Basket with Raspberries ( for Anatoly Marienhof )
The raspberries are misplaced in a wooden basket, cradled thankfully in multiple paper towels thick enough that the raspberries won’t bleed through to the top of my coffee table. … Well, it’s not a coffee table … any more than I am a real person. I mean I do not feel like a real person. I feel like a poser even though I live in a group home for the mentally ill. I live on a fixed amount of money from Social Security. I can write poetry but today I’m under a lot of pressure because each bedroom has four people living and sleeping in that bedroom. And oddly enough when things are going good I freeze up like crazy.
So today is the day just before Thanksgiving and two of my roommates have gone out to be with family. I have the bedroom pretty much to myself. The one other guy that’s home is watching TV in the front room, which I would call a living room except that 2 other people sleep there and call it their bedroom. I don’t know what to tell you. I’m just beside myself when things are too good. I break down like crumbling cheese. Do you know that kind of cheese that crumbles so easily?
Writers, especially absurdist writers, and especially writers that I have been following for 30 or 40 years, these are my friends … my dear dear friends. I want to say that the raspberries are complaining about their lives. But that idea – that raspberries are conscious enough to complain – is too far-fetched for this world, or for this, my small group home, on the corner of the eternally parallel streets, 7th Avenue and 9th Avenue … precisely because others might not be familiar with the work of Daniil Kharms, Nicanor Parra, or Anatoly Marienhof.
Marc Isaac Potter (we/they/them) … is a differently-abled writer living in the SF Bay Area. Marc’s interests include blogging by email and Zen.
They have been published in Fiery Scribe Review,
Feral A Journal of Poetry and Art, Poetic Sun Poetry, and Provenance Journal.
Twitter is @marcisaacpotter.
Marc Isaac Potter (we/they/them) …does not have a dog named Wilbur
