this summer and other tyrannies

dear octavius,

this body is no longer working out for me.
the back aches
the belly rumbles.
today i stepped out of the house
and the sun swallowed my nerve somehow it
seeped in and spiked a trillion cellular fevers
and hatched the tongue of the summer in my pantlegs.

ketchup is the joker of condiments, if anything,
not the king. it's not that i don't like it ...
i just don't like it on the table
as the default topping.
it's just that there are so many other condiments
worthy of a spot on the diner table.
like sri racha.
i thought what turned out to be a girl's purse was a hoagie
at this bar the other night.
it was pink and had a bow...but it was dark.
and then today a genre-similar delusion took place.
on campus i saw a guy walking
with what i presumed was an open book, he seemed
to be reading it, in that way one does when they are trying not to run into things.
glance happy.
but actually, i realized,
he was holding two cheese-conjoined slices of pizza.
but dammit it looked like a book.
a holy text, maybe. even.

i watched a very long japanese movie tonite
and like all japanese movies
it ended totally without warning.
i sometimes suspect secretly
that these same japanese directors are commissioned
to direct baffling american television commercials,
meant to confuse the viewer into consuming the first thing
that makes any sense to them,
which can only be
the brand name that magically appears on the screen
at the end of the darn thing,
and relieves the anxieties the viewer is having
about having possibly gone insane in the last 45 seconds.
the movie was nobody knows
and it was pretty good.