“a face / from the ancient gallery”

today i got up so late i

decided to take the bus to work. a knot of people,

a white dog dim in a totebag, squint vaguely west

where the bus’ll be rolling in. a crossingguard

motions across the way: a fenced-in schoolyard. older kids

running with games or late again. chatter dins. then pipes up

a loudspeaker, megaphone. my eyes search for what my ears can’t.

laughing baritone: it intones:

the killer awoke before dawn

and i think,

music. they must have the classics on. unfazed,

the playground games continue. he put his boots on,

the pendulum swings again, and eyes at the busstop

begin to flick uneasy. he took a face

from the ancient gallery and he

walked on dooown the hall

maybe a principal. a ranter? but as if it happens every day,

they begin to line up to go inside. the voice,

smug, deft, as if quoting shakespeare. as if

for them it might as well be shakespeare. dusted off

from the shelf:

more figurine than figure.

tchotchke

i tear through the crossword

and i can tell you where i was

and in whose voice

i first heard each answer.

and

i don’t know

what’s cooler: my friend at work requiring

the spelling, or me being able to letter out

tchotchke

on the pink post-it.

reliable source

seven days of
work yet. rain and chill. there’s
on the news a shooting per day and yet
another trend:
why the same headlines? i remarked
last night, sleepily, to a constallation, freckles on
the boy’s back. i mean,
why are they always finding crack in babies’ cribs?
he may have found a reply, but i was already somewhere
between dreams and tall ships. there’s so many
gaps in reporting; shoddy, infuriating. but then
i never know to ask the right
questions
’til i see the photos after:
or i ask you.

age

…How about the 78-year-old grannysmith types you hear about who

down you with their motorcycle or off their spouse? Who

haven’t so much as batted a fly all their lives?

Shall I  become a senile, psycho old bat, too?

470 years from now I’m going to drive

my large, rusted hulk of a spacecar

[through whose windshield

I'll be barely tall enough to peer from]

really slow in front of you.

[in response to melsie's post]

drosophila

 

[image courtesy http://www.livescience.com/humanbiology/041013_longevity_flies.html]

Sometimes when i read one word or glance at a captioned image,

another word, as if in spoken translation, pipes up

to replace the original. Today I read an article vindicating a supposition

I’ve had, that we weaken our immunity through

overuse of antibacterials. That antibacterials essentialy don’t do

what we really want

any soap to do, which is cleanse.

The subject of the study was the ever-studied

fruit fly. The article refers to the creature as “fruit fly” down

to the captioned illustration. But then it was as if a skinny hand raised

in the back of a classroom.

“Drosophila,” it corrected.

Ah, that’s the word. Thank you

elementary school science monica.

get well Fidel

My online news perusal is dictated by my place of employment, while my newsprint perusal is dictated by how much I wish to spend, and how much paper waste I am willing to justify throwing away. So, typically, my day goes like this:

After logging into the network, the MSN homepage pops up. I click on any enticing headline, usually by the Associated Press or Reuters, and the network’s internet filter immediately intercepts the next page with the announcement that I will be able to look at “News and Media” for no more than 60 minutes per day. Knowing that time’s-a-wasting, I don’t bother seeking reliable, incisive news sources/stories. I am happy to get any news at all. For local news/shootings in my environs, I log into Philly.com which boasts the two-headed monster of both the Inquirer and The Daily News.

Today I learned that an ailing Fidel Casto has ceded power to his hermano menor (I found and read the Spanish language version on MSN), that a key figure in Inquirer/Daily News publishing has ceded power to a next-in-line, that Tastycake Co. may be moving out, and that it is very hot outside. I would deign to provide specifics about these stories, but to do that I would have to reread them. Unfortunately for me, my 60 minutes is/are up.

I am a huge fan of free newspapers. The Metro provides for great daily lunchtime reading. And, as it is a slender publication, less paper waste will end up in a city landfill.

receptionist schadenfreude

again the company’s

phone system choked. receptionist

schadenfreude