
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April - National Poetry Month 2008
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Random Memoir Fragment



Previous Posts
Albums. Landlines. Square television.
I don't love anything, not even Christmas
My favorite place in the world
How do you Plea?
Rashy
Eeyore