Tender mother sleep
lulls us speechless–
childhood mirrors bathe us
for hours in tangerine shadows,
whisked by fragrance
and pebbled with gray area.
We trip through a hole in the floor
nary an inch wide, but big enough
to engulf us once and forever
in haze and old-timey rhetoric.
Argyle suits beckon us further,
to the so-called country
and the wasps in charge of it
until they strangle all life
or die trying, mouths ablaze
and flies open, awaiting service.
It’s not right
to have
a sack of potatoes
for a leg.
Pick another vegetable,
something less starchy
with more fiber
and vitamin C.
Our audience
will identify
with a bundle
of curly kale
or a jicama pile,
preferably one
on top of the other
on top of the other.
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.
WHARVED 