Octopus’s Garden

Mimosa tree secularity hit me in the solar plexus. Ain’t no gods going around making mimosa trees and atomic bombs in the same breath. Time and space are like the lint balls I fish out of my belly button each morning—always there without the slightest idea as to why. So I sing to my octopus. I keep her in a 75-gallon tank I keep as the centerpiece of my living room. She scuttles about in her sharp salinity across from the fireplace, next to the Basquiat lithograph and the Koons tchotchke. No this ain’t no Hirst-like reproduction of an octopus in formaldehyde, though like he did with that Great White, this is an honest to goodness Briareus I call Belinda. I thought of going with a Hapalochlaena lunulata in order to make nerve toxin broth to feed to my dates, but I ditched that idea. I just drugged my dates straight out—ether in the car, Spoorloos style—and fed them to my successive dates, Bar Jonah style. I gotta tell you life is a peach in my octopus’s garden in the shade.

“The America of my experience has worshipped and nourished violence for as long as I have been on Earth.”

— James Baldwin / Nothing Personal