My Saturday Night

Gran Turismo,

how it blows.

License tests,

hairpin turns,

realistic

car physics.

It's shit.

LA woman,

playing behind,

makes it slightly

tolerable.

Gran Turismo,

how it blows.

Mr. Mojo,

risin'.

Face

Face
Face
Face
beauty Face
fashion Face

Eye
Eye
Eye
produce Eye
construct Eye

Leg
Leg
Leg
transport Leg
bouguois Leg

Chest
Chest
Chest
poem Chest
mortal Chest.

this poem brought to you by RuPual's Drag Race.

What Work It Was

It is funny to remember what walls
the mind silently built around itself
placing each with the attention of one
working out the layout of a labyrinth
and with the attitude that this is
what is delicate and so far beyond
what is sacred that it is only for one
to ever want. It is humorous now
to find, where once one lived, is nothing;
only the room inside a dime-pocket.

There are dark rooms, cavities for the soul
that unfold to bare one's whole existence
for as long as one is willing to stand
senseless and ignorant inside of them.
They have doors that look like mirrors inside
a line of mirrors. These are the doors to forever
close or affix open; either affords more
and more hinges to be used for change.

Grill

Here in the infinite breadth of the moment the sun in every space
as if it had always been we ate and spoke the possible memories
away. Gone as if they had never been and they never were – lost
in the corners of dropped sandwiches and jokes held too tightly.
Of course we never knew them and never will. Gone, such excess.

Ode To A gChat Onomatopoeia

What sound 

does a gChat make?

Thoonk?

Suunk?

Dooonk?

It is subtle,

a small variation,

in consonants 

and vowels.

Soooonck?

Foondk?

Loountk?

Does it matter?

The tiny differences?

I say yes.

And I say,

Ptoonk!

Oda al queso asado

Did you know: April is also National Grilled Cheese Month. Fact.

The grilléd cheese
of yellow heart
formed an embrace,
hugged itself
together,
kept itself
from melting
over the
flame,
while outside
fat raindrops
hit the windowpane,
snaked downward
like beads of sweat,
in the heavens
the lightning bolt
looked for a place to land,
the thunder
rumbled
hungry,
the clouds
busied themselves
in bunches,
the air
grew thick
and the cozy
grilled cheese,
there in the kitchen,
content
in its
pool of butter,
sizzled oblivious,
until the time
with the other grilled cheeses
on the great iron
skillet,
it traveled on a spatula
to realize its dream:
fill someone's tummy.
Stacked up,
it was never so appetizing
as on that plate,
the children
at the table
with sticky hands
were
gods to be fed
grilled cheese sammiches,
demanding,
with whining voices,
and the sight
of a golden-brown buttered thing,
but
then along
comes
the dog
with her nose for food,
sniffing
the grilled cheese,
bold,
she examines and observes it
as if it were hers,
she jumps for it,
but misses altogether
in her haste
for a taste of ambrosia,
receiving a reprimand and a
shoo
from the room
until
each child has gotten their
portion.
Thus ends
in safety
the career of this treat
called grilléd cheese,
then,
crispy bite by bite
we eat
this delicious morsel
and swallow
the gooeyness
of its yellow heart.

Points to anyone who can name the poem this is modeled after.

Rose

The loaf of bread,

full of yeast,

swells its head.

Rising up

and up

and up.

Up 

into my mouth.

Down 

into my tummy.

Yummy.

Not Roses

Whore tea cult chore

Roes of row says
Buck cats foul of day seas
Mount hands Hiawatha sale Jas.

Eyed bayou flue errs
Button steady rote averse
Toward dent euro fecht shun.

Dudette fork?

A Rose Is

not a poem
or even prose.
All one writes
about the rose is
what it is not.

Roses

Deep in his heart a poet knows
That roses are not poems but prose.

A Rose

It is the hundred thousand symbols
caught in the ironed silk red, red through,
curved around the fingers that are not
dipped near the stamen; the space left
by the fireworks burning out the space
before the ash feathers, manna, along
a thousand invisible stalk-lines; what
we expect buried within the hip and
time; what with attention we stretch
into both what we knew it would
become and something much, much,
more the way all colors are when they
are bound in the fleshy crystal of a petal;
what it is is not the fibers wound
for the sun or the air or the eye but the what
it is, the Rose, is a poem.

Whether

Whether or not it is right,

I feel like a bit of a trendsetter.

Whether or not it is right,

I feel a bit proud.

But honestly,

who cares whether or not it is right.

I'll still feel proud.

Hubri-fic.

Weather

I don't like it, she said, How
it is always rainy somewhere
and how it is always here.

I think, he said, you've lost
a letter; this isn't very climactic at all.

Weather

He knew the weather by the drops
on my glasses as he glanced
up from his screen for the first time
all afternoon. It’s shit, he grizzled,
shaking his head in the fluorescent buzz
of the library, to live in a place like this.

Weather

Oh boy am I sick of this rain.

My squishy socks sure are a pain.

Just two weeks ago,

I lamented the snow,

now I wish it were here once again.

New Town

There on a north bend of the Missouri where it is fat and
swollen with dams we built, dams that flooded the early white
town of Sanish and probably a majority of the Hidatsa, Arikara,
Mandan villages as well but it is hard to tell since we just don't
have aerial photographs of that time, but I can tell you that there,
buried beneath the water and the long bridge across to Four Bears Casino
where white men and women wear credit cards affixed to necklaces,
there you will find the kind of remnants that built towns worthy
of the name New, homes and hides that cut the first stretched
scars of people lining the North Dakotan poor-cell-reception areas,
places not where the refugees of the past have huddled cold and
in their coldness built a history.

Montaigne in April

Pitched by wind this spring
Again, against the gray church stones,
God is in the magnolias' waxy blooms.
I intend to memorize their stems,
Though their language is dead.

I Feel Sorry For Broken Umbrellas

buoyed bellies burst

in a rush of air

spindle-limbed urchins

wink in the street

Fish

My fishies have been swimming upstream,

splashing in the faces of the nay-sayers.

Glug, glug, glug.

They lug, lug, lug,

their leaden bodies

toward a promise of happiness.

Prosper

Oh is it so
bad to be strung like a clothesline
and bent weighted
by the wet what, what really?

No sense in believing in the reality
of things when weight is
weight and to be strung out
well we all have our

idiosyncrasies.

For Good

At night Adam rolls over
to look at me, looking where
his rib is and softly tells me
he would like to have it back
by morning before he wakes
and remembers for good.

A Triolet About Knowledge

I want to find the final step
That under every step supports,
This strong foundation finely pressed:
I want to find the final. Step
From warmth, this fetal nest;
The more the cold the more, the more,
I want. To find the final step
Look under every step's supports.

Wish List

after "God's Ear," a play

For Halloween, I want to be
an exception to the rule.
I will wear socks
on my ears and gloves
on my feet. I will smoke
cigarettes, and swear, and
smash things with my hands,
but people will nod
and understand.

For Christmas, I would like
a master plan.
I think it would be fun
to play with, to carry around
and show it off, to bounce it
off the wall or stomp on
if I felt like it. And the best part,
it would never break.

For my birthday, please, I want
an exit strategy. It's a useful thing
to have, and I could use it
like a rope to pull myself
out of a quicksand pit,
or like an eraser if I didn't want
my name on something after all,
or like a pair of scissors
to cut the tie between you
and me.