5.38-Minute Soliloquy

OK I need a poem so here goes

Slippery out
Walking in the street
Looking at my
Red shoe laces
My brown shoes

Asphalt
All the ice over to the side
Snow mounds
Puddles of water

Yeah

Laurel Street

Yeah

Where am I?
Hague and Laurel?

Very beautiful olive-green-painted
Wood-slat siding house
Pretty big probably built
More than a hundred years ago

That’s the neighborhood

So now I’m walking
On the sidewalk, which is
Trickier but I-a
I just tell myself to keep my chin
In front of my feet
And then my
Shoes won’t shoot forward and make my head
Slam
Onto the cement behind me
Which has never really happened to me badly
But could
I know that one of Garrison Keillor’s brothers
Who lived in Madison
Died that way
Many years ago
Just walking on an icy sidewalk
You can die
You can die anytime really

But we think about that all the time I won’t
Go on anymore about that.

Whole bunch of finches
In a trimmed hedge
Whole bunch of em
Lot of finch shit in the snow
Down beneath

Huh

You know I can hear a saw
There’s a real
Real nice saw sound
Sounds almost like a
Gosh it almost sounds almost like a-a

Like a

Paddleboat horn or something
What do you call those things?
Mississippi river boat
Steamboat
Sounds like a steamboat

Horn and there’s Pete’s
Rubbish Hauling
PETE’S
In green lettering
There goes the garbage truck down the street

Now I’m on Prior I think
Getting pretty close to my own street
Ashland

And now I’m passing an apartment building
An old friend from grad school moved in here
A long time ago
And then I never saw her again
She left
She went to Florida or something
I felt bad that I never looked her up
She living so close and all
Not sure why I didn’t

Oh well

Regrets

And more regrets

YES yes yes
You know if I don’t talk
This poem will be shorter
Which is not a bad thing
So I can allow silence
To enter the poem
But if I did how would I
Portray it?
No one will know
Once I've typed these words out
Exactly where the gaps should go
Or how long they should be

There’s 

a

There could be a long long gap
Between any two words

There’s certainly a long long gap
Before the poem starts
That is before I turned on the
Recording machine
I did have that thought
That-a
That became the first line
Even before I turned on the machine
But now I can’t even remember what it was

And then of course a gap after the thing ends
And the recording machine
is turned off.