POEM

Hardly any artists or art-lovers in my family,
so encouragement for art was (and still is)
like a broken mirror; the cracks of it crumble

& I’m still peeling shards away from my body.
I call mercy. Mercy always answers with a bit of
buffoonery. I give truce to those broken reflections,

as if I should give possession to what accepts me,
or what is acceptable with exquisiteness
that shows promise amidst hopelessness,

regardless if it seems like a crumbled direction;
a street full of sinkholes, airfields full of toxins,
giggles in the gut that begs for retreat, or

a fairytale that echoes in the woods
as I pass them by one night as brown beetles
flip and turn, in swarms, on the street,

as if some invisible torrent depresses their wings,
their bodies chanced to meet with some plague-like
Undefiance; superhorse-like rage

juices the jugular; to swallow the unswallowable
picturesque humidity, at the expense of walking around
during the slippery night, rain falling

as if to mean something else than mere falling,
to hear myself speaking in my mind’s tongue,
as if walking around in circles through neighborhoods, or

down dark highways, means to pull up phenomenal roots
of newness for what’s sake?
Headlights in the distance, anatomy of pearls.

I cut a glance into a yard; the house’s side-lights
illuminating a group of bright-colored tulips that make my
lips curl into pausing rosebuds—

Light fills gaps where darkness’ synapse
travels on a trellis of accumulated relapse.
My uncle always speaks of being in his Comfort Zone.

The wallpaper of the mind, of the body, of one’s Being,
is a harmony in one’s home that you feel;
it either will claw into you, or massage your nape.

What is it to feel ordinary? What stirred just now
stirred me to the bone. It’s when you
pay more attention to the periphery of things

is when innumerous oceanic particulars vacates
the energy of your surroundings.

[Yesterday-bots to the unassuming normals]

Yesterday-bots to the unassuming normals
lost track but birds are all weather-patterns
right through where we stood before hitting
the wall in the wrong direction, or in short

sentences uttered by streets full of angry people.
I watched videos of Syrian executions & I wept
the populace of a flood that now seems to be
plumping-up the land. I’m in some kind of

irrelevant crawlspace. Your memory cannot
save you (“a glaring deficiency”). I’m not fooled
by the thistles of riddles. When you told me
of your monstrous darkside, Oh snap! I became

a mannequin with real eyeballs, while you
laid there, convinced of my blatant blankness,
voidoid, persona non blogga, primping,
telling me of how you wanted to wear lingerie

(to be a Sphinx of our coming-of-age) to satisfy me
until my body bled out, not of blood, but with
“something bigger,” but it was far too much
for me to handle, so we parted; we parted forever.

POEM

When a Community wants to be mildewy,
when grotesque is replaced by sarcasm,
balks at the rubber on the mound,

ungovernable derailings twang from song
in an anybody’s-guess-kind-of-way, then
ruthless does the day tip one’s hat backwardly,

without a nod. I pass through a store; a girl
with pink hair seems heavy with boredom
& her mother says “OK?” to me, angrily,

after I said “Oh, sorry,” after stepping in their
paths, accidentally. Flash of lightning in the sky
of conglomerate ominousness, sticky as

Oobleck Suess-treks; what piles up higher
than memories? Books that taunt on a bedside table
or on the side of a bed? Is it late October?

Why is it so cold in late-June? The hammer
of globalization, to be concerned about
being spied on is like chewing dirty words

until the lips leave entrails. Sloppy executioners,
treacherous, yet cheerful—the lunatics rage
from the courthouse, singing the volcano “alive,”

waiting for it to immortalize itself into the
History Books. All’s I can say is: Pickily,
well not-so-much, Good has become Bad & Bad

has become Good. My mirror neurons mourn;
I stick out my neck for anyone, like an accidental
canvas. The man across the street blows his nose

with his dirty handkerchief as I stare on, scribbling
down words as my eyes pull redness from a sunset;
my head, longing for a pillow made of gravestones.

PETRICHOR

After the rain, I was told to be
a maker of vases, longing for a sacrilege
to mold into scientific self-pity.

Reigning in the mortal mind,
ciphering strips scripts to abbreviate
the feuilletons in the skull.

It’s possible, one thinks,
that not to succumb to word-happiness
is like some short-lived Commemorative stamp,

born into a world where
“you put my constellation up” (A. Mlinko),
poster-boarded poster boy for

a mouthful of tacks, biblical behemoth
alignment, so beautifully-ancient, I mean.
I meant to say, even when our tiniest conversation

produces pleasure, or agony?, my fingers
tightly clutch like the way the body tends to tense-up
& where I’m found is “just there” like a treetop

or in some stray line of poetry, undefined,
like a clumsy instrument
where all the theories exhaust our lack of admiration.

Does the Zenith have a zenith? A top? Spinning?
I flee like some French fleet, swift feet— 
the parrot-chatter published daily

when I look at myself in the mirror
tells me that I’ve accepted delirium
as the feathery-hide of an uncooked goose.