Coloring Book

I'm such a rebel

and I'm only nine

Here I am sitting

drawing outside the line

 - for Sandy Lempka

To Kill With Kindness

Why aren't you dead?

I smile at you every day

I call you my friend

We share laughs

It doesn't work

No matter how much

I shower you with love

or cover you in hugs

you're still alive.

Maybe there's a better way

than to try to

kill with kindness

______________________________

And so, dear readers, we start in on a series of poems I wrote in high school.

Culicidae

Zzzzzzzzzzz--

the electric whine

of a tiny blood-sucking mother

ends abruptly,

halted by a hand

that stares down

at her crumpled body

with unexpected remorse.

Careful fingers

pluck her tiny form from the sheets,

examining her brittle frame

and wondering what pond or puddle

brought her life.

She’s silent now,

segmented limbs still twitching

with the release of calcium stores

or perhaps it’s dying thoughts

(if insects are capable of thoughts)

as her life flashes before her compound eyes.

The Prostate Poems Part 2

VIII.
a poke. a prod.
entrance granted with copious lubrication.
again. again.
no more. please more

IX.
This tingle radiates upward
ascending the order of functions
until it shakes the faculties loose
and returns them to seminal roots

X.
Wearing pink rings two, three fingers wide
reaching for treasures to be found inside
grasping at sheets, lost to submission
gifted with a plentiful emission

XI.
beneath a shower of silvery suds
white foam sprays upward
at the press of a hidden button

XII.
this gayest pleasure
misunderstands the appeal of pegging
though similar sensations abide

Bellingham

You can tell a lot about a city from the myriad slices of life found in their pictures. Those icons and memories perfectly preserved in digital amber for the tapping of keys and clicking of mice to unlock. Bellingham is no exception.

You see his local businesses discretely advertising to a niche audience; the landmarks and parks made popular by word of mouth and essential experiences. You get to see the voices and poetry of the personalities that inhabit him. All those defined characteristics that make a list of the essential visual and lived experience peppered across this city’s landscape, crystallized and collected through the thousand perspectives of everyone passing through.

Bellingham wears the faces of profile pictures some familiar, some unknown, and with bodies of news articles and skies (always the skies). His limbs are landscapes gently jagged in their rolling hills and curved around bays and mountains. Houses and sidewalks sprinkled with the idiosyncrasies and windfall of life bloom across the city’s curves like circus personalities with microbrews.

His seasons and sunsets, evident in exclamations of disbelief and outrage beside sighs of joy paint a picture of the various neighborhoods circling the city’s heart. With subdued excitement there’s life in these streets. Ghosts of a gridline overlayed in concrete, lined with homes, once tall, now a specter of forgotten memories, these streets pulsate with the warmth of a star eight minutes in the past. It’s not just the life on the streets, it’s the life in them, the sovereignty of silence and the cold, hard life of stones.

Snapshots of first meetings and last farewells, the starting of many an epic journey, all captured perfectly in the flow of his parade with an unintentional honesty, bookend the stories of his existence. His alleyways and neon profile capture the heady, lingering scent of old piss, stale beer and cheap green before the ever-present threat of sudden rainfall washes it away again.

Phone Tag Redux

I want to be someone you want to talk to,

someone you sit staring

with the chat window open for an hour,

wishing I would initiate conversation

so you didn’t have to,

typing three different messages on the theme:

“I want to talk to you so bad right now”

before deleting them to start all over again

because the first one sounded just a little too desperate

and the second just a little too abrupt,

but still not sending the third draft

for fear I might take you seriously.

I want you to know what it must have felt like in the 90s

when you waited by the phone for hours

hoping it would ring,

practicing how to say hello

and make it sound nonchalant and cool and breathless

like you had to run all the way from across the house,

but still sound surprised

because no-you-weren’t-waiting-by-the-phone-why-am-I-calling?

I want that Pavlovian response

every time you see that green notification by my name

as you hover with indecision,

torn between clicking open the status bar

and deleting me from your friends

just so you aren’t racked with temptation

every time you see I’m online.

But I guess it’s worked the other way around,

unless you’re playing this game too

and maybe, just maybe, I should make your day.

Sunday has become a day of bread

Increasingly, I find myself accountable to yeast.
I'm kneaded and folded by hands too tired to rest on the keyboard.
Honey oat and vegan avocado call to me with a voice that sounds like home,
but that was never my home.
The wafts of freshly baked embraces are a cultural memory
implanted by the white picket fences I've yet to see in person.
So I substitute,
I darn over the holes of missing traditions with
weekly practice in homely creation.
It's a glutenous trap of the homemade variety.