—after Joe Brainard
I remember my mother singing Hold Me Now
by the Thompson Twins
and then looking at the universe for a response.
I remember the song peaked at number 3 on the Billboard Hot 100 in May 1984.
I remember blue popsicles and stationery from Love of Pete.
I remember Boris. He lived next door but claimed to have lived on Mars
in his past life. His favorite TV show was Land of the Lost.
I remember looking a gift horse in the mouth and saying, “I’m more gifted
than you.”
I remember sitting in my crib and watching my mobile
and seeing two airplanes crash into the Twin Towers.
I remember telling my Montessori teacher that Leipzig was the new Berlin
and that Hitler thought the world was made of ice.
I remember reading Dune when I was five and identifying as a Bene Gesserit.
I remember how my tongue was like a floppy disc every time I ate
mint chocolate chip ice cream.
I remember riding through a decadent urban world like a lonely cab driver. It was a nameless hour and the streetlights circled like a pack of wolves.
I remember using my brainstem as an oar to navigate the limbic tides
while other children played soccer and Little League and had birthday parties at expensive waterparks.
I remember meditating like Marcus Aurelius
and feeling sorry for kids whose mothers wore Lululemon.
I remember eating reality sandwiches and declaring them unreal.
I remember how my Aunt had an allergy to dark blue and green with purple shades.
I remember playing three-card monte with God.
I remember swimming in a gene pool without goggles.
I remember planting star seeds in my father’s garden next to the Brandywine
and Speckled Roman tomatoes.
I remember using Saturn as a makeshift punching bag.
I remember death squads and the right-wing swing of two-piece skirt suits.
I remember how every kid got their finger slammed in a car door simultaneously.
I remember reading the rhyme of the flying bomb and predicting the smart-to-hot economy.
I remember the doctor’s office —always eugenics!
I remember how my parents named our dog Goldberry because my father spent three days
at Woodstock and my mother had a Tolkien fetish.
I remember hating Tolkien.
I remember how loud the animals were when they talked outside my bedroom window.
I remember toast that was far too full of bread.
I remember how my eyes were massive blue slabs
of Gnomen stone uniting humanity with a living new language.
I remember how my sister went to the Winter Glow Dance with a boy
with sideburns like a Tibetan prayer rug.
I remember how everyone thought my sister and I were twins.
I remember fate in a pleasant mood and secrets of the sun.
I remember bending over the hologram on a Saturday night.
I remember the militarized arm.
I remember single tap commands and superimposition.
I remember how sex felt like lilacs in brine and metal chimney vents.
I remember whipping the horse of Turin
and listening to Nietzsche’s last words —“Mutter, ich bin dumm.”
I remember the right hand being bigger than the head, in a convex mirror, in the aero aesthetics of the Bristol-Myers Squibb Offices in Prague.
I remember the intended meaning of the message.
I remember how I discovered a cure for AIDS. It was a bright, sunny day and there were robins at the bird feeder.
I remember being poles apart.
I remember having a birthmark the color of overripe mulberries. I remember not liking mulberries. I remember how my mother
never sang nursery rhymes like Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush.
I remember knowing the unknowable.
I remember harnessing energy from “The Lightning Field” in New Mexico. Four hundred silver rods blinking against the sky’s blue black flesh synching my DNA to the heavens.
I REMEMBER THE WIDER MORAL PANIC.
I remember seeing dead people like the kid in that movie.
I remember the lyric shift archival sources commentary on the text
notes on process leisurely disaster.
I remember snorting Adderall laid out like the Nazca lines. The next day I pulled
hummingbirds
and astronauts
and trees
and whales from my nose.
I remember reading Joe Brainard’s I Remember
and thinking
MOTHERFUCKER… I’m an Indigo child I can do better than that.