Raw Material

A customer tries to buy shirts with “a boiled cotton scent that reminds him of his grandmother.”

A famed conductor agrees to create a music festival with definite Aryan overtones, I can see from the poster for it that the clarinet mouthpieces they use are impossible to play. I am horrified by the fact that the orchestra would do this. The conductor assures me privately that the project is like “subtly digging an obnoxious guest you have in your own home.”

I wake up wondering if these two things, and an even vaguer memory of another transaction where I stand wondering if I’ve already paid, or should pay, for something I’m not even sure I still have, have any threads of connection I could braid into some kind of poem.

I lay awake wondering if I can make it from the bed to the point of writing it down without losing it all, like carrying a handful of oil.