Her Scent Makes Me Nervous

How do you cope with what can be inhaled like coke?
Her essence, a perfume untouched by mediocrity,
assailing every part of me. It screams,

“Hands up, this is a robbery!”
Guns of an amorous intensity intently drawn,
point blank like lovers inches away from a kiss.

I’m not her only victim, her only thrall
in this bank vault, this morgue for money,
she makes me worry that love is as petty as cash.

I exhale and with the dearth of air,
she leaves me for a second
and I elude the spit of hot chrome.

But this scene is only in my mind,
brief and mutably wavering,
it’s always different.

Yet always dire, perhaps the next whiff
will encourage a stampede
of the most exquisite beasts.

I stop my intake of breath for a second,
as an attempt not to travel back
to such dangerous surroundings.

Shutting the door, I sigh deeply.
Leaving the barrier between us,
free of the floral spice that suffocates me some.

Closed Casket Ceremony in a Forest Fire

A conflagration started by those of the highest station,
as an ode to one who’s soul found liberation
but this would bring desolation
to the furred population.

The roses are left,
while embers of arbors burn.
All bare and bereft,
the aristocracy grieve in-turn.
Wearing the mourner’s mask,
callously concerned.

Foliage ablaze around,
Sounds of deforestation surround
Assaulting and assailing
with the cruelest kindness.

Sweet little spectators,
carved out in neat little rows.
like swine to a trough,
regaling recently dead woes.

The woodland creatures come,
charred and enraged.
creeping from
their fiery homes decayed.

A fleshy paw points to an ornate sarcophagus.
“It was you who brought this upon us,”
sputters a singed hare.
The socialites stop and stare as if now aware.

A haughty voice rings out,
“Who are you to accuse and accrue
so much venom
for the departed off to Heaven?”

A roar rose up from the periphery of animals,
the fury of a trillion candles.
and just like that they all caught fire
as if the forest was one big pyre.

Dukes and duchesses burnt to a crisp,
nothing to be heard,
no quips with even a fancy lisp.

A Tongue in Cheek Treatise of Caution to the Intellectuals Out There

Creativity is the jetpack that allows you to soar above
the jejune pedestrians. Docile in their domiciles,
they rarely look up. So feel free to wave a hello
if they ever do but only stop in the event of an emergency.

The further you propel yourself then the more you might
veer further into a cultural no man’s land, where the drones
that dopily paid no mind to you like any other bird in the sky
have been devoured by the zombies of ignorance.

Find a pedestal, land atop and never get off
because the jackals down there want fresh flesh
and you’re all gushy softness. Hardened and pockmarked scum,
they want to suck the idyllic marrows of your brain bones, siphon
‘til the dryness is dry. Brittle and languid in anguish, squish
your eyelids together so tightly that they fuse and maybe they
won’t hoover the x-factor out of you. Your je ne sais quoi
becomes their foie gras, that certain something that they spread
on their white bread mundane.

Let them build their own means of conveyance, fly lower
and feel them drag you under. Dumb yourself down
for your bosses, your loved ones, your compatriots
and destroy what essentially makes, divines, creates
and drives you to heights inconceivable.

To Be Read After Most Anything I Wrote in Grad School

I.
This obscene man you see standing up here,
right before your fresh-out-out-of-a-dishwasher
-steaming glassy eyes is just an eggshell of who
he was when he wrote those other poems. Tenuously
feigning the robust, just go ahead and drop him to see
the fragility of his ego splatter translucence and yellow.

Nowadays, the workaday life’s need for rigor has strangled
the vigor out of him and he eats, lies in bed, never calls or visits
the plethoric cadre of friends he’s acquired over the years,
but instead does nothing. This is the first thing he has written
in an age of apocalypse: where life tastes like dry rye toast.

Familiar and nourishing, but not satisfying and so where
is the butter, the margarine, the cream cheese, the jam, the jelly,
the preserves, compotes, and other such spreads that add empty
calories, yes, but flavor as well? Banality is giving up and giving in,
paired with those prepositions then “giving” becomes the cruelest charity.

II.
Nobody cares that you write poetry, music and the like.
That's unless you turn a profit doing it or perhaps you

turn into a prophet doing it. I think if I were to have
the latter happen then it would somewhat resemble

the Python's Life of Brian. Most people who know me
would probably expect me be waiting with open arms

like Journey's Steve Perry and that every time I pen
something, that's what I'm waiting for... to be a messiah

with my face on merchandise of every possible imagining.
To be the Hello Kitty of the poetry world, my face
with a pink bow on everything from toasters to vibrators.

Just like there is always a "but" then there must be an "until"
and the "until" in these scenarios always involves a fall. It is
probably better to stay under appreciated for a majority

of your life and lauded as your chi starts to fade
like Bukowski did. But wait, he hated that

and I would hate that too.

Through

I dreamt that I could see the universe through a crack in my ceiling.

Not just the night empyrean but actually as if I were floating

through space. A bold voyager, drifting in my bed

with eyes affixed upward, on equal footing with the stars.



There was no more sky only this blackness,

where color and lights were more vivid

as my apartment coasted like the USS Enterprise

with the bedroom as the bridge. Flying solo,

me as my own Mr. Sulu,

manning the navigational controls

through alternating listless and mesmerized gazes

at the vastness unknown, my hands were laying folded

near my solar plexus feeling the solar winds

off this universe’s sun pushing me onward

like a cosmic junk ship.



No need for warp drive, just glide and float forever.

Rumentations in a Corolla

The cherried embers of cigs and jays burnt holes in the upholstery,
jagged circles of cauterized fabric, reminders of moments maybe
long, long past. Coffee-stained car seats make you look incontinent
and the cans of pop, strewn about the floor of the passenger seat, act
as a layer of recyclable snow, hiding the floor mats until spring cleaning.

Every moment pent up in this metal box with rubber wheels feels
the way children must as they cleave the blooms off of blossoms.
Each petal pulled and plucked a representation of pantomimed control
that they assume all grownups must have, but what an untruth that is.

Later adolescence just proves a series of mistakes and missteps
with numerous stubbed toes as proof and all the scattered, misplaced
attempts to find someone to share in these misadventures ends
murderous. Spin the bottle, Russian roulette one in the same
with the whole kiss, kiss, bang, bang balance of randomness and clarity.
Pity in the charity of those that may or might stick around, giving a fuck
in either sense of the phrase.

We, the you's and me's of the world, defy strict identification as vacating
the promises forgotten left our mouths dry and the rest of our bodies
waterlogged. Bloated refuse collecting under the aqueducts of time, friends,
we are the sewage- putrid leavings of a God, gods, goddesses, despots, dictators,
dignitaries and designees in ruin without end, without an edge, wither out.

Church Marquee Says, “Transformation in Progress, Contemplate the Chrysalis”

Dio singing of Heaven
and Hell with Sabbath blaring
from stereos anthemic

drove by those plastic letters
following us, trailing us
down the street away so gone
in a state of flux, fucking

the mind's processes of thought
like potent psychotropics.
Life now a pupa shrouded,
crusty shell stuck to the tree

of spheres, ten emanations,

visions of Kabbalistic
thought, provoking us to feel
we are trapped inside inside.
Ugly caterpillars wait.

The body best be broken.