ATTENTION PEOPLE OF THE OH SO MANIFEST WORLD!
//a dispatch from Jamie Thomson//
I spent a lot of time this summer helping my family’s neighbors, Lester and Lella, clean their attic, which was great, because they paid me, and because they are among my favorite people to spend time with in Northampton. When we weren’t sorting through things, we sat on their porch and drank juice and talked, slowly and easily. Up amongst the things we found was a series of family scenes from the 1950s or 60s, perhaps intended to teach a class, though the material didn’t seem so clear to me. Instead of bringing them to the dump, I tried my best to decipher the lesson.
American Dumb
by Jamie Thomson
//-//
Soon After Easter
Here in New Jersey
I ate a chocolate
I found in a dead log
One of many dead logs
Weighing down the acreage
That was appraised for me like a credential
By my host
Who revealed himself over dinner
To be a republican
It was inside a green plastic egg
Still not found on Thursday
Disappointing to the parent
That had overestimated its own kid
And that valued
Diligence and industry
(Afraid I imagined
The kid
Was still looking)
And if it had known
A disappointment to the kid too
The yolk it was meant to have
Was coconut flavored milk chocolate
By Lindt
Wrapped in reflective silver and blue
Itself egglike
I ate it after several minutes
Of having it in my pocket
Wondering what might hatch
PULLING GREASE
we search shorn badlands for what’s there
and find
it’s not great work
we spread the word of a very different gospel
one that is twisted in the middle
but frustratingly won’t
fail to find itself in the end
like a möbius
it starts as a profession
of dark love for dark things
the animals and air
there
then into yet another purple sky
thin impersonation
of the night it brags about
seeing just beyond the horizon
there are the two of them
advisers of a different way
exceptional strategists and
navigators-without-fail
from each to the other
like hysterical documentarians one lurks
near the terminal where night casually waits
like a Japanese teen for his bus to arrive
as if day were Boston
and he wants to get to New York
and follows him on
fearlessly he
boards the animal tube
no one else notices him
sit among them
and pull in their grease
it’s obvious he’s worrying
about his performance
having both been glory
and been unremarkable
before
he’s just some guy
really
with a job bigger than he
thought he could do
and now doing it
he realizes anyone could
if they’d just shut up
about who they were
being one of the guys in a city
lost among the lost coins and
slack herds mushing forward
overcome with false purpose
he manages to feel apart from them
an individual
like many others
are naturally able
and to know himself as just a man a
ponderous onerous little idiot
who types and erases curse words
to exercise two powers
