20130329

Howie Good


ROCK, PAPER

I had half-hoped, half-expected to see women waving their handkerchiefs from outdoor balconies, men in the street lifting their hats. Rain falls, equal parts light and dark. It isn’t true that paper always beats rock. I can’t remember now why I ever thought it was. I hold the phone to my ear, waiting for someone to finally pick up. Each day brings more of the kind of life that might charm stupid people on smart drugs.


ART NOTES

1
William Burroughs
wouldn’t appear anywhere
without his hat.

It just swam around
inside the clear plastic bag
like a goldfish.

2
The first paint
was probably animal blood.

Art is dangerous.

3
Everything
that happens,
they say,
happens
for a reason.

The sun
will shine
for at least
another
6 billion years.


HOTEL OF DREAMS

The sign outside said, You Are Requested to Close Your Eyes. When I opened them again, Baudelaire, dying of syphilis, the so-called “French disease,” was wearing oversized sunglasses in an attempt to disguise his condition. I went to the window. What may have been a city composed entirely of radiant dust glowed in the distance. I felt someone close behind me. “By three things is the world sustained,” Baudelaire whispered, but could only remember the first two. Or maybe I misheard him. His tongue had been broken and mended and broken again. Ten minutes passed with us just standing there. Night seldom started on time.



Howie Good, a journalism professor at SUNY New Paltz, is the author of the forthcoming chapbooks The Complete Absence of Twilight (Mad Hat Press), Echo’s Bones and Danger Falling Debris (Red Bird Chapbooks), and An Armed Man Lurks in Ambush (unbound CONTENT).
 
 
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