Incubate an egg with the heat of your palms. Brood.
Nurse your sorrows with the sour milk of jealousy, or failing that, Nestle’s infant formula.
Dissect a seed.
Relive a pleasant memory by reenacting it in excruciating detail.
Do math problems in your head—for example, prove Goldbach’s Conjecture.
Collect rain in jars, tightly sealed and organized by month and day.
Get ready! Sharpen all your knives.
Grind them until they’re thin as piano wires.
Hug yourself tightly and rock back and forth on your haunches.
If you must watch the clock, unplug it first.
If you must play solitaire, dispense with the cards.
Light cigarettes and watch from a safe distance as they turn into columns of ash.
Pace, but let your fingers do the walking.
Novels are best read backwards, one page at a time.
Stop kidding yourself about what comes next.
Go about your business.
Coil into a spring so your mind won’t have anywhere to wander.
OTHER POSTS IN THE SERIES
- How to wake up
- How to eat
- How to walk
- How to listen
- How to wait
- How to breathe
- How to find things
- Manual: How to make videopoems, courtesy of Swoon
- How to lose
- How to dance
- How to procreate
- How to play
- How to listen: the movie
- How to mourn
- How to calculate
- How to grow up
- How to spit
- How to burn
- How to mourn, Belgian-style
- How to make a fist
- How to make a face
- How to sacrifice
- How to take notes
- How to talk
- How to dig
- How to sleep
- How to cast a shadow
- How to teem
- How to fit in
- How to sit
- How to panic
- How to exist
- How to drive
- How to question authority
- How to cook
- How to find things (videopoem)
- How to distress furniture
- How to meditate
- How to be a poet
I especially like “..coil into a spring..” and want to know what happens when the coil lets go.
Well, presuming your infrared-sensing pits are on target, some small mammal gets a massive dose of venom and you get a meal. :)
done
By the way, that was tongue-in-cheek, and might be in an unfamiliar dialect. Working at places like IBM, you get often get email requests to do something (a quick edit on a file or something like that.) Takes you a minute or two and you shoot back the one word reply: “done.”
That’s more or less how I took it.
I am loving the whole series, but this one entry in particular spoke to me on all sorts of levels.
Glad to hear it. Thanks!