I appreciate the weather

I appreciate the weather, I appreciate your time and I appreciate

that you’re pretty chill, that you won’t conflate this yawn

with an actual commentary on whatever it is you’re saying.

I can’t rollerskate. I wake up at dawn rolled between covers

and my two children. That moment when your child discovers

they like dancing and listening to music, like laying in the dark

alone with headphones on. The hawk hovers for a moment,

then flies on. The beauty of car parks at sunset. I embark

on an adventure to put things away. This concept of place

that keeps returning to kick my ass, as if every place weren’t

many places and many trajectories. I brace myself for a day

that’s already past with its own weird grace, the grace inherent

in any space of time. Trevor says Levi Strauss’ concept of the

mytheme is impressive and bogus. What if the Sermon 

on the mount was in a valley? It definitely wasn’t in a cave,

I say, but that too is undetermined. Brain ways move much

slower than the speed of light. I smile at a random person

because she smiles at me. She is not a robot, she is not AI

or a deep fake in the large language model race which worsens

with every capitalist incentive. I don’t deny using Chat GPT

to ideate. I am compromised. I am not implying anything,

I’m saying it. I have never seen a lapwing. My brother

Bryan says I should go back to China. No more two-day train

rides across the country sitting next to bags of garlic, before

I was a mother, I mean before I grew two babies and two extra

organs to feed them in my womb. That’s what a placenta is.

I complain about work but I am lucky, have attained the kind

of employment I used to dream about, but not the hacienda

I still dream about. I’m always a little surprised to wake up

In Washington, D.C., which is not the TV version of America

The TV version of Washington, D.C. is usually Baltimore. Coco

picks buttercups and I put them in a small vase. The esoterica

of gardeners is something I aspire to. Although it is Friday,

I know no way of improving the world, except to be kind,

love my enemies, etc., which I mostly do. It’s easy to love hard 

to like. I never visited my father in Bombay but I should have.

I bought a Lonely Planet India and outlined a monsoon-season

appropriate itinerary, but I was disinclined to rely too much on

my father’s charity. Now I wish for more of it. If I played chess,

I would only get to check mate by accident or error, even though

I was in the honors society in high school, which was thirty years

ago, when my impropriety was minimal. I like to talk about

being ungovernable but it’s not true. I’m a part of the gears,

same as you. A devout non-believer who doesn’t need to chill

the fuck out. I am responsive. Look, we’ve all tilted at windmills 

and hoped beyond hope. Reading Don Quixote is one way 

to develop a solid vocabulary in Spanish. Trevor did it once.

The buttercups are wilted despite the vase and water. Should

buttercups be picked? Lawns should not be mowed but instead

should grow full of flowering weeds. My bead collection is mostly

old prayer beads. Bones and stones, no falsehoods, no trying.