“Two dogs with everything on them but jalapeños” I say,
holding up a V as if the vendor has no idea how many two is.
Another dancing customer announces that it is very cold outside today
and, indeed, it is.
So cold it pierces your bones and sucks all the moisture from your face.
The fingers turn into rubbery stones and the body shakes uncontrollably.
But the weather doesn’t make me cold today.
No, it’s the fact that the one girl I think about is so far away that she can’t be seen.
She’s in another city in the world but in another universe in her heart and mind and soul.
And it’s the fact that my future is currently about as bright as a green penny stamped with the year 1968.
That wasn’t a very good year.
I keep waiting for those bullets but all I get is seven deuce offsuit.
I occasionally get a jack eight, but those are hardly ever very good and they’re hard to play with.
It’s impossible to know what to do with that.
The dancing boy brrrs one last time as he receives his sausage with kraut.
I get two plump dogs wrapped in foil and placed in an old grocery bag.
And I walk away to eat my nitrates alone and cold
while sitting indoors.
Filed under: poetry
The world is a little closer to space today.
That violent vacuum sucking away just a little extra warmth
given to the blue marble via the sun.
You can taste the space when you walk outside
and inhale the sharp coldness,
like an invisible fog of negative temperature.
They say that “nature abhors a vacuum,”
but, if you think about it,
Nature is full of vacuum.
And it’s The Earth that abhors it,
as she clings to herself in front of the measly light of the sun,
desperate to escape the cold darkness of the universe.
Filed under: poetry
Some cheeses age well.
They become interesting and full of complex characteristics:
like an oaky flavor,
and a succulent, pungent smell.
They color well and grow swirls and whisps.
They do not crumble with age;
they simply cast aside imperfections.
Other cheeses don’t age well at all.
They lose their charm and grow mold.
They develop a smell which becomes a smell which we use to classify other bad smells by.
They get fuzzy and green,
and they turn into a slimy ooze that nobody really wants to talk or even think about.
And other cheeses… well…
They dye themselves yellow to preserve their old color.
And as they whither they add on wax or plastic to hide their old lines and cracks.
They lose their smell.
And their flavor becomes so lost we wonder if they’re even edible anymore.
They sit there like silent statues dedicated to what they once were:
mockeries of memory and frescos of nostalgia,
cheeses which have somehow lost their cheesiness.
Filed under: poetry
Winter rain is a crisp cucumber slice exploding on the tongue.
The thunder knocks on the walls waking me up in my gray room
with a start so sudden I knock the dreams off the shelf of my head.
It feels good waking up to thunder and the messaging rain
instead of the piercing nag of the alarm radio telling me to go to work.
Today it’s just me and my book and the unwrapped present I have to send out.
It’s Christmastime, you know.
The only time where gray feels comfortable.
And pine needles don’t annoy.
And stuff bought at Target become letters of love
delivered in cheap paper held together by sticky tape.
Filed under: Uncategorized
“That’s not how it’s supposed to work,” she said. And she’s right. That’s not how it works. You can’t just talk to someone for an hour about nothing and expect them to date you.
You have to woo them. You have to ask them out. Straight up. On a whim. Hang out with them all night, and brush some broken glass away from their feet. You have to meet her in a bookstore and realize she’s the girl you took on that road trip in college.
Falling in love is like a video game and, unfortunately, I’m the one who makes the little guy run into the hole because I have no idea that the b button makes him jump. So I keep running and running and running and falling and falling and falling. And every time, the little guy dies, and another life is scraped off the top, right hand corner of the screen.
I’ve never figured out this game. I don’t even know how to hold the controller. And pretty soon I’ll be staring at the big, fat words, “Game Over,” sitting alone in my room with four cats and two dogs and a dusty comicbook collection wondering how I got so fat and so stupid.
Filed under: poetry
They call it “The Garden of the Gods,”
but I call it “The Dishwasher of the Gods”
where some lazy, inefficient God decided to stack his
giant stone dishes haphazardly among the greenery.
He’ll probably run it half full and waste water.
And, sure enough, it rains as we run around amongst the plates and glasses
trying to find a quiet place to flirt.
It’s that weird kind of rain, too,
the kind that pours and sprinkles while it’s still sunny,
a borrowed rain from a storm the next mountain over.
Even the lightening jumps over to have some fun,
scratching invisibly over our heads to shout our names across the sky
and scare us silly.
The summer thunder laughs in the distance
as the both of them dash away.
Filed under: Uncategorized
I sit in the cold and clasp myself,
thinking of walking in the cold with you,
our lips chapped and electricity flowing through our hands and warming our souls
as our breath, like smoke, flows out of our mouths in a happy rhythm.
But, in reality, real smoke enters my throat
through a pipe nestled between my lips as I hold myself
against the arctic wind, looking up from my escaping story,
which wisps away like the wet smoke flowing from my chest,
burned by the fire of you in my imagination,
smiling at me with a red nose
while leaves fall around us as orange as the sun setting in the distance.
My mind sits cracked in half by two dreams:
one of which refuses to leave my head
and the other refuses to settle on the white screen in front of me.
Reality chills me and fantasy kills me
and nothing gets done.
“I am an island” as the songwriters say,
sitting alone on my ocean of blue carpet.
Cold, white light oozes in through large, foreboding windows
as I sit with my stuffed animals laid out in front of me.
Friends, family, fluffy pieces of comfortable surrender.
My isolation keeps me safe from the world crumbling around me,
like dirt clumping and rolling down a damp freshly dug ditch.
My island is safe and familiar.
The beat up and ragged mattress of a prison cell bed
or a pockmarked floor in a very small cage.
I know it left and right and my eyes feel every scratch as if they were etched into my own skin.
Eventually I discover people in the drive through window
of my red brick wall.
There’s a whole other world out there, full of smiling people
carrying around their own little cages and bumping into each other
because they have no idea that the other exists.
My stuffed animals lose their life,
and their glass eyes seem hopelessly empty.
I gather up my feelings
which I’ve laid out in front of me on my little island.
Happiness seems to have gotten lost somewhere in the sand.
That damn happiness, forget it. Whatever.
And I leave my island. Exit my cage. Jump through that window.
Or, at least,
I try
But, sometimes, it feels as if I were scattering sand
from my lonely beach
into the vast carpet ocean.
Filed under: poetry
Lightning shoots up.
Those who are struck by lightning aren’t hit on the head
By an angry Zeus flinging bolts from his cloudish house.
No, they’re the unlucky few who happen to get in the way
Of a river of plasma as it escapes the grass
Toward the turmoil above.
It’s a scary thing to think
That they sky, all along, has been the victim
And the ground is the one who gets angry.
Filed under: poetry
He played the banjo with a pipe in his mouth.
Not lit.
But clenched between his teeth, an antenna for his concentration.
Music poured out from his fingers,
An open hydrant leaking water to thirsty children in shorts.
I stared and listened aching with jealousy
The pain of covetousness overwhelmed me and I cried inside
As I realized that musicians get worshiped and women
And writers get addictions and very
Depressing
Deaths.
