Archive for March, 2014

The Care and Feeding of Baby Elephants

Posted in Uncategorized with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 31, 2014 by unsensible

I got you a baby elephant
It’s not a practical thing
But some things are bigger priorities

And I might die if you don’t smile

Good coffee and chocolate
Hasn’t helped you sleep at night
Talking does as much good as poetry

So please, while I’m at work
Fill the bathtub with water
Feed him whatever baby elephants eat

 

He might be lonely too
It’s not easy to sooth something
So big, so clumsy, and so helpless

It’s not fair to ask you
When you’re bleeding into black handkerchiefs
Bumping into ghosts in the dark

But I bet he’s good at sitting quietly
I bet he’s a good listener, even to silence
You could pat him and listen to it too 

It’s not a practical idea
It’s just hard to be so big, so clumsy
So helpless all at the same time

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The Lawnboy Confrontation (In My Front Yard Last Night)

Posted in Uncategorized with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 22, 2014 by unsensible

As he pushes his belly against mine in a strangely intimate gesture
His face puckered sour, growing red, spewing invective
He’s gonna’ head butt my teeth
Smash my face through my head, head and…

Because he knew he would have the strength to kill me
The moment he set foot on my doorstep

He spits in Lawnboy Alabamese and the beery universal vernacular
Trying to get me to hit first because he’s got a witness and what have I got
Because I’m just some faggoty ass writer
or whatever else he can manufacture to goad me into hitting him
He’s angry I’m reminding him of
Whatever he’s thinking I am at the time

He’s so close I could kiss him
Or grab him by an eye or a nostril and make him scream like the day he was born

For an insane second, I consider explaining everything
I think I can see him in the sulking in some corner, behind a doorway
Listening to screaming he couldn’t stop from someone he loved
He’s so proud that he just isn’t gonna’ take it anymore
Not like he’s taken and taken it his whole life
From me, who he’s meeting for the second time
From life, and I’m a good enough prop for now
Wanting whatever ghost haunts the periphery of his bleary 20/20/20/20 vision to be proud of him too
Proud for once, before the day he dies

I’m just a prop
With the misfortune of understanding a little

I came over in sweat shorts and flip-flops
Men my age can smoke on their back porch unmolested
But go to jail when they hurt people like him

I’m not even mad
Vitriol rolls off in unpleasant lukewarm droplets
Till his roommate pulls him away from my face at last

###

I’m not mad till I’m in my own basement
And he is whatever I think he is
I can’t help but wish I hadn’t taken it this time
Like I have my whole life

From this person that I just met for the second time
And whatever he happens to remind me of at 2AM
The aching crush of the tyranny of men too pathetic to be evil

I clench my fist and smash out the dog end
In the curtain of smoke that forms the privacy of my basement

Hoping sleep forgives me in time for work tomorrow

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Cosmonaut

Posted in Uncategorized with tags , , , , , , , , on March 20, 2014 by unsensible

An open window to a bare night where nothing is funny
The stars push you deeper in your chair
You move against the drag like a cosmonaut in morbid slow motion
Handled air hurts skin
Compounding gravity a subcutaneous ache
Dragging air into smoking tubes
Feels like taking out the trash
A chore you’d rather not do

On collision course with impossibly faraway Saturday nights
When you wanted to be out with your friends

If you could remember what that was like
Or imagine the contours of their faces

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Falling in Line

Posted in Uncategorized with tags , , , , , , , , on March 17, 2014 by unsensible

You’ve made a career of refusing engagements
To stay in high demand
An art form of identifying absolutes in everyone
(The absolute wrongs that they do you)

No aptitude for style
Unique has hit its expiration date
Mysterious has left the building
Despair is showing its age

And really, nobody’s THAT smart…

Shop girls start calling you “sir”
You can’t muster the moxie
To manage a youth culture timbre

You’ve got words to spare
And a mean little air
You mutter them quietly in the grocery line

You’ve traded the things everybody wants
For the something that nobody needs

…

You’d be almost common
If you weren’t abnormally arrogant

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No Poem Here (Move Along)

Posted in Uncategorized with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 14, 2014 by unsensible

Early on there comes a moment
When you realize that your sadness
Has charms like a hazy moon
And your poetry takes on a life
Of purpose

You pretty thing
You sad thing
Like a time-stop wilting flower
Fragile and temporal

Girls address you with tender voices
Your audience adores and respects your holy transience

Then…
There’s an age where the dark is no longer pretty
The joke has become sardonic and hollow
You cross into an arid land of hard sun
A life of cool nights hasn’t prepared you

Misshapen by the drug that sustained you
The empty air admiration on which wafted
The absinthe that glorified your countenance
In it’s pale, pale sheen

You are merely human
And you haven’t lived a day of your life

 

A dying flower sheds petals in glorious display
As it exudes the extent of its short life
A dead flower is loved by no one
An apology stuck in a clump of dry earth

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Unicorn

Posted in Uncategorized with tags , , , , , , , , , , on March 9, 2014 by unsensible

I can’t fit these little pieces back together
I have no art for subtlety of motion
Waving hands a ponderous pantomime
Handled you like a hammer with good intentions

Repair impossible, reparations doubtful

I picked through the dust to gather the shards
Licking fingertips to make the smallest fragments stick
Suck the taste of blood and basement floor
A tiny pile whispering in my palm
Every grain a diamond in the light of our casement window

It isn’t just possible to break what we love
(And to love what we break)
Somtimes it’s a god damn certainty

Sifting the pile side to side in my hand
It whispers and I whisper back

I call back to you
Because I haven’t forgotten
My unicorn

The traces of you are in my fingers
These broken pieces are in a pouch next to my heart
I trace what I see and what I can’t with the same simple lines
I remember to remember

I’ll make you again in 1,000 senescent letters
Love you from old shapes into new
Until apologies don’t matter
I will marvel at you
Sorry but not sorrowful
No broken promises but infinite promise

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