I Like

I Like

BY JOE BRAINARD
I Joe
You lie
About pineapples
There are none under anywhere
I look
I see
I find only dirty tulips
Or orchid ribbons
Orange
With big black words
A royal sky:
It lets one see
And what a good thing a white shirt is!
Nice
Nice to see red by night
         to know pink well
         to understand yellow birds
         to realize black and white
Terribly nice
Mirrors are
Nice
(Terribly)
To see by
To see by me
You
I love
I love Indians
          pen points
          Hungarian
          plaster
          sweetmeats
          five
A nice number to love by
If feather pillows didn’t leak
Out onto green floors
Where normal shoes belong
With blue socks
With white stripes
And Boston newspapers
All about news
And things
I like
I like fried chicken
          smashed ‘taters
          thickin’ gravy
          not biscuits an’
          chawklit pie wif
          mushmeller toppin’
And I simply love horoscope!
(Crunch)
The sky is aflame!
Red
(A jet of anti-matter gas is exploding harmfully
     against the upper atmosphere)
But tomorrow is Tuesday
And I shall see the four seasons on one branch
     of pink trees displaying
Ivory lilies insisting
Upon white privacy
(Or they threaten not to root at all)
I, personally, vote for blue
And to hell with Easter
I prefer red and green
          mother Christmas
          black birds of passion
          sunsets that consume
          pink nuns and salty peanuts
          and Renoir who bores me
But most of all I like shoe polish
And the big sun rises over Delhi. . . .
Joe Brainard, “I Like” from The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard. Copyright © 2012 by Joe Brainard.  Reprinted by permission of The Library of America.
Source: The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard (Library of America, 2012)