Revenge of the Lawn, the Abortion, So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away by Richard Brautigan Read Free Book Online Page A

Poetry just can't handle it. Face up to reality," the man said to the poetry.
    But the poetry refused to go. "We're staying." The man offered to call the police. "Go ahead and lock us up, you illiterate," the poetry said in one voice.
    "I'll call the fire department!'
    "Book burner!" the poetry shouted.
    The man began to fight the poetry. It was the first time
he had ever been in a fight. He kicked the poetry of Emily Dickinson in the nose.
    Of course the poetry of Michael McClure and Vladimir Mayakovsky walked over and said in English and in Russian, "That won't do at all," and threw the man down a flight of stairs. He got the message.
    That was two years ago. The man is now living in the YMCA in San Francisco and loves it. He spends more time in the bathroom than everybody else. He goes in there at night and talks to himself with the light out.

The Pretty Office
    W HEN first I passed by there, it was just an ordinary office with desks and typewriters and filing cabinets and telephones ringing and people answering the telephones. There were half a dozen women working there, but there was nothing to distinguish them from millions of other office workers across America, and none of them were pretty.
    The men who worked in the office were all about middle age and they did not show any sign of ever having been handsome in their youth or actually anything in their youth. They all looked like people whose names you forget.
    They did what they had to do in the office. There was no sign on the window or above the door telling what the office was about, so I never knew what those people were doing. Perhaps they were a division of a large business that was located someplace else.
    The people all seemed to know what they were doing, and so I let it go at that, passing by there twice a day: on my way to work and on my way home from work.
    A year or so passed and the office remained constant. The people were the same and a certain amount of activity went on: just another little place in the universe.
    Then one day I passed by there on my way to work and all the ordinary women who had worked there were gone, vanished, as if the very air itself had given them new employment.
    There was not even a trace of them, and in their wake were six very pretty girls: blondes and brunettes and on and on into the various pretty faces and bodies, into the exciting feminine of this and that, into form-fitting smart clothes.
    There were large friendly-looking breasts and small pleasant breasts and behinds that were all enticing. Every place I looked in that office there was something nice happening in woman form.
    What had happened?
Where had the other women gone? Where had these women come from? They all looked new to San Francisco. Whose idea was this? Was this the ultimate meaning of Frankenstein? My God, we all guessed wrong!
    And now it's been another year with passing by there five days a week and staring intently in the window, trying to figure it out: all these pretty bodies carrying on whatever they do in there.
    I wonder if the boss's wife, whoever the boss is, which one he is, died and this is his revenge over years of dullness, getting even it's called, or maybe he just got tired of watching television in the evening.
    Or just what happened, I don't know.
    There is a girl with long blond hair answering the telephone. There is a cute brunette putting something away in a filing cabinet. There is a cheer leader type with perfect teeth erasing something. There is an exotic brunette carrying a book across the office. There is a mysterious little girl with very
large breasts rolling a piece of paper into a typewriter. There is a tall girl with a perfect mouth and a grand behind, putting a stamp on an envelope.
    It's a pretty office.

A Need for Gardens
    W HEN I got there they were burying the lion in the back yard again. As usual, it was a hastily dug grave, not really large enough to hold the lion and dug with a maximum of incompetence and they