Teller

I'm scraping my sleep out of crusted china, or you know, every now and again
Rubbing eyes with the backs of my index fingers,
Careful not to get soap in them,
Slowly forgetful and here's where things should've been written down,
In the suds of a kitchen sink,
But I'm curious about what's for breakfast,
While I'm not even hungry,
Or am I?,
the pain and the rumbling are disassociated now,
Clank, scrub, hissy splash and clinkety clank some more,
Rinsey rinse, dry dry, dry, thump.
Mmmm, the smell of bacon.
No, it's just my imagination.

Shower

Rain drops music ceaselessly
A body swallows splashes down its bare back
Muscles awaken beneath the drumming baptism of dirt
Dewy blades dance between concrete cracks
Trees moan with a delicate sway
The body staggers a step to the wind shifting west
with a pull of the clouds the sun glares through
Its rays glistening off myriad beads of water
Fighting tremors of cold, vacillating
Breath, cenesthetic
Hallucinations, clamorous
Thoughts about life too turned over, rarely claimed
Tears seek refuge in the downpour of slippery billows...
Feet now callous, collecting grass
walk back to the same rooms they'll always know

I'll Huff and I'll Puff and I'll

I.
Eraser spent to the ferrule,
Flat graphite-black
Like grinding teeth, rim scrapes
Sheet, rips, blurs the mark,
Image persistent, a little uglier,
Error slightly more spread out

Onto the next page,
Led to the imprint pressed from the last touch,
False trace, last ditch effort,
Breaks and oh no, slides out,
Rolls off the desk
and onto the floor

This is what it took
to pull the box out,
Pull another out of the box,
Pre-sharpened,
and resume.
...

II.
This is not a suicide,
Or even a wan, divested dress-rehearsal.
It's more like a scribbling,
Down to the quick,
Or a slow repression of
Welcome thoughts.
". . . granted you never sang on key,"
You say that as if you'd heard.
Although destruction is reform's strong arm,
Perfection is incomplete.
Masturbation for a while,
Then a soft rain in the dark.
In the morning, dew on the grass,
Lavish a hazy blue,
Birds trade songs,
and I've forgotten of you.

III.
Cigarette smoke familiar with these yellow walls
Holds its breath til a window -
Sauntering to the radio, a squelching boar
On a limp rustic half round table,
hiss, squeee, thud, just in time for
"We interrupt this broadcast to regrettably inform you
that your life is meaningless; and now, back to the program."
- is raised, gosh it's stuffy in here,
What time is it anyway, quarter to six on a Saturday morning,
and the lights are just starting to go out
In da neighbahoid,
Come on in the city . . .
There's a war on,
I'm lucky enough to barely be able to tell,
"Morning, Sam." "Oh hello... um, Ralph. Have a good day."
and that's good enough, I guess . . .

giddyappendix

Hi-strionic------DADA

eso--t-------------Eric
----r-------------------
-----m-----------------
-------a----------------
---------y--------------
----------b-------------
-----------e------------
------------n-----------
-------------o----------
--------------t----------
de ea re ita censuere

LOL

COST OF LIVING INDEX
A dissonant string of words speckled calamine ear brass...
Never learned from my mistakes,
The
sound of
a heart that
knows it's almost beat
like a despairing child who
smiled at a joke Then
grew to understand
it Swans
around
questioning grace-
lessly failed suicides in progress,
A muffled pattering of raindrops on a cotton hood,
Oxygen rich, megalomanic fight or -
Running water,
- [structureless] flight,
a Peel to the Census.
Risking hypoxia, readingreadingreading,
--Emergency Masks Have Been Deployed--
...unlikened, not ferromagnetic,
yes more like a sieve,
CHEMICAL ENGINEER

runner

Under that rug, corrugated documents of love,
With anyone else's name in any of the blanks,
Too many to count, none of them as whited out
As that fourth or fifth one,
And still more tears; why keep any fragment?
Why not burn them like the tenderness left
Drifting tenuously in the names...
Eyes without a face, a sadness more saddened
By the wearing of its mask...