fortune cookies

• someday you will be in the guts of worms
• a mysterious man will audit your emotions
• you will fall in love, but only at the worst time
• you will fall in love, instead of make money
• each raindrop reminds you of home
• you will ace the bar exam when you dream about it next
• the weight you gained is for hibernation
• today’s word is “existential angst” (存在焦虑)
• hello.
• i am you writing poems in the shade of a tree
• like walt whitman, you assume
• your fortune is this: the evergreens shed sharp stale needles along the roadside as you fire past them in a bullet made of 1998 ford taurus, your mother’s car, the one she gave you for your 16th birthday, the one you still drive 20 years later.
• your mother died of congestive heart failure after a heart attack that no one recognized at first because the known signs were all male-oriented.
• you have your hand out the driver’s side window, testing da vinci’s hypothesis, listening to a cassette trapped in the stereo, a choppy, slowly dissolving rendition of chicago’s “25 or 6 to 4.”
• the sky is gorgeous
• this morning spent speeding away from your concerns, but concerns are the only thing faster than the speed of light; and at every stop sign or off ramp, there they are, baring big fangs and supported by a trestle you built yourself out of old lumber and that moment you watched the life drain out of her eyes
• why did you write this—
• here is your fortune: you didn’t know what life was until its lotioned fingers slipped from yours, your sister on the phone with dispatch, your father running down the stairs
• you didn’t know what life was before the steady pulse hit broad bricks, collapsed in the old armchair, stuttered “i need water” and left.
• sorry
• here is your fortune: you will be that, in your own fashion: a writhing wreck of neurons piloting a flesh mech, deeply concerned with your acne scars and your small butt until you take a wrong step down a staircase and crack your skull against the unforgiving concrete.
• everything you love is built into the moment you die, psychic buffer, papier mache battle armor, a memoir unspooled from a twitter feed.
• you will meet someone nice someday, someone who will call dispatch when your soul skitters across the wooden floor like old nickels dropped from a shaky hand.
• you will meet someone nice, who will braid your hair in the autumn evening.
• you will meet someone nice, for a moment or a steamer trunk of moments.
• you will meet someone nice, and their mother will become your mother out of necessity.
• you are driving in the mountains in summer. the sky is gorgeous. you smile for the first time in years.
• that is your fortune.

jcb