The Day Before Yesterday
Meanwhile, Franz Kafka sells another piece of his dead mother’s jewelry to pay for his brothel visits. Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse go horseback riding together. Alma Mahler has just aborted their child. The police question Dr. Freud, but he has an alibi and they release him after slapping him around. Summer is fading, and Rainer Maria Rilke feels it as a wound in his chest. Using an alias, Adolf Hitler boards a train for Munich to escape conscription in the Austro-Hungarian army. Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa has gone missing. Museumgoers lay flowers in front of the bare wall.
The Anxiety Index
At premiere of the Moonlight Sonata, Beethoven played with such fury that several piano strings napped and became entangled in the hammers. I’m beginning to understand something about it. If you go searching – in self-help books or on hikes or with hallucinogens – for answers, you'll find only what light cannot illuminate, a confusion of names, today’s rain falling on yesterday. I was taught in school to never begin a sentence with “and” or “but.” But, as a practical matter, how do you do that? And why would anyone even want to? Drivers go faster and faster. More run yellow lights. There’s nothing in the stores except vinegar. Maybe if you know how to use it, this is the cure.
Howie Good's latest poetry collection, THE HORSES WERE BEAUTIFUL, is forthcoming from Grey Book Press.
