Limited, Inc.

Another Karen Chamisso poem On Poets They try to make it hard, the poets With their initiating ha ha ha And the laws concerning the breath/wind In and of words, subtracting snorts and swallows The whole mucousy richness As the silverware clinks tink tink tink tink On expensive plates That one would like to break           Or Hurl They try to make it hard the poets but still I decided to be one – since The gate door is unlocked – and it was always only meant For you The joke prosody plays on the tongue goes: knock knock? Who’s there? And the answer, child, is iamb.

In the new novel I am writing, much depends on a poet, Karen Chamisso,  I figure my last novel, which I still haven't placed with an agent, was all about the Bush era, and for that I needed a political murder. For the Obama era, I have decided my guttering candle that will light my way through the murk will be a poet who is also the heiress of a fortune made by her father in the bug extermination trade. You'd be surprised. So I've been writing Chamisso poems. This is one. Claire Claire taught me the larger gestures The kabuki theater of entrances and exits In sky high boots at the Killer club Sweeping into the backseat of the taxi at 2 a.m. The seriousness at the center of silliness A moral position, stoic, Enduring the battering of ten thousand bragging boys. Claire taught me the larger gestures but Claire died. They dragged her body from the river. She chose the largest exit. And though I see and feel The moral position, I can only visit, stricken

Buridan’s ass would doubtless have hated the internet. The same old blues, he’d think, multiplied infinitely. Or perhaps, and this is the bet every Internet marketer and Google stockholder makes, he would have loved it, as craving becomes an addiction to choice. We begin by looking for the cheapest price, and we end by spending hours looking at Airbnb pictures and commenting on how they could possibly thought that photographing a corner of the bathroom was of any interest to the curious renter. This is, at least, my experience. I become more asslike as I realize that possible worlds are unfolding before me in cosmic vistas, that one of my childhood dreams – invisibly entering a house – is being realized on a frightening scale, and I have merely to put the cursor on another link to send another shot to whatever part of my brain that is dedicated to invidious comparisons. However, there’s a point, a sad point, in which the whole expedition upon which I have embarked – to find, say,