No One Ever Said It Would Be Easy

Clarification:
No one ever said anything
at all.

In Heaven We Must Be Everything That's Missing

Disembodied horns and tails.
Appendixes that actually work.
They secrete divine secrets in the form of worms,
revolve majestically like celestial apricots.

In Pennsylvania men subsist entirely
on the holes of donuts. In California, a moist fish hook
is a rare delicacy. When I am hungry
I chew on my hands until they are apple cores.
When I am hungry I beat my forehead
against the stone of an otter's stomach.

When I am hungry I swim out to the void
and snap among the fiery pelicans.

Operation Now You See Me Now You Need Me

Once we realized no one was to blame, we re-focused
our efforts. Ex., We’re at war with North Korea:
our Lieutenant wakes us early in the morning
to stomp out a battalion of tulips. We color stampedes
over the landscape. “Take that natural beauty!” we are told to cry.
We cry. The women love it. We pin the last love-me-nots
to our uniforms. These are our trophies now.

We are flying to the Middle East tomorrow.
The campaign is suffering. Nothing can console it.
A squadron of Green Berets snuck into an enemy dune
and planted Marigolds. “Take that oceans of uncertainty,”
they whispered. The desert takes things too seriously;
in spite of all our Intelligence the flowers began
to blossom. It is awful:

hundreds of enemies now peek from the sand daily.
Sunny dispositions to be had all around. Webster was forced
to re-define arid, barren, and desolate. Now they are all
different shades of orange. The public is in an uproar.
The government scrambles to respond.

It is my unit’s job to rub out these anomalies:
slices of tangerine, inklings of pumpkin seed,
Cadres of carmine conspiring on the petals
just below our boots, defiant to the last drop.

Concerning Such Conceptions As Eternity

My mother swallowed me
before I was born.
My father is full of flies.
When they kiss I crawl
from one stomach to another.
I nihilate the idiomatic expression:
I drape their vowels in voile.
Younger, I forced their hands
together in the supermarket
parking lot. Older,
I roll alone in the garden; read
the petals in order:
fire-orange, fire-red.

New Years Resolution?

I've decided to copy Shauna entirely: I'm going to try and post a poem a day here, regardless of revision or taste. Here here.


The Puddle is Habitat to Many Creatures

We burst the prison
of a tiny afternoon.
I clapped on my galoshes,
She clapped off the pinwheel:
it's still there, just rolling in the dirt.
People think we're lazy, but they don't know
the electrolysis of mud.
My grandmother used to say
there were frog's legs in her bones.
When we laid her in the grave,
there was a spark;
a thousand toads leaped out,
and the family feasted.

Breast-stroke through the mud;
we oscillate between the hermit
crab and a bottle of barbeque sauce.

Blog

I am an old man again. I have no idea how this thing works. Perhaps it will encourage me to write daily. Hurrah.