Empathy: A Dress Rehearsal w/ Market Research

My neighbor just pulled into his driveway.
He was about a quarter of the way through "Land Down Under."
I was reading an article about the fact that most websites are
designed with a masculine
aesthetic. I stopped reading when I realized that
my neighbor didn't cut his engine. Instead,
he had made the conscious choice to wait out
the song. In fact, he turned it up,
hotboxing himself with the music.

The masculine design aesthetic of most websites
doesn't jive with the fact that
more females than males
use websites for online shopping.
The designers can't change what, to them,
is inherent and intuitive. Even though they are
paid to check that kind of shit
at the door.

I get it. I really do. The personal
is even more powerful
than we want to imagine,
even in a commoditized world.

Which leads me to the waking dream
of what could possibly lead a man,
circa 2011,
to put off all the other things,
all the better things,
all the family things,
all the urgent and important things,
all the important but not urgent things,
all the chores and not chores,
all the fingerjabbing of life,
for this:

Be One w/the Man You Normally Are Not

Complete the smallest
acts of love. The smaller,
the better. Wipe a crumb
from a mouth, swallow
words, you know
which ones, etcetera.
Write down the acts
on lists and show
no one. On the coldest
night of the year,
when your children
come to you cold, burn
the lists. Collect
the ashes. Store them,
and show no one.
When you have enough
for a body, throw a
funeral for a lost
friend, a lost family
member. Invite
no one, but pursue
the ritual doggedly.
Dig and sob and bury.
Afterwards, call the newly
mourned friend, and
greet him as
a risen lord.

Dear Emerson

Change my life
again. Write in a journal
something
maybe whispered from a bird,

a slow hunch
borne out
quickly.

Shake the man who makes
too much of his own time
down, down
to earth. Rub
my face in it, in earth, in grass:

“A man must have aunts
and cousins, must buy carrots and
turnips, must have
barn and woodshed, must go
to market and to the blacksmith’s
shop, must saunter
and sleep and be inferior and
silly.”

It's really such a relief to hear it
said so clearly.

*

A professor, surrounded by a vigorous dog,
once said to me:
clear writing is a morality, is moral.
He was talking about big T
and his cousin, you.

Surrealism, done well,
sounds just like the real world:
that was written on a book jacket
and made sense, too.
Of course you can't just point the camera, right?

Sunlight. Throwing one's arms in the sky
for a stretch. Writing by hand
on the first real day of spring,
a few days into summer. I am one nap away
from waking a real man.