Poem for Tao Lin

Your poems remind me
of my dreams, mostly
the ones stuck to my shoes
like old gum groping
at my worn down heels.

The heels are so tattered
you can see their metal roots
encircled by white bony plastic.

Last night I dreamt
I lived back in the co-ops.
There was no place for my stuff,
the room was full of old
leather chairs, and rejected
stuffed animals.

I thought, this will do, but
the showers, that is what I
didn’t think about when I
agreed to live here again.

In the dream there was
a dark haired boy,
he kept touching my stomach.
We were laughing and I looked
at myself disapprovingly.

I woke up surprised again
to be back in an apartment
in San Francisco with sore
teeth from the night’s grinding.

I had two root canals this year
and I lost my favorite hat.
I’m not sure which is more upsetting.
The hat is quite important
for its symbolic nature.

A black scholar cap
that makes people call me
frenchy, and I wore it
in France all those cold days
with sputtered rain and the
gray old buildings.

The teeth are another story.
They take your living
slithery roots out, because
they are damaged. Something
electrical, the signal isn’t
getting through, and you
can’t feel cold anymore.

So, they replace them with
steel rods, drill them straight
into the gum. Steel doesn’t die
like living electric nerves.
My teeth will be secure,

And I won’t have to wear dentures
when I’m old, but I will have to
live with a cold and plastic object
inside my mouth that is not
human. They don’t seem to

understand that emotional
attachment. Dentists, they think
a living bone is a bone, a hat
is just a hat made of material
and who cares if it traveled
to France and back, and who
cares if you must live with
a prosthetic your whole life?

*This is a poem from early last year when I first discovered Tao Lin.