Poetry
three
Woman with Cake
I want to buy and eat and sleep well
So I marinate my emails
In a professional tone
Whatever time I spend at this
Burgers into value
These are damp and bready hours
Which I can convert into tenancy
Meanwhile
Eleven geese are commuting
Across somewhere’s pale sky
And I’m increasingly wishing
Not to be seen
A zoo at night
A public caring
I don’t want the climb or clench anymore
I want time to be my own
Let there be room enough to curl around
A docile error
Like the observations of a vacationer
In bald eagle tie dye
Or the assumptions of a docent
With social feelings
I read somewhere about ancient sculptures
Of female drummers
Mislabeled Woman with Cake
Domestic totems in museums
With their arousals and amusements
Dormant but ample
Anemic longings
What I drizzle over
All my beautiful cakes
Hog Lagoon
I knew a beautiful woman with the bruisiest ego
Like a foamy sunset
It undazzled
Vanity works like a dental pick
Sharp at both ends
I don’t pretend to roll the windows down
In a Cadillac of hypocrisy
And look out on some moral vista
No, I twirl my mercy like a baton
And build suspense in the billowing
My heart can be so mutton
Mostly I observe the world with great affection
Otherwise it’s disgust
If the field of my vision
Lands on something pitiful
I feel as grotesque as a diapered bear
Balancing on a ball
And also there is jeering
The universal sound of wanting something to fail
The sound my heart spontaneously makes
When I consider bail bondsmen, oil tycoons, elephant poachers…
I get sick with the simultaneity
Of knowing we’re all in the mire together
Inundated and overtopped
Maybe the squeaky soul gets the grace
A doomy souvenir
I never thought we would lie on velvet poufs
Unjealous and braiding each other’s hair
But I did hope there would be snacks
Popcorn Futures
I was on a break from quitting
I decided to stop donating to politicians
I’m tired of the ways they meet my expectations
Their bland hors d’oeuvres
Forever trapped outside the work
I get it
I go to the market for easy offerings
Red pepper marmalade, brie, gluten free crackers
A drama free umbrella
At the checkout conveyor, I employ a certain genius for arrangements
Shapes flare out like a fractal
I’m tired of repetition
I have to drive past this strip mall and several others to see the river
The bloated doe on its bank
Whose death seems natural and is therefore mystifying
Legible to someone fluent in the dialect of doomsday
It’s hard not to stay pinned under the heaviness of all we’ve done to invite it
In whatever interim, I’ll make myself an instrument of care
A tennis ball hung from a garage rafter
It doesn’t matter if a ceremony is religion exactly
Or an apotropaic tantrum
As long as you are facing forward in your convictions
Take the pundits wanting to keep us in snacks
Through every vicissitude
Wanting us to have appetites
To invest in popcorn
I want to invest in my own consequences
I’m writing doom and dread again
These are the signs and symptoms
Endemic to the end of a series of centuries
Spent staging our elimination
One new moon, there will be a final shofar blown across an analog sky
Followed by a bathic silence
A guttural equivocation
A feeling of contrition
Sharper than a kernel lodged in the gumline