Your Race Car Grin Ain’t No Landmark…

Noah Simons at An Untitled Piece Reading, Trident

Emma Gomis and the Not So Infamous Scone Celebration

4.

They’re playing eerie howling
Wolves and waterfalls
With the miscellaneous bird thrown in there
On the radio
Searching through the noises
That are supposed to bring
Some strange sense of calm
Here
In the immaculate boredom
And exhaustion mixture
They’d created
Somehow
Parakeets and wolves
Will assist
Diligently.
Coo Coo Hachoo-
The radio wants to be the walrus
And they’re eating up noises
That sound like insects
On dead flesh

The Darkness Does Not Overcome It.

My father sent me a package, and on the back of this package were written the words “The light shines in the darkness. And the darkness does not overcome it.” I was in the middle of wondering where this painting should go, and ended up using the words in front of me…and, understanding my father enough to know that everything he decorates an envelope with has a purpose- I noticed the eye of the pyramid, on the bottom of the page and noticed a 25 inside of it. Earlier in the week we had a conversation which lead me to believe this had something to do with the bible, and so I looked for the little number next to every chapter in the gospels written by numerous saints, and found no luck. After a telephone call, it turns out, it was in fact the fifth stanza of the first chapter of the Gospel of St.John. I myself, am not one who belongs to any one religion, so for these words to have come from a saint is something I definitely wouldn’t think to be upon a painting of mine.

It also has a certain hopefullness to it, which seems to be an aspect of humanity which has been leaking itself into my writing, and – I guess, other forms too. I have no choice but to run with it. (If you’ll notice, the photograph is of a woman holding her womb. It was from an article in the New York Times about whether or not newborn, or not quite born children are mature enough to register the feeling of pain.) I obviously took a spin upon it, and its meant to suggest the pains of women and abortion, rather than the child, and the ability by which to overcome them.

First political piece ever? Perhaps. I suppose when it comes to politics, it’s about the only subject I can follow.

(the color is also a lot richer in the painting. flashy cameras like to over expose things. That red, is supposed to be maroon-sigh)

enough explanation.

g’night.

Title-less.

I think I definitely
Misplaced you
When you are not
Supposed to be the kind of thing

One

Misplaces

You are not a pair of keys
Or the channel
I caught my eye on
Only to be lost into a
Sea of 97 number sets
And yogurt commercials

No.

You were not supposed to be misplaced like this.

This is not
Like the last time I spent
Too much time
Searching for my favorite sock
And found it resting snug upon my foot
Sheltering me from the abrasive
Harsh world of home carpeting-
In hindsight,
I was wondering why
One foot was warmer than the other.

But that kind of loss is acceptable,
It happens in Laundromats all the time.

I thought
That maybe
It happened over a telephone receiver
Or in a letter
Maybe,
In one of those drastic holidays
Where instead of simplistic goodness
Cheap port wine with black marked lines
That had the liquid sunk far below them
Became the focus of our attention.

Maybe it was something else.

I can’t remember how it happened.
Gradual, Sporadic,
All encompassing

Though

Somehow,
I misplaced you.

Maybe it was the boots.
You told stories to those boots
Carefully polished, colored, cared for,
More sympathetically, and with more passion
Than you had ever told a story to…me
Or anyone else I think.
You didn’t have to guess if the boots were deaf.
Possibly, you thought it so trivial with others.

I used to search in the cupboards of the bathroom
And sometimes, under my futon mattress, or
Deep in the pits of my closet,
Maybe under the monopoly games,
Or old immature VHS’s from a childhood I can barely remember,
Maybe
You were hiding in there
Then I looked in other ways
Hid a 750 of the Bourbon I knew you liked
And thought maybe if I set a trap,
You’d somehow get caught in that bottle,
And I know you were there.
But I looked in that bottle three weeks later
And an army of small insects
Decided to call that place
Base
And they set up small insect like tents
And lanterns
And I knew you were too big to be in any of those
Tents because that’s just the way you were.

One day,
The frustration of not finding you took over and
I sent you a stream of words all put together
In comprehensive sentences
With proper grammar, punctuation,
And a series of rigorous spell checks
I even typed it all out
Just in case a word tried to look differently
Than the word I was trying to write
And harshly stated that I had tried everything
I could to find you
And could not.
Then,
The document, which I had carefully created
Spent a week in an envelope
With a stamp
And no known destination

Then the receiver began to ring.
And ring.
And ring.
I ignored it.
Thinking you voice was just a mirage
Or a trick of you absence
Then your receiver rang,
Three times maybe,
And we both hid,
I in the closet under the box of VHS’s
My voice mumbling on the other line
About the blissful life I was having not looking for you
And you, without a clue to what
Was going on and
Just hiding
Because it seemed
Like the right thing to do
At the time

Then you decided to say you hadn’t ever left
That you were always there,
In the small insect tents,
In the port wine,
In the letters,
In all the searching I had done,
In the telephone,
Merged into the walls
And into my DNA
And in all the words to this poem

You mentioned that you had never hid in the first place
I mentioned that you were never there,
Thus held no reason to hide,
You told me I’d read the words wrong
Mixed up the speech
And wrote conclusions on the wall.

He was right,
And like my sock,
I wondered why in all the places I had looked,
A part of me was still warmer than the other parts of me.

Self Portrait #79 of zero.

Shorts #1

I.

I suppose in the slightest of strange and awkward, the girl approached the video clerk-
“I want a movie about fighting octopus, slightly cannibalistic”
The clerk, feeling a bit defeated that he’d lost his own game of “guess-what-the-customer-will-rent” replied,
“Um..I suppose I could do a keyword search on our database.”
He was discomforted by the idea that he had never heard of such a movie, especially being as campy horror happened to be one of his most favored genres. Clicking through the database, the girl heard the computer make a clicking noise, some sort of affirmation that the film did in fact exist. In anticipation of some auditory response, she noticed the clerk pull up a piece of paper, take the pen from its secure place behind his right ear, and write down the words “Bitter. Sweet.” And believing to be unnoticed, tucked the small piece of paper into his left back pocket.
“There’s one…” he started, “it’s called Bitter. Sweet.”

“No, No that won’t do-” The girl grew a sour face, her brown hair swaying across her forehead.

“Why not?”

“Because that means it’s bitter, and sweet, and the two of those-put together? I hate that emotion.”

“I guess the title doesn’t quite reflect the idea of cannibalistic octopus-”

“You’re right. It doesn’t”

She then walked away, and watched as her hair moved side to side with her step. The clerk reached into his back pocket. pulled out the piece of paper, and threw it into the trash receptacle.

The both of them, unknowingly of the other, sighed simultaneously. It was time for him to go back to work.