when you slap a presence
against your chest
in early august near the fan
it might turn out to be
a lady bug
you may revolt
no fault to oscillating fan
no fault to rolling stones
there you be
Rhode Island to New York
you aren't totally asleep
on the school bus in 1989
leaning precarious
against the window,
lined with metal mindful
the road bumping
against your head
Myrtle Ave McDonalds
i wish to climb inside
the head of the gray
old polish woman
presiding over a table
covered in newspapers
and see what
Marvin Gaye's Sexual Healing
is doing up there
The cat shat in the laundry basket
while looking me in the eyes
i had only just walked in the door
hadn't seen him in two weeks
i'd been dog sitting for some schnauzers
while my roommate
who hates cats
took care of him
Guilty vibes
your bad dreams
a woodcarving
on your mattress
still and breathless
winking at the moon
afraid to let it bury you
like a murderer;
your bad dreams
kill
you scrub the fingerprints
entwined as you are
from this thing
which, in it's plunging,
has unclogged
that which tears
incomprehensibly
through the silence
beneath your skin
Baseline fashion takeaways
there is something very WW2
about babies dressed as sports fans
something criminally tragic
about well dressed adults being mistreated
and something so dandelion
in senior citizen sweatpants
Asleep before midnight, like Bobby K.
in the old days some of us got nicknames
like an older man, 21, named Boobs
who was always wearing a towel
later we got wise
and stopped charging our phones
so as not to upset our cats
Poetry
it's a small, good feeling
every now and again
when i re-discover
i genuinely like poetry
i know there is no
bad poetry
because i've seen
the unloveable poets
at their lawn chair microphones
dripping beautiful, alien
poetry from wounds
that don't make sense
but i start to think
poets only
enjoy themselves
like the refractive company
that actors make
needing one another
just to make a play
or else they only like themselves and arthur rimbaud
which is understandable
or actually
just themselves, rimbaud, bukowski and leaves of grass
and brautigan,
if they've read him
... brautigan and o'hara...
and kennneth k oh, and certain ginsbergs...
and estrada...
...and patchen...
plath and silverstein...
...and the authors of almost all
of the reasonably short poems
it's a small, good feeling
and i can always use a good feeling
today i can use one because
someone stole my bike
Grown up thing to do #41
is not telling the truth
when even they themselves
believe that they are
is a grown-up thing to do
Reverse entropy
at work
we return
from seven different
holiday weekends
with the same
hangover
nice to have
so much
in common