Monday Poem: Failing, in the Silliest Business
“How do you know you’re really a man? I mean, really know?” Genes, and jeans, and Jeanne all say one thing; but here is Kelly, questioning the plays I’ve made with my body on hers. Or is she merely being cheerfully metaphysical, trying to burst the typical mental picture of cloudy-blue-eyed, blonde-tressy secretaries? After a fifteen-minute flight, lying ragged like a kite hit by lighting, I was fizzed shy, sneezing, frisked by “Anyways . . .”—the ambiguous ending to a small dusty fling, one that started in the office when I openly admitted I was scared of kites, Read more…
Monday Poem: Past Harvest
The wanderer handed the teller his note: “Crisp, clean, random-numbered leaves, untraceable—What’s my face telling you?” The teller rolled her eyes, clicked her tongue without alarm, ready to charm with her green-and-whites this hobbling fool in her parlor. Unable to speak, cursed to write only poetry, he’d arrived with colored bandages—Indian summer’s subtractions—wrapped smartly around his head. This barely walking, non-talking torture, he wanted a fortune, an ensured happy ending. It would cost nothing less than a charred piece of his heart. But the traveler had already torn and worn himself beyond destitution, his fevered destinations pulling Read more…
Monday Poem: Quacksalver
“This mutual condition of my heart and my head starts with a glass of the best, the noblest rot, sweet stream of kisses all the way down the tongue and esophagus, into the gut, where there’s nothing but knots—bouncing, fluttering mad to unravel hyper strings—this is my constant instability.” I shut up and glanced about the doctor’s office, absent the whining and wailing of the ER, but dense with smokers’ laughs, and jokers’ coughs. I was assured the best specialist for my type would, of course, set up in the backroom of a bar. The doctor finished writing, Read more…
Monday Poem: Never Whistle “Whisky” on a Crowded Beach
“Love—Is that what you do or just what you want me to think?” “You’re on the other side of misery. I just offered to buy you a drink—” “Of desert wine, I bet. I know what comes after the sweet streams.” An albatross with bum wings caught in-between a vacationer’s insinuations and the weirder actions of the tide . . . I’d only been admiring the peach-skinned evening, strolling in loose-tied trunks, green hoodie where the water tongue-kisses the beach, when I obliviously threw a whisky-whistle at the blended clouds: mellow, delicate tones deepening to something more Read more…
Monday Poem: In the Belly of a Sick Fish that Can’t Afford to Flush Itself
“You’re lucky I ever even looked at you” is not what Jonah wanted to hear on his blind date, twenty-second in a series of serious disappointments, boring glass-apple stories, robbed of even a moral at the core. And this latest was off to such a promising start, from his suggestion they meet for pre-supper coffee, cherry tarts, and ice cream, to shaking hands — no hugs — pulling out her chair, and beaming mere-mortal adoration of her list of endless talents, recited at a hummingbird’s pace before the first cup was even poured. Twenty minutes in, she asked about Read more…
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