On Eating Pitted Mt. Athos Olives with Sicilian Herbs Bought at Whole Foods on W. 24th Street

These pitiless and pit-less fruits! – unconscionably tasty props! –
revert with them to your adopted systems of denial and
relinquishments, decisions and provisions that you’ve learned
throughout your years here smooth away and soothe the wary
fear of absence in the heart: take part in these delicious

grand abandonments as if they were the whole experience:
which they may well turn out to be: Sicilian olives hit the spot –
their touch of fire, peppered gleam – their hot required
flush – salty garlic blushing savor, kicking just a bit of butt
en route to summoning some rush of flavor you recall from –

surely not your Anglo-Saxon prison of a childhood – but
some first whiff of – as if it could be any other thing! – that
source of your complexity: that winging demon – that
entirely invisible yet utterly mad, physical relentlessly
exquisite hex – your first encounter with the blatancy of sex –

which is to say, your first deep dive into the belly of the mystery
that makes you love New York as if to leave it would be
worse than hell. Every swell and crumble of its concrete,
damp exposure and unnerving whack to your composure –
all the black despondencies you knew that sometimes barred

the dawn – result in an incorrigible hard-on: here’s the thing
that you are here to do: toss each over-priced Manhattan
gourmet olive into your wet shameless gaping mouth,
and know whatever Hamlet meant when he informed
the disembodied skull of his Horatio that there were more

things in this heaven and this earth than he could know
amounts, at least to you, to the fellatio that you perform each
moment of your life on this ridiculously rife profusion of
collective phallus: spectral palace – this reflection of your soul.
Bring on the olives! – eat the blessèd, damned things whole.


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