Prozac Before Swine

I remember fun but I don’t remember liking it all that much.

--Daniel Pallas

Letters: Collected, Undelivered, Found

1993

The idea of the crimson foliage stroke is to knock the opponent’s sword down and take the sword over.

--Miyamoto Musashi

The Book of Five Rings

1643

Armed with nothing more than the arm of a mannequin

I charged them all

and broken glass did skitter through the alley

and I remember I didn’t quite

make it all the way across

and

instead

face down in the gutter water and grease I remembered

that I had forgotten what I was mad about

I think about the rows of cages and in each one

a rabbit wearing Maybelline mascara

I think about monkeys with Lucite skull caps and wires

shot into their thinkers

I think about a cicada at the end of a string buzzing

around and around my head

“I have seen a naked boy asleep on a clear hot day

on the back of a water buffalo

in a malachite field of rice,”

he said

“I watched a girl in a conical hat drive a thousand ducks

down the road to a slaughterhouse.”

I remember him saying that

I thought about thinking and

then thought again