read slowly

Estimating pressure the tips of my fingers
I’m feeling you up, in.
In a pinch, some tender Mary
An inch an hour, two feet a day.
You tell me every band you don’t like
Sounds like:
DMB
Another cigarette, eight more silver hairs,
Wankers at the funeral luncheon,
When we killed.
Everyone still gets sandwiches,
Because you cut them
On an angle.
And I want to keep walking along beside you on the street,
While away,
You teeter on top of the curb.

Short Poems from an Early Spring Quarter Notebook, 2008

Modern British Literature

U Of C

Spring on the breeze
And gorged clouds
Up above the campuses
In Hyde Park the courtyards
Are blooming green about
The history and all the dead
Brown ivy
The new grass sure is right
About something,
As it reflects the black
pocketbooks
And well-tailored suits
Of the white people
Walking around this
Seemingly un-white
Belt.

I know it's the clouds fault
That the endless blue cries
Above them.

They remind me that I don't
Feel their caucasian white I
Feel prettier things.

Flannery O’Connor

“You think you been redeemed?”

He went with them
Although he only knew them
In battle. In his mother’s
silver-rimmed glasses, his
Eyes closed as he ran
Alongside the sins of the

Allied Army recruits.
Six hours later he woke
Up in a berth crying out
To Jesus. A black man
Laughed reassuringly and
Told him he was dead.

Everyone's Gotta Believe in Something

I overhear a girl
Who reminds me
Of a friend I used
To know. She’s
Talking about weed
Like a prayer whispered
to the night wind

The embodiment of
a friend. Someone I
Used too as I listen...
A loud bandana A
fashionable voice
I think about her
Eyes. Her nose
Snorting coke.

Seventies Child

Fuel our war of sin
Conflicting with how
America was founded

Forget the Puritans
And their locks of
Curling religion

Lady Liberty eats the
Lives of those who don’t
Believe in Christ.

"May We Live TIll We Die and Then Grow Wings"

A shirt from a pub reads on the back of some
Man whose hair is graying quietly behind
A brain that believes faith and drinking
Are one in the same like repenting
Sins right after they are
made.

To The Asshole Who Doesn’t Raise His Hand

Look, man,
I’ve got things to say
Too and I can’t get them out
Because you choose to sit
In front of everybody else

You forget the fact
That you are one
Among many and
Not the professors
Best budding friend

So please sir, do
Raise your hand
You’re not the only
One with a hard on
In the class

18^th Century Restoration Comedy

Walking In a Park With Etherege

Drinking coffee like its
Going to get me drunk

Gulping it down like
A gin and tonic

Takes the edge off
Always helping

To forget it's nine
AM in the morning

Haha: A Duet With Margaret Cavendish

Arrow rain
Sing your periwig song
& hide yourself beneath
The quickening dawn

With a lap dog smile,
Bid your pain
And sorrow
To the clichéd

Western wind
Whistling the
World a tune of
Praise and bragging

Rights: You’ve
Learned to love
But Choose to
Love yourself

4-evah (Go anywhere fare)

Between the ironing board and the washing machine
He married me
Blood, and pot, and drunk blonde pantyhose
While my one-night-stands looked on disapprovingly, from behind the curtained bath.
Now I’ve got ‘the flu’,
But I might be pregnant or have tetanus –
Wandering…
I dream all night long, offending her in real life.
Of swing dances I ruin,
By forcibly cutting in,
“Hey guys, watch this!”
A Kings of Leon song,
Gone on too long, tuned out,
A foursome.
A force ‘em.
Some intimidation tactic for the bride, it didn’t function as designed,
Ice-cream tits, and a high five.
Winnipeg is underlined, I don’t live there anymore.
And if I seem defeated,
Then that is what it seems.
A hair-cut that makes you look stupid,
Is the only thing God gave me to amend,
The damage you did by getting between us.
Atheist!
I hate him, and it's good.
But I love you, and that is better.

Dusty Plains on the way to the North Country (aka Fargo is full of Shit-Tectonics)

I try and cross my legs, but they are too long and the seat in front of me is occupied. I need to lean against the side of the bus to pass out because Im tired of reading Tom Wolfe, but the dick in front of me has their seat all the way back. It bothered me, but not enough for me to ask them to move up.
So here I am, passing towns which due to the slow economy are forced to fill their billboards with messages as hopeful and generic as an old man playing a deer hunting game in the puny bus station arcade. He wears a droopy fishing hat even though the lack of cloud cover signifies deer season has been over for awhile. The pump of the plastic handle represents a desire not to destroy, only to gain from destruction, for digital elk do not leave reminants for the digital soil, and the entire beast is laid to waste among pixilated trees and brush. Turn Turn Turn-> Red to Blue to Yellow to Black
'Have a Nice Day!' it reads, but regardless of the punctuation, I remain unconvinced. Only something whose awesomeness is not limited by my personal experience would ease this tension. I found this- http://youtube.com/watch?v=bkQ0qZvP75Y

Where were the young men?

Where were the young men with their heads dipped into books
the day the ponds flooded over?
Onto the streets the homeless took apart their can
collections and cut them into tin canoes
that floated down the streaming gutters all rainbow-dinge and gasoline.
No one really knew what to make of the whole scene,
as there was something hauntingly apocalyptic
yet beautifully ephemeral about this particular puddle.

No thoughts, no words cross the young men's minds.
Just images within ink characters. When they read
an individual page they found a year's worth of art
in the font's shape and the typewriter's ink ribbon dust stamped.
There was nobody but the homeless outside,
the rest had aligned
themselves along the street in the huts and
staircase'd closed-door victorian-imitation 1980s-style mid-level cost-friendly
inauthentic
but truly empty wallet homes.