ANOTHER! Library Blog

Morphology, or the study of morphing

I tend to brush my teeth right before I go to work.
When I don’t, there’s this space right before
I go to work into which other things
or nothing can creep. I’ve been reading a book
about rocks in the teeth brushing space,
which took the place of the washing my coffee cup
space, which I now leave unwashed, which is why
I stopped drinking coffee. I knew a guy
who believed we could do anything we set our minds to.
I asked him to be a guy who didn’t believe that.
When he couldn’t, I said check mate and we went for pizza
by the river. I need to stop writing
about wanting to change. My desire to change
is unchanging. But wanting to stop writing about change
is a desire to change. Sometimes it feels
like I’m both the prisoner and the warden in a movie
about a guy who didn’t do it. How does the warden
escape being sadistic, given that the script calls
for sadism, how does the prisoner get more
of the rice pudding? If I ran a prison,
I’d make everyone wear corduroy pants
so their escapes would sound funny.
That would be different, like whimpering
feels transitional between crying all the time
and not crying all the time. This may be insensitive,
but do you ever feel like the wagons of your thoughts
have circled and you’re inside, being shot at?
And you’re rooting for those doing the shooting?
I won’t ever notice all the things I never notice.
This is like saying something else
that means the same thing put a slightly different way.

—Bob Hicok