Read This, Jerk
Hardly under the table
The kind of thoughts I’ve got
Understandably slipshod if not a bit tacky
The distant mining song of trains grumbles low
To the cat stretched to noodles in a ladle of sunlight
Or some stray lettuce edged between tiles
My expression’s tarnished and worn like sugared marble on a tombstone
Anointed with some testy blathering
Hypersensitive to the smell of your touch
Longing for the taste of the way you move
Whisk me away
Why don’t you
Oar that damn dinghy over here
While I’ve still got some fight carved into me
Rough stuff doughy up the sleeve
Got those pillows stacked so high
Always on your side
Tiny tears gouged in the flesh
Fluff to manhandle and caress
Until the puling barks of well-paid rabble-rousers fade
Like motor to changeover cues punched on film print
As we hunker down and hold on
Battery-powered rabbits with pinball eyes
Cooped up like daisy petals shredded to party-streamers shrapnel
Or pallets of toilet paper for display purposes only
As sea turtles stroll on empty Brazilian beaches
And whales crowd Mediterranean Sea shipping lanes
A stimulus of office supplies for the freshly unemployed
While we reconsider my closet of unwell-kept things
And barnstorm the dusty hunting magazines and the burnt two-by-fours
Never quite walked out
To a crowd that can’t possibly be eagerly waiting
My untimely arrival
Or guess the cause of death
Just kissed-off on my last breath
Whispered between hints of barrel-proof whiskey and untamed violets
All along the butcher’s block with a shotgun’s iron sight’s chance in a drive-thru window
To send me any longer ways than away
To or from all this unresolved ache
Sacked in all the right places
So
Hit the dirt
Before my insurmountable demolition-derby past overtakes us
Jagged roots of body bags planted like dumped shoe lasts in ear-splitting dissonance
I drop like orange roses into the warm jumble of your limbs
Safe in the whiff of masa flour frying on the stove
Or just the sound of you putting a jigsaw puzzle together
To drive me so much more than wild
So
Belt out another one to rainy Des Moines summers and drill bits and outrageous tips
Birch branches that’ll never shake on it
Sketches of Carlin in your childhood home
And afternoons that pass too fast to ever have to keep
The troubled way we never get enough sleep
Trouble is
You were being so cute in the hospital room
All boot taps and lilted body blows and puckered lips
Thread to thread in dancing capillary action
The little things you do to me
And all the ones you won’t
As is your wont
In the brassy come ons of Saturday’s cringing poses
Matte finishes on the unfinished paint jobs of gray doors
Let’s invest in solar windows and pickled onions and pet snails
Copyright a few dance numbers and one-liners and that sure-fire way you say my name when you mean it
Lives led so abnormal and abused and absurd
Just as they should be
Tossing gladiolas to the crowd under a moon-swept banner
Reading Stay Home
And we lower our heads
Lie chin-down in the gravel and plowed fields and subfloors of the world
Cling to the Bauhaus hues of grain elevators and coaling bunkers
In the strident collapse of privacy’s dampened antibodies
Batteries below 10 percent
All communication defrosting in the fridge
Too slow to notice the day getting overdone
Just like the way we talk our way into tomorrow’s socks and leftovers
Before it’s time for a stirring nightcap again
And again
And
Of course
Again
You have it
There
