I-T
Checklist, spree
Flush-free
Sentimentality, composing one of those
Portals
Pointed somewhere less fortunate, where
Presumably, beams of consideration are worth
their weight in coinage. Rites. Aloe.
This is how to feel alive in central air,
This is how to tune relevance, because relevance is
Tunable and ‘doggone it,
People like you.’
Plucking
Decor, lattice, pop-
Smut and skin lotion,
Folding the newspaper
In a manner to make it insensitive.
Implicating especially, the qualms
Of luxury from the shrillest magazines,
Grown-up fudge,
–No bright
Packaging, and
Never before bed.
Wouldn’t want to be all the way over there
Unnecessarily.
“Should we clean the vents?
We’ll have to get out the ladder.
Maybe tomorrow.”
Pragmatic
Comedy think
Tanks, the grainy bottoms of lattes,
From which the future hurtles.
“Plights” of the living,
Tangible adversity
The kind that can be represented in digits
The kind
Paid artisans write articles about for
The breathing dead.
Balance; lets rent a helicopter to
Find it, to land there squarely.
The
Shut first worlds, closed
Air of the over-hemisphere
Of a bubble
Sitting in an interminably vast
Standing water,
Who knows
Where you are?
Campy, barreling.
To be one of those
Strong eastern european women
Who don’t take any shit, who shake the
Shit out of your hand.
One could only be so lucky to awake in the
Second world; to be
Maimed,
Not swallowed,
Though
Amphibians seem so
miserable. These folks
Do not speak of love
Over tapas.
Chickens are corralled and
Pinched, swung like
Numchucks.
III.
December.
A dry steppe proving effervescent,
Roused by
A pack of skinny dogs humping one another,
Who’s tongues can’t hang
Straight,
What else to do?
God’s
Laughter.
God’s
Famine.
January in Miami,
Premium
Reclining chairs cocked
For an even suntan, facing
Hispaniola this week by chance.
40 degrees fahrenheit, a tragedy
The papers pitch
Until a real rattlesnake rears
Shoots and steals the floor under the city
Of cards, Port-Au-Prince.
Cooly, chair clerk folds, tosses
“Haiti” like a how are you.
I say, “Haiti” back, shake my
Head, project some sadness, some
Predictability.
“Lots of voodoo there,”
Pointing to the mute
Horizon with his mustache
Before a shrug, as if that’s the
Sort of thing that cries wolf,
As if you catch cold.
