So it’s only when they’re alone

out on the patio

with a cheesecake to each that he says,

“so it takes eleven elephants to get you off?’

and she is laughing

with her prehensile tail curled

through the inside of his thigh

saying how she once watched a nature show

where someone said

that certain species of female turtles

might be immortal

as long as they keep breeding. 

He is quick to remind her

that the eight elephants in his possession

are themselves very large,

even for elephants,

and then puts a bar stool

up behind the back of his shirt

for a spontaneously scheduled

hunchback impression. 

She is up in his lap now

with one breast apiece

against one cheek apiece

and singing in her best Ethel Merman voice,

“It’s like a small episiotomy

when you and I are sharing sodomy,”

and even though he has threaded

all of his fingers through her ribs,

the time has come

to loudly announce his predatory license. 

She runs one long thin finger

down the tip of his nose

before climbing out  

and finding a small Moroccan cushion

to sit on at his feet,

asking if his amazement is the same

at knowing a light always comes on

when the refrigerator opens. 

Agape at her sudden distance,

he is quick to mention

that the eight elephants,

which are “very large,”

are also “very well-trained”

but the one he addresses

has already tumbled backward

and disappeared into the gap

in the deck boards the way one other,

just like her, he remembers,

became a macramé owl

on the wall of a public restroom. 

“I can pull your peanut up the hill

with half that many!” he screams

at the spreading horizon,

though when it turns out that he is alone

and he has no elephants

and he has no trunk,

his beard falls off

and he’s finally just a small dog

alone on the side

of a Mexican highway.

It might just be the constant state

unmanufactured new

that means I’ve seen this

though I miss that childhood window

less than long complaint,

remember dropping

suns that scorched horizons

into candy corn uproars of rage

and now this light

that sets me bitter and amazed

to see this here and now

so red

Oh, my sweetheart,

oh, my girl with schoolbooks,

hold my hand,

let’s cut through gardens

on our walk

oh, my dirty lilac,

oh, my sense of shame,

we have to get

our fucking done

in mounds of dirt

oh, my logging semi,

oh, my bandage,

drive away

and pop this heart out

through my chest

oh, my cotton ticking,

oh, my tawdry bullets,

together,

we can murder

in the dark

oh, my nose-hair trimmer,

oh, my lawsuit paperwork,

legally,

it turns out

that I’m old

oh, my mourning after,

oh, my taxi cab to hell,

I cannot bear a separation – 

rob this bank

with me.

Dusk follows herons

toward a gone train

long past the concrete

where children load their broken legs

into aircraft large enough

to carry a city like this away. 

They don’t notice fresh enamel

on the long tooth that rises

out of the mushy canvas

in the other direction,

hazy blue as a bruise. 

These unquiet desperates

followed the Steinbeck road

in Japanese jalopies

far past the place

where they turned their backs

on the tetherball unscrewing itself. 

This doesn’t mean the diaper days rest

out in the back forty. 

They brush against bottles,

against fists, they fasten identity

the way a wig rests

on the head and the whole

gets called scalp.  

The days have gone

down like this for a decade

without a single smiling valediction

for any of them.

A woman, small, in her thirties, whose dark hair has gone a fourth of the way to gray, is sitting in a chair. A drink on the end table next to her sweats small beads that run off and gather in a ring on the wood as she stares through glasses along the line of a fine nose toward a stack of paper in one hand. The only light in the room comes from the window behind her, and it brightens a small approaching figure.

“Mom, can you help me tie my shoes?” He puts one hand on her legs, which are drawn up under her on the cushion.

“Not right now,” she says. “I’m working,” trying as she speaks to untangle the notes her husband has left in the margins. It’s gotten worse as the pages progress. A couple of mixed drinks hasn’t brought her any closer to a translation.

“Please!” he begs. “I wanna go outside.”

She still doesn’t look up. “Put on your slippers, then.”

“I can’t find them.”

Reaching for the glass, she sips and looks up at him. “Ask your father to help you.”

He lets out the breath of a child losing precious minutes. “He’s busy.”

“Busy?”

“He’s playing the banjo and singing those songs with all the bad words.”

“Jesus Christ!” She smacks the paper against her leg. “Is he drunk already?”

“Not yet.”

She sighs. “All right, then – ask your brother,” and resumes reading.

“I did.”

Looking up again, she asks, “and what happened?”

His face retains its pleading expression. “He told me to eat his butt and then he went out.”

 “Murff,” she grunts, climbing to her feet. A rumble of half-formed profanity starts as she rests a hand lightly on the boy’s small head and then pivots around him. The staccato syllables continue all the way to the front door. She opens it and calls out.

Shortly, another boy appears on the porch, almost a copy of his brother except for having a few years on him. They have the same slight build, dark hair, and green/gray eyes. 

“What?” he asks with a crooked smile.

“Did you…PHLLEAHH!” Her face wrinkles itself around her nose. “You smell like you’re made entirely out of crap!”

“Yeah, me and Tommy had a fight with dog shits.”

“Dog shit.” Mother and editor all at once, she pulls him inside. “It doesn’t matter how many you throw, you still say, ‘dog shit.’ Go run yourself a bath. And don’t ever fight anyone with anything unless you’re going to win.” She gives him a soft smack on the back of the head and points him toward the bathroom.

“Uh huh,” he mutters, and starts walking.

“Oh, by the way – did you tell your brother to eat your butt?”

“No,” he replies. “I told him to lick it.”

“Fine. Wash your mouth out with soap while you’re in there.”

“Uh huh,” he says again with a shrug and vanishes down the hall.

She ducks back into the main room to grab her drink and then turns to head for the stairs. Down in the family room a man is sitting in a ragged love seat fumbling around the strings of a banjo. A small and growing monument of beer cans litters the floor in front of it and he’s sipping at another one as she approaches. When he sees here coming he raises his eyes and shines a big grin at her.

She doesn’t return the smile, gesturing broadly instead. “A little help here, please.”

He leans forward to look at the sheaf of paper in her hand and then slumps back. “I already did that manuscript.”

“If you mean you left a bunch of dragging scribbles on it that any first grader could have made with a crayon then, yes, I guess you did.” She swirls the contents of the glass in her other hand.

Shaking his head, he says, “most of that thing reads like it was written in finger paint during the rec period at the laughing academy. Crayon is better than it deserves.” He goes back to twanging away.

She shakes her own head in exasperation. “I’m not talking about that anyway. You might throw in a bit more with the boys.”

“What’s up?” he asks, and rests the banjo at his side.

“Well, let’s see – our five-year-old can’t tie his own shoes, and our eight-year-old, when asked for help, recommends a snack of ass and then goes and has a turd war with the neighbor kid, and both of them think I’m a cranky bitch and you’re a big goofball.”

He brings the banjo back up into his lap. “Sounds like everything’s fine to me.” He plucks a couple of strings and then looks back up at her. “You know, it’s funny that I came into this thinking I didn’t want kids.”

Her eyes bulge as much as they can without falling out and her chin sticks out like a suitcase handle. She thinks about the drink first before throwing the handful of pages at him instead.

They float down around him as he beams at her. “You’re pretty hot when you’re angry.” Reaching down, he pulls at one leg of his shorts and exposes an erection that’s gathering steam, shaking a bit as it points at her.

There’s a look of disbelief for a moment before her jaw relaxes. She reaches up with her now-empty hand and drags her shirt down at the collar, exposing a breast.

Two boys are hunkered down in the stairwell, one with untied shoes and the other smelling of excrement.

The younger one whispers, “what are they doing?”

“I think they’re screwing,” the other answers.

“What?” He gives a puzzled look.

“Never mind. You’re too little.”

“You mean when one of them is on top of the other and they make weird noises?”

The older boy turns toward him, his crooked smile returning. “Yeah, that’s what I mean.”

The younger one is silent for a moment. “Nah, Mom’s too quiet,” he says. “I think she’s giving him blowjobs.”

1. Coyote Song

Cale used to sit a tractor, pulling furrows out near Tekoe, back when the wheat still paid. Since then the bank’s returned the Harvester to the dealer and he drives a bar stool, dragging stories, telling time by the shadows outside the window or the passage in and out of folks who haven’t yet heard how he lost his virginity as a sixteen-year-old in the bathroom of Planned Parenthood up north in Spokane.

Not much for numerology, he still counts the third beer as lucky as the seventh and the tenth as good as both combined.

The Indians from out of Worley run him out around midnight. An old blue sedan, half of home itself, weaves him back to the other half, a bed inside a converted garage where the few ponderosa pines outside send cones on down to the roof while he sleeps, whether the moon is out or not.

2. First Quarter, Last Quarter

If anything, she was something between a bona fide date and the carnality of fast food, accessorizing a homespun wardrobe with the expectation that he’d hold any door open for her and then leading on in, hip first.

In a red shirt on a red-eye night, with beer signs glowing through two windows, she looked across the small distance of a pickup’s bench seat and corrected him.

“That’s a sensitive part of my waist,” she said, with lips too close to his ear.

            In another few hours, on a bed minutes away, she would let him in and then cast him out in a series of short motions, the moan and then the shudder, followed by harsh words, waiting for morning.

3. Waxing

This time, it was a small symbolic thing, a little bronze Shiva from that downtown boutique full of tapestries and incense. He left it on her window sill and climbed back down the fire escape.

It was just a token, like the others, an object to construe as an article of love. It was the only possible way. He had no idea when his tongue had ceased working, when nothing had become a native language.

It must have been before this. And then again, he didn’t try, not any more.

Because it never worked. So from a distance, the words didn’t matter. It was easier to follow her home.

And then the icons – a blue button, a silver earring, a pair of dice, the jack of hearts, and now a diminutive metal statue. He told himself, ‘at least this is only the fifth time.’

4. Eclipse

It wasn’t the shock of blonde hair, which didn’t shock any more, only the same thing he’d seen bobbing just high enough over the top of clothing racks.

The same worn jeans and shirts hung on metal and plastic hangers, the way they always had. Thrift store smell, except that even when she added dark streaks coming up from the base of her neck it still wouldn’t touch her.

Or maybe. She reminded him just enough of another with twice as many years behind her. There had always been the luxury of seeing them as distant airplanes heading north and east that looked like they’d collide but just crossed vapor trails in muffled engine noise, each wandering off harmlessly against the blue.

Now there it was, and then gone too fast, one body moving out in front of the other and putting out the light.

I want to say, ‘you cuntless wonder.’ 

That’s not it, though.

You have pawned my friends

for corn flakes,

postured as a human,

set me up as mate

inside the floppy udder

of your brain. 

That’s not it, either. 

Even if I hadn’t found my love,

my hand

would still have feared

the bear trap

waiting

this side of your asshole. 

Mostly, I’m incensed

because you didn’t think I’d recognize

a frumpy cupcake

with shit frosting

when I saw one.

I.

Finnegan, with one leg

either side the flying buttress, says

‘this poem’s too conceited. 

Where is my banana?’ 

Daughter, who is

also paid to be a bride

for mother,

folds her teapot up and leaves

for home.

II.

‘You are not supposed to be here,’

says the judge. ‘We’re holding trials for poets.’ 

Ginsberg, as accomplice, has to answer

for Walt Whitman. 

Whitman has to fuck a turtle

for a dollar.

III.

Green is green

because the child says it is

and red is red

because the poet says it isn’t.

IV.

‘Even if the line is rhymed

and then the Rhine is limed,’

he chimed, ‘this isn’t poetry. 

It’s riding bicycles

without your pants. 

Thesaurus.’

V.

If someone ever writes

just one more

haiku, I

will…

That you would lumber

together

a ship of disaster

surprised no one

with your hammer hands

your ballast head

for boards to set

a navigation

in your way and always gazing

down

the long sextant

of your nose

well past the minor love

of friends

your mates

you made and decorated,

set aside

to toss harpoons

now at the letters

floating by

in your numerous bottles,

we ring the ship’s bell,

toast the ones like you

we lost at sea.

She had a son, from an abusive ex-husband, and would have had a daughter, too, but she’d died about the time I met everyone. Months later that left a half family just waiting for someone like me, though I’d had no idea that was the case, or any reckoning that I’d been looking for such a thing.

Something like a brain connection developed, spoken between a pair of bodies. She was a self-professed genius at blowjobs, though I didn’t have enough experience to either confirm or deny this. The games started and went on. I found out that I had a middle of the road penis, in her view. We had middle of the road sex in mine. I didn’t ask for more.

Quickly, we settled into a barely domestic routine in an old suburban wing of my home town where gunshots sometimes chased the sunset and the clanging of old metal garbage cans heralded morning. It was an existence balanced around taverns and pool halls, and homework, and raising a child that I was always reminded would never be mine. I soon found myself eyeing every fairly attractive cashier at the grocery store, but as devoted as I ever had been to anyone I could love, and not going anywhere.

The following year we rode her parent’s coattails, which were broad as rural eastern Washington would allow, to south Florida. We were the only ones that called it that. Anyone we met that spoke English was three times my age and from the northeast, and asked how we liked ‘Flarida.’ I said I thought that the only difference between being in and out of the ocean was whether you floated.

It was eighty-seven degrees when we landed in the ripe month of August, with eighty-seven percent humidity. The water temperature was also eighty-seven. I learned quickly that, if one was planning on leaving the hotel room, there was no point in drying off after a shower.

There was one hurdle to clear, which was shoving off the time share people. This was how the traveling jones had been handled by her folks, to take a discounted rate on airfare and hotel knowing we had the sales gauntlet to run. I knew nothing like this, or like the joy of watching the man’s face fall when my lady asked if we could pay any installments with food stamps.

Freed from any possible obligations after that, we left for the Bahamas. On the trip, I ended up hiding in the bilge of the on-board bar from the realities of being on a large ship, cashing in about a dozen drink tickets in the small black room, which were scattered all over the floor because the louts tending the drinks didn’t give a fuck.

On the first night, my other half’s family decided to have a drunken brawl. The stepfather never recovered. He was the only one who ever really made sense to me, his Wyoming twang recalling my own nativity. A self-imposed silence as a result of the argument galled me, but he never broke it for the rest of the trip.

Night Two saw a departure from he and my lady’s mother, and a walk around the open markets. Every square was full of buskers and tee shirt stands. We ended up ducking under an awning and having seafood tacos and several beers, after which we staggered off to a public square.

I saw two lovely things on Grand Bahama, one being the high, dark, shining foreheads of every street woman who would offer to braid my hair for two dollars, and the other, a spider in a banyan tree on the edge of a broad, cobble-stoned breezeway. It had spun a seven-foot wide web between two limbs and rested in the middle. The creature’s legs were paired off and it sat like a four-pointed star, shining black and yellow in the last light of day.

On the edge of evening we locked the door of a public restroom and had a stand-up quickie against the wall. I managed this, her shorts around her ankles, amidst the pall of stale urine and the litter of paper towels and aluminum cans pinholed for pot smoking.  There was a crumpled up, brightly-colored Bahama dollar on the floor by her feet. I noticed it while thrusting away, and was afraid, afterward, to pick it up.

When we returned to the room, the air conditioner had plummeted the temperature to meat-locker level. The island was covered with lizards, and I still don’t know what they were called, but they all carried their tails in a curve up over their backs in the manner of scorpions. I tried catching them, even then as little-kid in some ways as I could be, but they were cottonwood-fluff elusive.

One had managed to get under the door, probably chasing the giant cockroaches that also infested the Bahamas. At sixty degrees the environment had frozen him to the floor firm as bird shit.

Is this love? Is any of it? I scooped him up and watched him warm on my palm, then went outside and gently set him down. The cold floor had made it almost impossible for him to move. Under a full moon, I imagined I knew how that felt.

At the picnic table Sean

who looks a dozen years older

and sounds a dozen years younger

than the twenty-seven he is turning that day

is smoking an American Spirit Light. 

The scuffing of bark

on the cottonwood a few feet away

catches his attention

and he watches a squirrel

humping down the trunk

in the oddest way,

realizing as it nears the ground

that it is straddling the tree in this fashion

because, in squirrel terms at least,

it is endowed with a monstrous cock. 

The little furry beast climbs on top of the table

and sits because it is begging

the way all of them seem to do

and Sean sits there holding his cigarette

while the squirrel holds his penis. 

Both are about the same size,

the cigarette and the penis,

and the man and the squirrel

look at each other for a moment

before trading. 

The squirrel holds the cigarette in two paws

and takes a big drag

while Sean hangs on to the creature’s cock. 

It’s erect, and Sean,

with the ends of three fingers over the top

and his thumb against its underside

begins massaging it. 

Partly because it’s been months

since his last tiny mammal orgasm

and partly because Sean

is just good at what he does,

the squirrel,

who has tossed away the cigarette,

slips into an ecstasy

lasting only about a half a minute,

after which he shoots his gooey satisfaction

clean past the edge of the picnic table

where it lands,

iridescent in the sun

on the dirty asphalt. 

Again, they look at each other for a moment

before Sean takes out his pack

of American Spirits again,

this time lighting two. 

He hands one to the squirrel,

who tucks it into the corner of his mouth

and winks

before ascending the tree again. 

Sean watches him climb

and thinks for a moment

about how much different

the next twenty-seven years

are going to be.

We have to go home now.  Whatever we came here to do has been so tragically interrupted that there’s no point in continuing.

Boulder, Colorado, once a center of such bustling vitality, has lapsed into a dirge.  Even the creek that runs through town, swollen in the middle of a storm today, could only manage a sad burbling in its fullness.

All of the buskers in the square, no less, who ply their arts along the cobblestones, have gone limp.  The bottle and flame juggler on Pearl Street left his tools at home today and sits, morosely pouring his latte down the open mouth of the giant stuffed squirrel on the bus bench next to him.

The local trustafarians, in a rare moment of solidarity, have all parked their SUV’s in a giant ‘T’ for Thriller.  Each, this morning, took an extra bong hit and then wept, clawing at the sores on their unwashed feet in their sorrow.

Even the big fat greasy smelly crabby old dude at the farmers market fell into the abyss, taking up his old acoustic and performing a delta blues rendition of Billie Jean before finally throwing up into his shirt pocket, rather than against the ankles of passers-by as is his habit.

This is The Day the Music Died.  Worse, we will have no more luck resurrecting the internet than we might with Don McClean’s career.  We will have to make it without Google in this time of crisis.

The King of Pop is gone, without the good sense to expire on the toilet.  We are alone in the dark now.  It’s time to return.  It’s just no good here any more.

Outside,

the swollen light has pushed out

from behind the clouds

and into the smell

of Russian olive,

throwing shadows

from the running dogs

down onto the wet grass. 

Inside, my wife is naked. 

We have already painted

our first sunset here

on the sheets. 

Bottles and corn chips

are everywhere;

the butts in the ash tray

multiply. 

We are one house away

from being whole

and perfect.

          What was left of his eyebrows jumped up above the top of his gold-rimmed specs.  “She was sixty-seven.”  He did a thing, always, now, where he folded and unfolded his fingers, pulling his right index out of the mesh and pointing it back toward himself.

“The whole family was comin’ for Easter, see.  ‘Cept Ginny.  She and hers were off south, in California.”

There was a small gash on one forearm where the blunt edge of the counter had been enough to break his old skin.  Every time he brought his hands down against the table, it bled a little.

“That still made six kids and eleven grandkids.  Irene was set on devilled eggs for the whole mess of us, so she sets up two pots to boiling.  I went to work onto the house to shape it up.

“She must’ve had six dozen eggs goin’ so I just got outta the way, went outside and beat the rugs.  I came back in an’ went upstairs to clean.”  He paused, still lacing and re-lacing his fingers.  Eyes that were a tea-stained shade of blue held me still.

“I got all the carpets done and even dusted some.  That was usually her thing, since I never done it well as she did, but I figured she had ‘nough to do.”

The number of red blotches on the table from the forearm was growing.  “I finally come down an’ she’s got the extra leaf in.”  He sets the edges of his hands down on it.  “There’s so many plates of eggs that it’s all covered, ‘cept right in front of where she’s sittin’.”

He draws his lips into his mouth for a moment.  “Her head’s down, she’s got her arms folded an’ she’s restin’ on ‘em.  I say, ‘Geez, if you’re that tired, why don’t you go lay down?’”

Anoter pause.  “She didn’t say nothin’.  I went up and put my hand on her shoulder.”

I can’t see the film over his eyes any more.  They’ve welled over, filling the hollows of his cheeks against the bottom of his glasses.

“She was gone.”

He was feeling lost

and probably just one red Corvette

or trysting with a woman

half his age

from full-blown mid-life crisis

when his wife

of twenty-seven years said,

‘reach around

and stuff your hands

in your back pockets.’ 

Once he had, he asked,

‘what now?’ 

‘Congrats,’ she said,

‘you’ve found yourself. 

You’re just a giant ass.’

The meth head swings

at birds

that only she sees. 

There’s nothing

sadder

than an addict. 

I can turn

a cigarette

into a trilogy

and smoke

the third half

just to get to sleep. 

The sores

on my face

are only evident

in the mirror.

“I’m all about architecture,” she says, and she is, she’s an outhouse with earrings and her poem smells like shit.  Part two, right after this, right after her faux-Buddhist, yogurt inflected histrionics, and it’s a man who can’t read his poem except in the most Presbyterian fashion possible.  He, also, like the outhouse, has not done the assignment.  He, too, like her, receives wild accolades for this writing, with everyone filling all the structural holes in the work with their silly-putty hash-headed sentiment.

The third reader has followed the assigned guidelines but hip-hops his Beastie Boys rip-off, after which he carries on about his creative process as if it’s creative.  Or a process.  He, also, is lauded for his literary prowess.  Oh, well.  He may be an idiot, but at least he’s loud.  Our facilitator offers suggestions about enjambments.  He nods and says, “yeah, most rap is in four/four time.”

Suddenly, there’s an honest criticism, the first in about a hundred comments.  We’re able, as a group, to move quickly past this crisis.

Our next contributor has written a short children’s story.  Everyone loves her for this.  My acid reflux is returning.

We have already burned forty-five minutes on fluff.  The outhouse then says, “syllable count.”  It sounds like she says, “syllable cunt.”  I will never be able to think of her any other way from now on.

At an hour and a half, we finally land on the fifth poem.  It took the whole elapsed time thus far to realize that I’m back in kindergarten and this is show-and-tell.  Goddamnit, I want my graham cracker and a nap.

The syllable cunt is full of lovely ideas.  She’s empty of gray matter, and will never be able to hide this behind her always-prominently-displayed tits.  The bebearded man sitting next to me seems to have finally cleared the fog of the morning’s pot high, and now he’s brimming with eyeless observations as well.  Terrific.

Poet Number Five defends his creative choices with the vigor of a raw pork chop against the onslaught of criticism that flies in, heavy as moth’s feet.  He’s stoic and resolute.  I think I might be the only one who will cry in this room today.  I have my reasons.

The next reader is asked to read his poem a second time.  More Slowly, Please.  He crashes through it again like a rock tumbling down a mine shaft.  He also, like most of the rest, has not done anything resembling the assignment.  This, also, goes unnoticed.  The syllable cunt offers her input on his output. It’s a backwards, brainless kind of intellectual sex.  I’m the only one that comes away feeling fucked.

Bebearded man reads his piece at last.  Oh, joy.  We’ve all been handed copies which were of an original draft, scribbled on wide-lined paper with a ball-point, presumably because all of his crayons were taken away once the doctors decided thorazine wasn’t necessary any more.  The woman on the other side of him yawns and says, “maybe these are song lyrics.”  I silently agree, thinking that a musical format might provide enough slack in terms of writing rigor to excuse a bad poem.

The syllable cunt keeps talking, trying to manufacture a few intelligent words.  She makes me think of an old friend from a gambling house I worked in who would have opined that this character carried an open can of tuna in her back pocket in order to smell like a big girl.

Next, Bebearded Man compares Einstein’s relativity to the ‘ickiness’ of human nature.  In his case, at least, I might recommend soap.

Then a woman reads her poem, in her quiet way, in a manner that actually serves the work on the page.  The Hip Hop Master, who for a while has been uncharacteristically silent, pipes up with a comparison to Less Than Zero.  In five hours of class time, it’s the only literary reference he’s made (if you don’t count Bruce Lee, and why would you.)  He’s made this reference twice.  I have to think it’s the only story he’s ever finished.  I had no idea it was out on Cliff’s Notes.

It turns out, though, that I was wrong about being the only one likely to cry.  The syllable cunt has a look on her face that seems to indicate she’s about to either weep, or fart, or both, and I think it’s because she’s been trumped by a woman her own age, though being either out-written or out-performed is about as hard for her as tipping a canoe.  She finally offers something less than warm tofu flattery.  Thankfully, the rest of the room is ready to ignore her now.

Then the guy who looks as if half his head was made out of velcro, he who appears to be the perfect centerfold for grown-up Dungeons and Dragons geeks everywhere (he’s into math rock, Douglass Adams, and awkwardness, his turn-on’s are equals signs and foreign beers and his turn-off’s include people with noses and dirt) he, this fuckin’ guy, finally says something.

I don’t get it.  Nobody gets it.  It doesn’t matter.  It’s time to leave.  In two-and-a-half hours, we’ve managed to workshop eight poems.  I need a drink.

I am bead-set

wide and glassy

corded like the spine

a bone on nerve

an abacus

that counts itself

and rattles as it goes

I am gas and groceries

or yesterday

the blender man

hot coffee

for the penis mascot’s

always-broken nose

Sniff the paper

plug the holes

with tree limbs shorn

from popsicles

I’ve set to melt

along my boiling-bellied

leather trunk

Feed me jell-o

set my intravenous arm

with old raccoons

or stop my speech

with nipples, Dear,

when I am in a funk

She is

  the one

    who sees

      the one who sees

        and is unheard herself

          but writes in perpendicular

        to all the other perpendiculars,

      the many angles, whether

    three or six

  or twenty-four,

     in five dimensions

        makes a fifth an extra

      finger, holding down

    a photon long

  enough

to see.

Systems of Knowledge

“Yeah, I read about that in a commercial.”

College Psychology Lessons

You could tell even from the dish pit that he wasn’t really into either one of them.  At school we called it the Louisville Annulment.  It was kind of a Morning-After Pill for relationships that only go back as far as the night before.  Nobody really tries that hard to pick up anyone before noon.  He was just trying to use the same prowling technique that landed the girl from last night on someone else right in front of her.  That way, maybe he gets off with only buying her breakfast.  So there he is, up at the counter, talking up the other one, and you could see the defeat and terror in his eyes when the one he showed up with comes out of the bathroom snapping her gum, probably still the same gum she was gnawing last night, and grabs him around the arm.  “Sorry, honey,” she says to the other girl, loud enough for everyone to hear, “but this one’s mine.”

Safe Assumptions

‘Wow,’ he thought, ‘she’s pregnant.  Great!  Nine months without PMS!’

Best Intentions

Trying to reinvigorate an art sensibility among children, he began marketing Salvador Dali-O’s, which weren’t really O’s at all but rather small clocks shaped as if they were bending over the edge of a table.  The legend on the side of the box said ‘Breakfast Surreal’ in bold letters.  To complement the product, he introduced a line of small ceramic bowls in the shape of urinals.  Lastly there was Dada Crunch, which didn’t use any of the traditional cereal ingredients at all but was actually just a box of dried cat turds.  Shortly afterward, he was forced to flee the country.

Show Times

            Light waves particularly as it goes by.