Telling

May 24, Strong Game

Short Games

1. Tighten every muscle in your body
at the same time.
2. Call it smiling.
3. Tell everyone you meet that
they should smile more.
4. Paint a sign saying:
Smile and the world smiles with you.
5. Hang the sign around your neck.
6. Have yourself carted through town
wearing nothing but a smile
and the sign saying:
Smile and the world smiles with you.
7. Gain XP equivalent to
how many muscles you feel like
you could do without.

May 23, Mortal Game

Short Games

1. Consider all the ways you can fuck up
(take time away from work to do this, if you need to).
2. Toss and turn during the night.
3. Twist and shout during the day.
4. Hyperventilate into air ducts.
5. Tell all of your mirrors that
it will never ever work.
6. Do it anyway.
7. Fail or succeed and see if I care.
That’s not what counts, honestly.

Just live, will you?

May 9, Lerner Game

Short Games
1. Make poetry famous.
2. Burn your initials into the sun.
3. Read poetry
from the middle of a burning building,
standing in the fast lane of the freeway
OR
falling from the top of the Empire State Building.
4. Be Richard Speck,
rather than Gary Snyder.
5. Ride a rocketship to hell,
rather than a Volvo to Bolinas.
6. Sell arms to the Martians,
rather than wait sullenly for a letter from some deceased clown with a three-piece mind, telling you that you’ve won a bulletproof pair of rose-colored glasses for your poem ”Autumn in the Spring”.
7. Be hated by everyone
who teaches for a living.
8. Read your poetry and watch people
get headaches, vomit, weep, scream, disappear, start bleeding,
eat their television sets,
beat each other to death with swords,
and go out and get riotously drunk
on someone else’s money
9. Do not bury poetry
or dandle it on your knee like a retarded child
with beautiful eyes.
Instead, blow it up
or throw it off a cliff into icy seas
and see if the the motherfucker
can swim for its life.
10. Buy one of those beautiful
switchblade knives.

April 18, Mythomania Game

Short Games

1. Tell your boss that he’s doing a great job
OR
that he looks good
OR
that he smells wonderful
OR
that he is a real “people person”.
2. Tell a beggar that you don’t have anything to spare.
Nothing at all.
Really.
3. Tell your mother you’ll call her.
4. Tell someone pretty that their face
is “geometrically unsound”.
5. Sing the national anthem
with your hand on your heart.
6. Tell all your friends
that you are their friend.
7. Tell all your friends
that voting is super important,
and that you sure vote,
and for the right party too,
and that people who don’t vote
don’t have the right to complain anyway.
8. Tell yourself that you won this game.
9. Keep a straight face, champ.