But now I’m dreaming of sailing to the Sun
I am sailing to the Sun
I am the Sun

I want to live where the winter moon lives
by a secluded pool where I can learn to swim.
Grassland and birds against the tide of people and business.
Wild flowers and a meal.

Across the ocean, on to the riverbank, into the wild wood, hunkering down among crowds of scoundrels, it was as if the world was coming undone.
But it wasn’t.

Turning to magic and religion to help us thrive
Using magic and miracles to survive the days
To win hearts and minds
Here be cave paintings and lion totems

A new lease of life would be like an explosion
inside a fanciful storybook of an autobiography.

I don’t like to talk against art, as it is now, today, just because I don’t, but something does bother me and that is the more intellectual minimal stuff. Like earth works etc. I wonder who needs it?

               — Joe Brainard, from Diary 1969 (Sunday, March 30th)

Probably I should be more interested in people
and more in touch with the modern city and its inhabitants
but are they in touch with me?

Sometimes one needs an editor on hand. Other times one is altogether too silent. Shy?
I would suggest dark and dreamlike, senses only stirred when dimly lit dwellings prove to be other than wholly illusory.

A bird was singing in the elm tree;
at least, I think it was an elm tree but
I’m not good on trees.

Underappreciated and misunderstood but nevertheless charming and witty and an endlessly helpful
set of limbs and brain cells whose holiness is outstripped only by their modesty.