Teddy

If after all that— would I knot my tie in the same manner as your Ted?
Take you home, spread your legs, enter the
Split aerial, gold on my fingerprints blood bitten bottom lip
Don’t hesitate to harangue
Enter the place where all your poems come,
Be your mattress, you on top (so much shit they gave us once)
Plumsugahskies lid, lavender ships, my spring break, my circled ink calendar space
Buoyed matter, my little pinkie curled around your auburn tress, sloughed
Skirt blouse, heaped in androgynous dune, corduroy tangled afternoon
Where I tell you shit—
‘Don’t hafta turn the oven on 400 to stick your head in it—
To feel warm inside’- fairy child since he lied, kiss your July forehead
Paint your nails an amethyst blue, dew your tears and wet your hips,
Watch your fingertips come—

would I be like him, though.

Etonian fop, dressed alone, salutary, milk
Your nipples until a bad poem curdles, sully
Sunday alone, tweed, elbow patched, your name
In my jacket, your fluid on my handkerchief
Scent stilllife with a bowl of honey
Salt from my body, your eyes black as
Tacks pinned to that place where you would
Not let me take you.

Where you would not let me take you away.

On Easter Morning 1983 we found the dead body of Superman

Hung off a dead-tooth branch of the balboa tree in our backyard
I remember that it was Sunday morning before Church.
Georgia May had pinned her palm branch from
Sunday School above her headboard, crying after Aunt Glynnis
Told her in between drags to, “Can it with the hosanna’s, alright!”

Grandpa had woken up early to go out and fire
his Remmington at the one-legged whippoorwill
Returning with a red knee high boot cupped in one palm.

Superman’s shirt was inside out.
A pair of crooked spectacles with
Spider web lens lay crippled below his shadow
His body hung swayed and paused
Like the transparent spine of a grandfather’s clock
A ballpark patch of urine drew fleas near his crotch.
Grandpa said that apparently he had used Wonder woman’s lasso
Which led Uncle Karl to momentarily put down his
PBR and make thrusting sounds with his torso.

In a way thinking back on it now, it was kind of funny
The way grandpa angled the ladder against the tree
using his own father’s Cherokee knife to free
Superman’s neck from the jaundice strap.
A listless blue plummeting into the earth.
Georgia May ran around rattling the plastic
Eggs to see which ones contained dimes and
In the evening time, none of us took note
Of the train that whistled past in the distance,
Lugging tufts of smoke on the railroad
Tracks that hadn’t been used

Only Georgia May pointed at the unusual array of Canadian
geese flapping over head
Forming a mathematical greater-than- sign
In their formation headed in a direction
That wasn’t quite South.

Two dredged up prose poems composed Valentines day 1995....

Since I’ve somehow fucked things up with Maggie…

I spend Valentine’s day with Jennene, who I used to go clubbing with five years ago, and who I used to kiss even though Jennene is a flannel clad dyke who’d kick my ass if I ever slipped her the tongue-- Jenenne would only let me kiss the perched hyphen on her face, once, very quickly—after we snuck into the girls’ bathroom at the Red Fox Den and snorted lines of coke off the porcelain bicep of the sink, in front of a rather philosophical rainbow painted above a sad browed mirror proclaiming the Lesbian mantra: I KANT EVEN DRIVE STRAIGHT, we’d chop up powdery caterpillars, inhaling honest sniffs as the grainy olfactory sentences drilled saccharine numbness into nasal canyons and then we’d dance, our hips straddled tightly beneath the stutter and crooked din of the dance floor, chinking long-necks Jennene would stop between cinder shots and tell me that she loves me before our eyes would close at the same exact time—like dual garage doors slowly digesting strafed genitals into the cement palate of wayward loss.



Vespers

We drove home drunk, mistaking the thud for a speed bump until Kirby got out, vomiting a crimson rug near the fuel tank and realized that we had run over something; his bicycle upside down, banana cushioned and wheels oscillating like a spindle; two spoked binoculars grating in dismayed wondering in what direction the wind will whistle.

BOOKSTORE EMPLOYEE BRANDISHES MALLET BEHIND COUNTER
REVEALS IDENTITY OF ROBOT PATRON FALLS IN LOVE

Perhaps it would not be so obvious at first
The corporeal gait of the surrogate human
Ferrying a pagoda of summertime tomes
Between the retail labyrinth of bargain
And Bestsellers strutting with the same
March of middle class uppity
As he fumbles his purchase on the cash wrapt
Oprah’s seal stamped on each of them
Like the Magna Carta of artistic security
Or maybe he treated you
The way patrons often treat menial bookstore
Slaves as if they are manacled to the
Ray guns that scan the merchandise
Nothing more than blinking ATM machines
To barter currency for hazed over sentences
(And how dare you invite them to join
Some sort of a members benefit club!!!)
Even though it is required of you to ask them
When you know they will scowl at you in decline
Even though job security often involves
Placing certain expressing organs and glands
Of our body into Tupperware
While invisible steel hooks
Tug the side of our lips into a smile
Inquiring to the robot patrons if there is anything
We could help them find before annihilating them
Cudgeling them with the investigative mallet you
Told me about when first we met
The tip of the warrior baton
Lanced in his side like a flag
The slot white of his eyes whirling back
Into his skull reminiscent of a casino jackpot
Tendrils of steam streaking from earlobes
In a jet stream of gray smoke
As his ersatz anatomy continues to leak
Coating the manicured carpet with the
Springy coils and greasy gaskets of his intestines
As one final yellow shock snaps
Out near his neck and you know he is gone.

In first grade Cedric Dockery told me
There was a robot inside of him
Miss Heinz didn’t realize I was dyslexic so
We had to stay inside the classroom during recess
Re-working over simple addition
My head unable to discern the numerical scrotum
Between six and nine
Between a lowercase p and a lowercase b
Balloons on a stick
Hovering above the inky cornfields of sentences
Twisted as they entered the innocuous field of
My six year old vision.
Wishing then that I could have been
Tapped over the head with the
Tip of a mallet wand
In an effort to help me perceive what the first added
Elementary sum of what reality was supposed to resemble
Or how a wielding patron annihilating mallet
Would have come in useful
During my own bookstore days ten years ago
The born again middle-aged Christian
Calling me a marketer of the devil
Because we sold playboys and magic the gathering cards
And how he planned on publicly telling
Fellow patrons in the store
That he plans on boycotting us.
How I wish I could have had a mallet
To pry open my lips, informing
Him that most gas stations also sold playboys
And magic the gathering cards and I don’t think
He plans on boycotting them—
Plus we also sold bibles!!!
Or the time I stole a copy of the Kama Sutra
For the woman I thought I wanted to marry
Hoping that it would serve as an accelerator
Switch the limp pistons and gears of our bodies
Feeling as if our flesh itself was coated
In a film of aggregated rust
Hoping that maybe one slight
Movement of combined muscles into flesh
Would reignite something that had long
Since been diminished,
Something that could not be
Put back together again in time
Like a car motor or a snapped serpentine belt
How I wish I had the insight of a smashed
Mallet across my skull then
The carousel of hurt correlating with the
Sockets of loneliness
Under the lid of my chest.

But I couldn’t find a mallet
The vertical weapon of slaughter
Curled in the grip of your palm
Wisps of steam still incinerating
From the guts of the robot carcass
Whose skin you just obliterated
Wondering what would happen
If you hit me over the head
With a mallet
wondering if my heart would
Topple out from my lips
As if you had just placed two
Quarters into the slits of my eyes
Twisting my nose a certain direction
Watching as everything
Inside of my body
Breaks free in front of your eyes.