Category: Poetry

If you’re ever gonna tell me that taking risks is wrong, then tell me before I jump from this plane. I’m fairly certain that the chance of my life ending is higher at this moment than it’s ever been, and you’re just standing there with a camera and grinning like a moron. Why did you even come up here with me if you only wanted to take pictures of me in this horrible jumpsuit? I could have just stood in front of a big fan with two feet on the ground, crouching and pretending to make a frightened face. I’m a pretty good actor, but you just never give me the chance.

How far have I come in my life?

Is that a question to be regarded with a forlorn countenance in the bathroom mirror after a fortieth birthday party, or am I going to reverse the incurable ill that sent me flying past a hospital’s third story window the minute before I was to be born in its maternity ward? This is a question often posed, yet never answered.

I like that declaration of something being done
for the sole purpose of its completion and nothing else–

you know, the castle made of fragrant taco meat
defended by French toast molecular structures
blown up to be visible to the naked eye
and smelled by none other
than the Duke of Prunes.

Nothing quite like a dangling resolution
to soil one’s party–ants, no.

Ants have no picnics to ruin today,
or any other day. They just meander
onto your blanket in search of easy
sustenance. Do they know

they’re not meant to take from your
first-world bounty? Of course not.
Poor buggers, they are.

Benny the Bungler
bought stock much too low,

and he’s up to his eyebrows in money.

It’ll only take time
for his fortune to fade,

and his hairline to go with it too.

Competition smoked
in a quarter of a mile
or something like that,

though I can’t say for sure
how many penguin daisies
it takes to screw in a lightbulb.

I fail to see the point
of penguin daisies
even wanting artificial light–

their habitat has absolutely
no fabrication of any kind,
so how do you think they’d feel
if you blocked the sun
and turned on a lamp?
I’d be pretty damn scared.

Noxious fumes have got a grip on me–
there’s no mistaking a fatal odor
for a month-old egg salad. Oh,

apparently there is. Thank you,
Earl Tupper, for living your dream
and letting us forget about leftovers
for a while until they turn color
or at least grow fur.