Scraping off the attitude
old man eating all my food
don't be kind, don't be rude
just shake your boots and let it all get loose


Marti Peterson, untitled, 1997

Fortune
-- by Dobby Gibson

Your luck for today:
The desire to have any is your first mistake.
The second, knowing this, is to hope
to somehow be outside it all,
and this will set in motion an architecture of great consequence.
Rivers will vanish into rivers,
Sunday will bring half-price bottles of wine, cruets edged with light.
How many times have you walked at night,
sheaves of gloom precluding a neighborhood
singing its own intense, quotidian silence?
A single dog will bark.
You will get your wish, but it may arrive too late.


Fortune
-- by Dobby Gibson

We think we are little gods,
yet the one thing we fear most is to be left alone.
So we carve one another's names into the desktops,
drop rocks from the trestle.
We invent and overuse the long vowel.
To be loved, speak with your hands.
To learn how, open a magazine
and try to catch the little cards as they flutter to the floor.
Some numbers come with secret powers.
Some secret powers come with little power at all.


Fortune
-- by Dobby Gibson

The neighbors will soon spread their confounding potluck before you.
Dressed in period garb, they wear sandals and socks.
The subscribe to Life magazine to experience
the present as if it were already the past.
Their flowering trees were engineered to never drop fruit.
Overhead, constellations of stickers glow from bedroom
ceilings as souvenirs from a time when life was lived outdoors.
All conversations end in silence. The trick is to make it purposeful.
It's not going to get any easier, for these are the CliffsNotes.