i'm still dreaming about the thrift store almost every night
last night i found a pair of nike cortezes in a golden girls pastel colourway
Apartment Poem is free,
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This fly flow take practice, like Tae Bo with Billy Blanks
Oh, you're too kind! Really? Thanks!
To the gone and lost forever, like Oh My Darling Clementine
He hold his heart when he tellin' rhyme
When it's his time, I hope his soul go to heaven
He nasty like the old time Old Number Seven
You still taste it when you chase it with the Coca-Cola
Make ‘em wish they coulda erased it out the Motorola
I told her no credit for a bag
If you want what they got then go get it, it’s all gack
Only in America could you find a way to earn a healthy buck
And still keep your attitude on self-destruct
I sell rhymes like dimes
The one who mostly keep cash, but tell about the broke times
Joking rhymes, like the “is you just happy to see me?” trick
Classical slapstick rappers need chapstick
A lot of ‘em sound like they in a talent show
So I give ‘em something to remember like the Alamo
Tally-ho! A high joker like a spades game
Came back from five years laying and stayed the same.
Happy new year:
It actually kind of feels like it means something this time, doesn’t it? Not always, but this time. I steadied myself, then got a little faster. I saw the light getting longer. I finally put up the little shelf thing next to the record player, seriously considered cleaning the basement, wondered whether we should just leave the Christmas lights where they are. I put my hair up in a little ponytail that made it look like it was sprouting from the top of my head. I wondered whether the neighbours could hear me scream-singing the Golden Girls theme song from the exercise bike. I took a very very very long bath, talked for hours into the voice recorder. I felt so grateful for Carlo that I thought I might literally dissolve about it. I pressed Buy It Now on the labelmaker, finally, fuck it. I watched the basketball game and felt linked directly to a version of myself who had once felt that same feeling while watching a basketball game. I moved up and then down in the rankings. I poked the crumbling log and watched the sparks fly up up up, wondered whether the fireworks were coming from the graveyard. I felt mostly fine the next morning, could sense the past and my luck like they were actual organs inside my body. We went skating and then Layne came over to give me a huge jar of homemade kimchi because someone is finally moving into the downstairs apartment in their building so they can’t use the fridge to store a million jars of homemade kimchi anymore. We sat on the porch and talked until it was too freezing to keep going. She was literally wearing rose-coloured glasses and a big safety orange hat with a pom-pom on it. She looked like an angel of the new year. Everyone’s life should have a Layne in it but I recognize I am uniquely fortunate in this regard. She was telling me about how she and Chris had handcrafted too many thoughtful gifts for their family members over the holiday. “It was like Santa’s Workshop in there,” she said about their studio, shaking her head. Now they are having a new issue which is that they want to send out nice cards to all their friends but they have so many and they wanted them to be nice, so they borrowed an industrial card folder thing from a friend who runs a printing press and now suddenly that’s taking up a lot of their time. These are the kinds of problems you have when you are a beam of pure light in human form. It is my birthday soon which always makes me think about the time she left post-it notes for me all around the apartment, like in the medicine cabinet and on my milk in the fridge etc., each one with a different extremely sweet compliment. Some people are just tuned into this wavelength and when you find them you have to hang on for dear life. That year was one of my great birthday ragers too, the cops came and everything. Imagine? Remember? I still have the post-its in a little paperclipped stack on my desk. I refer to them when necessary but not too often, because I want to maintain their power. Like many poets I have always had a thing for tiny messages. This year on Christmas eve Carlo and I ordered so much Chinese food that we got four fortune cookies and I kept all of the messages and taped them to an index card and stuck it on the fridge. You just never know when you’re going to need them. I laid on my back on the living room floor and spread my arms as wide as I possibly could. I could feel the connections between parts of me that did not normally feel connected. I remembered what I keep always remembering: concussion, panic attack, depression, winter, broke, too high, whatever. It comes in waves and they get smaller. You always make it to the end. I felt luck moving in and out of my lungs. I poured myself another glass of water, told everyone I loved them. Was doing my best. Could not stop saying it.
Oh hey here’s that shrimp you ordered:
&&&:
Carlo’s basketball corner:
Doris Burke's stellar broadcasting career | 2018 Basketball Hall of Fame | ESPN