Notes from Last Friday:

(scrawled in a baked-out stupor on the back of a Wrap-N-Run takeout menu. i thought i lost it and i was pissed, but i just found it, shoved between my monitor and the secret book shelf that’s behind it. the one where i stash my polaroids. it was stuck there, bending upwards like a laminated rainbow. i turned on my desk lamp and the light revealed the indentations made my ball point pen as well as the fine green film of pot dust that covered its surface)

· Right now I’m sitting on a blue, 35 dollar Staples office chair eating raw cookie dough from one of those plastic wrapped, pre-fab Pillsbury rolls. I’m wearing my ancient green Umbros and a stained blue t-shirt. I’m slightly sweaty in a degenerate kind of way. I’ve got a portable EKG monitor in a black Velcro bag slung around my shoulder. It’s the size of a CD player, that’s what the Russian nurse Irina compared it to as she stuck the circular heart rate monitor tabs under my breast.

· “Or like small purse,” she said. “You wear it.” She looked at me. I was naked from the waist up.

· “Spread your arms,” she said. I did.

· “You will do everything the same,” she said. “Everything you always do. But you won’t get wet. You won’t go into water. Everything else? The same.”

· I smiled at her. My arms were still up. I smile at everyone now a days.

· (doesn’t matter what your story is)

· I strike a Jesus Christ Pose.

· (now a days)


· It seems that my poor, pomegranate heart skips a beat every so often. I’ve felt it for a while, but in the past I always assumed it was the drugs. Things seem to jump around when you’re high…some of y’all know how that goes. Anyway, a doctor heard it through his stethoscope when I was sick in December. Hence the tests.

· Everything is fine. The heart of a young, in-shape person like myself doesn’t just stop. I mean, it could, but the chances are it won’t. In that sense, I’m fine. They just have to make certain and then I’ll be much finer. Yes, that’s what being much finer than fine means: being certain.

· While I was at the big, fancy expensive doctor I made sure to use the opportunity to ask about my stiff, cracking joints, the pains in my head, my digestion issues, the ringing in my right ear, my bouts of paranoia and sleeplessness, my low self esteem and migraines…

· My moral queasiness. My nearly constant feeling of temporal displacement…

· The doc glanced at his Rolex and gave me a couple of blank referral cards.

· “Take these to your regular doctor and have him fill them out.”

· “Her,” I corrected, as I shoved them to the bottom of my bag, where they’d be promptly stained by uncapped pens and loose bits of hard candy.

· Fuck health, I thought, as they stabbed a needle in my arm.

· I wonder, does anyone out there still believe in a sustained sensation of feeling “good”?

· (there’s always something wrong, something a miss)

· even on the best days there’s still traffic, pollution, ghosts, etc, to deal with.




· I just counted and there are five gray wires sticking out from under my shirt. It seems like more because they loop around and go back up my side. Data travels between them and the monitor. The data is collected on a memory card. When I return the monitor it will be printed out and examined. A hardening of a possibility takes place and eventually the doctors will look at one another, nod their heads and just like that, certainty will be established!





· I have the same heart rate as President George W. Bush: 46 bpm.

· Which gets me thinking: wouldn’t it be totally awesome if i found out that by some weird, parallel universe kinda logic, Dubya and I were sharing the same heart? It would be this tripped out wrinkle in time situation in which we each had split identities, a second personality who “lived” in the corporal (dis)reality of complete, psychotic dissociation, in which they were little more than a zombie, a Frankenstein’s monster groaning and grunting and smashing flat the complexities of life…So much of our so called individual lives are shared with others—who’s to say the president and i aren’t sharing one and the same human heart?


· he gets one beat, i get the next one...he gets one beat, i get the next one…he gets one beat, i get the next one…and so on until one of us fucks up and puts an end to it

· the secret service are protecting one-half of my second most important organ—talk about wild, man!

· but seriously, if i had bush’s heart I’d jump of a cliff

· or pull an eliott smith.

· in public, of course

· on top of a skyscraper, with helicopters suspended dramatically over my head

· waiting like pregnant pauses

· and there i’d be in my leather matrix cape

· with coke all over my nose like scarface.

· I’d blast the “fitzcarraldo” mixtapeCD out of some arena sized, monster speakers.

· And as I lit up the city with its rock diamonds and dance music hope

· I’d poise the knife over my heart and give one final look down below…

· At streets filled with shoppers and dirty black snow.





half irish half asian

pretty

persuasion



dog poet