summary of recent letters and phone calls

Received word my mothers picking apples with poets again
Fresh breeze
and a glance of the loess hills
cause
the apples to scatter
beneath her sixty year old feet
Apples aging too

While legends here are making a mess of things
friends are dipping in
slowly agreeing
Drinking to much
Proclaiming truth
Portraying unjust demeanors
Portraying what once was

How would you know?
Pompous old man
Would you not understand the buildings built into my upbringing?
John Falters paintings
The shoppers
The decorations down town
made from holly

jeeps
Run down and dangerous at the
Ye-Olde time tavern
Anhydrous buried in the Christmas trees

Nebraska have other men scrawled their names on your school houses
as ive been absent?
left me with motorcycle dreams and hangovers
water towers and elementry schools
left my friend Jake with a baby boy and a trampled dream
must you always tell us what to do?
must the slackers and make believers at the gas stations
proclaim us friends
sobbing stoned in Jack Genes shed
with old men
drunk with your car keys
with machine shed blues
sitting pretty
sluggishly unscathed

Phone call from Banjo girl

hey there ummm
so I had a dream about a Hemlock last night
and I think I can use conductive reasoning
to figure out how to find a hemlock in Bend
if we can figure out the setting of my dream
we can find the tree
I know it was a Western hemlock
and I know I saw those little pine cones
so if you see any of those little pines cones
anywhere
than mark that down on your list
for a possible spot for a Hemlock sample
for your collection

The shed is not the barn

Following the river to your home
You show me the shed
In which your brothers hid arrowheads
and scared you with stories of Indians

your fathers tractor sits blank
next to the barn
and I ponder his whereabouts

I fail at convincing you that the fog is preventing my departure
And scam a few more moments

In which
you pick cockle burs from my hair
o so subtlety
handing me each one
as if to show me the trouble I had gotten into

3 am in Omaha with Justin

young pink haired girl
vomiting in the kitchen
and your stealing sandwiches and offering me cigarettes
we search for booze
relentlessly
and eye the hipsters bikes and vinyl
upstairs someone’s fucking
and outside the trash blows through the construction cones
like a son of a bitch

If I was there I would call myself here

the Nemaha river stinks
and
the pricks have offered me a cold beer once again

I can talk to people in distant places
with my small telephone

Phone call from Chino Latinos

hey i just thought id let u know that I finally got a martini
and I’m drinking it right now
and its um actually not to bad
its um
actually a pretty nice martini
like its a little bit salty but not to much salty
it has a little like u know
it has

a little bit sweat taste to it
its working out pretty good for me
u know this martini is defiantly good
and actually to tell u the truth these people I’m drinking this martini with right now
happen to be
from a Seattle
they live in Seattle
this other guy I’m with lives in Bismarck North Dakota
and you know
Seattle and Oregon are kind of comfortable
they both have trees
they have a lot of trees
totally dude if u get a chance u should try this martini
like i could put in a box and ship it too you
its a really good martini
your always looking for that
you would really like it Jenkins

Oregon

everyone in Oregon loves Oregon
everyone in Oregon smokes weed and snowboards in Oregon

everyone in Oregon talks about how much they love Oregon
and how much everyone else in Oregon loves to smoke weed and snowboard in Orgon

I like to tell everyone im from Nebraska and that im not from Oregon
and that in Nebraska we dont snowboard but talk about smoking weed in Oregon