Cock and bull

This is too too good.
Let’s throw in kink
and soft-skull pink.
There are few things
I’m less worried about than
sharp coffee table corners.

Take it take it
away.
Start that victrola.
Baby, you can’t control her.

The fellas

Platitudes and underwire —
that’s how I define myself tonight
to the two who have shown interest.
Platitudes for he who cares
but who has never touched me
significantly.
Pretty sure the other one doesn’t care.

Morning

Take a shingle cut
straight from the roof
of my mouth
and nail it
up there
over us.
At what point overnight did you start saying today?

This isn’t shatterproof glass.
I’m punching a little hole through it
quick
then breathing there,
forehead on glass.
Let’s press
the spider cracks.

Such is

Good days just ain’t what they used to be.
People say things like “purge world”
and “time time,”
and I say “yep.”
Really not much to think about.

Double surgery

When the historic phantom
limb of the masses
unclenches,
the boys cry revolution.
It’s not so simple as a box
with hand holes
and a mirror,
though the neurologists might argue otherwise.
Turns out, we’ve got to sink
the passive-aggressive tugboats
with torpedo machines.
Got to remove the mirror from the box
and break it on the coffee table,
then use the fragment to saw off the limb —
like at a cut-your-own-Christmas-tree farm.
It’s the only damn way.

Dug up

The backyard grass is an oriental rug
under my back
and the sky is the bottom
of the dining table.
And the car door sound from the driveway,

the sound the four-foot gate’s latch
makes when you move it,
that’s a belt calmly fastened
around my dining room table
leg.

Then you yank it.
And a corner of the sky falls
on my face.

D for Desertion

I’ve got some stories I wish I had scars to match.

I’ve got a Roman candle scar
on my thigh. It means family.
One on my knee from a rock
my brother threw, when I never told.
It means resentment.
One from foot surgery that wiped out
a whole summer of high heel practice
and a whole semester
of drunkenness. It means maturity.

Then there’s the ones I don’t have.

One from a tummy tuck. It means loss.
One around my right middle finger
where that pallet fell and cracked
my diamond ring. It means denial.
One on my forearm from a lighter
someone dropped in my couch.
It means denial.
It means strength.

I never met a scar that didn’t matter.

Zero game

Shake down shanty town.
I see that moon coming up
and feel the jelly between my finger and thumb
like magnet gum.
Time for phosphorescence.
Let’s melt down to our
skeleton metal
and bang blue enamelware
against our forearms.

Tonight we throw ice
at the light bulbs
and grind
that fine glass
in the dirt.
We build scrim walls
between us
and the end of the world.

Two poems on getting older

In honor of my dad, who turns 56 today.

Anti-Aging

Loner loner
Low on toner
Looking for the owner of a Cadillac

Phony phony
Look at that crony
Bought himself a pony and a cataract

An onomatopoeia poem

After seventy years or ninety
or whenever you lose
your mind
and all attachment
to words,
you’ll still know your own
death’s coming when
someone screams
crash or boom
in your hearing aid.

Three pieces

There are three steps between you and me.
The third is the truth. You won’t ever see it,
and I haven’t determined yet if I will.
The second is what I say.
On good days, the second step moves
closer to the third.
Picture some squarish pieces of wood
floating on a still, deep lake,
no more than a few feet apart.
I’m at one side, and you the other.
Some days I do things to the water
to move the pieces.
Some days you do if you pay
the whole process mind.
I pay it mind
always.
The first step, the one just before you,
is what you get out of things.
Not what you gain, but what
you perceive.
Nearly anyone can step there —
that piece of wood is solid as your favorite delusion,
the one you believe because
you want to.
Three people in my life
have successfully stepped to the second piece,
and I have kissed them all.
The first went no farther,
and it only mattered at the time.
The second is my best friend.
The third got closer to piece three
than any of them.
Some of his knuckle skin got scraped off
on piece three.
The waves we caused
knocked out villages.