Pictures from Brueghel inside the big box bookstore

So many poems have been written.

Stevens. Whitman. Hughes. Rumi. Bukowski. Jewel.

Two tattered men, seemingly homeless, are sitting at separate tables against the wall near the Poetry section at the Barnes & Noble. One is leafing through a large book, I think about the Civil War. The other is carefully inking drawings on sheets of yellow-lined paper. I ask to borrow his pen to write this down on both sides of my Starbucks reciept.

Tall Decaf Mocha. $3.13 with tax.

I can smell the stench of street on him. I return his black rollerball pen. He asks me the time. About 9:45 p.m.

Stevie asks me if I am writing in Elvish again. Jade looks up from the book he's reading, a high-brow dissertation about a porn convention. He explains to me how the male reptile brain first sees boobs when it comes to things like the angsty teen-aged pop songwriter Jewel. I was unaware her breast were larger than average.

For myself, for Valentine's Day, I bought a copy of William Carlos Williams's Pictures from Brueghel and other poems , plus study guides for the GRE and LSAT, and one about the MAT for Jen.

354 days until Judgement Day.


Fragment

as for him who
finds fault
may silliness

and sorrow
overtake him
when you wrote

you did not
know
the power of

your words

~ WCW