EPITHALAMIUM
Because in the kitchen, it’s difficult to lie
Because the yearbook photo shows long straight hair parted down the middle, Marcia Brady-
style
Because in my son’s mind, he has only one dziadek & babcia & that blindspot diminishes me
more each day
the vanity of everything factual
tea drinkers & their charges
Because you’ve gotten me so pissed off that I’m crawling
like a roadside forger of wounds
the preferred hymns
of insects
of all the world’s cobblers
Because yesterday dinner was a roadrunner, the wrong coat, a spark that bled repeatedly
Because what’s a necessity for a dancer, for a puppet is merely a circumstance
the end of all that being looked at
not a rational attic or
cybernetic bee
Because traversal becomes fractal becomes lacy potato, which you made but rarely ate
Because I don’t want to be put in the ground
a reservoir for true forgiveness, inexhaustible
residing in somebody else’s memories
like trying to describe
the entire architecture of a house
by staring at one square tile on the floor
Because siusius don’t have hands or eyes or a buzia or legs
Because there are no statistics to support this feeling
ELEGY FOR THAT CLOUD-KILL GATE CAKE
when that the shadow-flash stutters
when that such a pulse of phosphorus could have had other evolutionary consequences
the jellyfish journey
so bright with defiance
when that men bend heaven to their methods
time its own kind of villain
playing at molecules
as if it could be used for bowling
as if to retrieve that valuable down a dropped sink or stop
the toilet tank sweating
goose the right hinge
wearing a dead man’s ears
the reminder of another person’s sleep
automated to a Jesuit tinge
a stern ball shaped & cyclical
when that we may not shipwreck in the meanwhile
ELEGY FOR THE TIN EDGE OF RAIN
It’s 2023 & you’re drinking Folgers,
like your father
who attacked pleasure
with an unscientific precision
his mood its own weather system,
nettles of implication
bathed in reptilian light or those indirect gifts
a mosquito-fucked Monday
the tenuous alibi slurred
brushing against sham
like some linear inevitability
I guarantee you one thing
a proof of the Pythagorean theorem
doesn’t need to be a conversation
nor another clipping from the Sun-Times
tracking an engineer’s average annual salary
Let’s mute the intrusion
the BVDs an ever-present accomplice
to the untied robe, Old Style & smokes in hand
all so very un-ninja-like
flatulence a stealth prayer
bound into the dark tissues, seal-sung
whether arm, ankle, or thumb,
all I bought was brokenness
the way chaos has a shape its own acoustic etiquette
or how still the Toyota was
with its spidered windshield & open door
emptied of everything
all the bedside chats at 3:00 a.m. or those when I feigned sleep
not to occur but survive
the glare of stolen time
grotesque but sentient
thighs crosshatched from failed skin grafts,
a whiteboard & notebook for the odd jotting
voiceless in the end, an open wound
for a neck
doesn’t make any difference
PROTOCOLS OF FINISH
Because the hand is not a conclusion, a physical yes
or lesson in agreed contradiction
ballerinas of doom,
sister shapes
mistaken for a spider in the snow
to pulse reality
Because there are times when a dog’s wheezing sounds like a boy crying
reflexively beheading the world
Because potatoes are an invasive species
stains the material & method
to reset a landscape
Because paintings are not windows, funneled
into space
to hit the floor
you have no choice
but to believe in
Because it’s really hard to know when you’re lucky and when you’re smart
Because the loophole’s welcomed in the land of confiscatory taxes
the ecstatic restraint
tentative geometry
locked into a scaffold reminiscent of switchboard wires
a relay decades in the making
TRIPLE CANOPY CASINO
Sometimes I host parties in here.
Sometimes guests attend.
I move a few plants to one side then.
To make room for the limbo contest.
[Production of a pole.]
Sometimes I lose.
Sometimes I ask the guests if they would like to tango with me.
They don’t.
You are strong in limbo. Your mother probably loves you.
Sometimes I attempt to amuse my guests with witty banter.
I will say something like “Celery is the lettuce of the vegetable world” or
“The only thing to be taken seriously is death.”
Sometimes they laugh.
Sometimes I play cards with my guests.
Poker usually.
The plants tell me what hands my guests have.
Sometimes I win.
Sometimes my guests have hands.