The Clean Part Reading Series - Not Yet

So anyway, The Clean Part reading isn't happening. An airplane never took off, Mathias called, and now I’m sitting here in Maryville all dressed up and nowhere to go. So this goes out to Mathias Svalina, all alone in Lincoln.


The Clean Part


You’re traveling around but you’re always
in the same place. Car. Highway.

The landscape is starting to look
obsessive. I don’t know what else to say.
Maybe some red?
Maybe some new form to the bridges
or railing?

“It’s the little things,” the little things
keep saying. But why trust them? The big things
can seem so persuasive
in their silence.

There’s a situation. Your mother and father
are discussing it long
into the past. You can make a note of it
in your little notebook.

You can say, “Spin me around. Spin me around
and around.”

Because it’s all the unknown,
really. And the telephone ringing there.
No flights out.
And you get to be suddenly older.

Just to stand there as long as you want,
and to look at yourself
in your decorum. In your eventual getting up
and going away,

like anything else you can’t explain.