Published: March 4, 2010

For Tom

The Musician is between two women

holding Heidegger in his hands while

unsure of the snow.

His shirt is blue, but the lighting is bad

and I am about to write a poem.

Simplicity

is in the cigarette stuck to the front of my

love-hate relationship with One Fifty-Five

West Sixtieth Street. I feel fine. Solid.

Like a stripper pole made of sandpaper,

know what I mean? The Musician smiles

like a surgeon on vacation.

That’s a good sign.

He’ll live a long life.

Back to those two women:

one screams into a cell phone, the other

stares into lace like a stuffed animal stuck in headlights-

neither bleeding, nothing happening.

Naturally, The Musician and I laugh. I never want

to know anything more about

this moment

yet promise to write a poem

called A quarter past four pm on the am dial.

He doesn’t believe me.

I don’t believe in poetry.

So I make something up. Something like

a unicorn’s eyebrow eats an ear of corn and grows and grows

and grows and growls while giving birth to a baby dormitory.

He says he can’t understand the unicorn part.

Okay. So the story has to stop.

Next, we visit our friends.

One tool uses the word incredicool

while the other mutters every word… is weird.

Neither answer me when I ask about

the weather- and,

who cares.

Not me.

Definitely not

The Musician.

We smoke and that’s it.