Satellite Clutter

When there’s not enough
To fear, there’s you
Exposing a comic face
In a rerun on basic cable -
Its script long-since been ignored and
Set aside without revision
To assure its weekly time-slot.

Someone in the live audience
Hollers fire and hundreds
Scatter like ants from a molehill
That’s been lit with a branding iron.

Canned laughter kills the gunshot
Ringing simultaneously.
Cue the Tri-dent commercial.
A buxom, adolescent girl scrubs her
Teeth and flashes a bleach-ridden
Smile at the camera.

Say "cheese."

Untitled

A stillness hangs in melancholy,
Tire-tread silence as the ruthless street lights mock
Streaks of golden glitter perched in the sky.
One forbidden cry encapsulates the nocturnal child,
As a lone starlet turns his shine down to dim,
Breathing heavily in the unfound fumes with
The absence of something to pound a tightened fist into.
The moon gaze remains dream-drenched
As revered words endure life inside the bindings tonight,
The first and last edition of its kind -
Still roaming in a reverie that is far from getting through.
I don’t think he notices the woe-be-gone eulogy,
Or the song that remembers the missing chord to its melody,
And so it remains,
Unsung.

Advice

Prize your flaws
Defects
Raise hairy memories
To life
Engage your mistakes
Deploy any
Negative criticism
Give thoughts form
Make them sublime
Kindly hold
Words set
In stone by
Jackhammers
Unable to be
Smudged
Throughout the
Fragility of time
Define those
Energies that turn
You inside out
Simply attempt
To accommodate
Your mind

The Poem Never Knew It Was Posted

The pen never knew it had ink.
The letter never knew it had a stamp.
The bottle never knew it was full -
Yet no one would hand it over to me.
They would have had to reach TOO far.

Furthermore,
The cigarette never knew it was lit.
The lighter never knew it was stolen.
The wrist never knew it was burnt.

Did I mention money?
It never knew it could talk -
Yet everyone would always listen.
They could not reach far ENOUGH.

(Chorus: too much is never enough)
Quite the fitting end for a poem
That never knew it was written.

Beyond Tinted Windows

Someone can see out,
But no one can see in.
That’s the futility of darkness.
Grasping thin air,
Grasping molecules of mystery.
Tinted windows and
The far-off cry of sanctimonial distress.
Despair = finding faith,
Like the demonic darkness basks
In the light, simply to know its own ugliness.
To view it, like a tinted window.

A Whisker Too Late

Time burns a hole through cinnamon gum
And you spit it out in place of a cigarette
That mellows minutes so nice and slow
While the cheese belly mouse begs
For an antacid, but he can’t really beg
Because he never figured out how
To get down on his knees.
So instead he bargains his next morsel of love
On a mousetrap for a way out THIS time.
While the next time he’ll be
Auctioning his whiskers to the highest bidder.
They’ll cut it all off without asking him about it first.
And he ponders the thought momentarily
As he wets his fur down one last time for his onlookers
While the man in the back of the bowling
Alley cleans his shears and contemplates
Masturbating to the face he saw earlier.

The Stamp's Stroke of Madness

The envelope never knew it had a stamp, but the letter had a destination to reach when it landed in the mailbox. At least, the madly scrawled address on the front of the botched envelope said so. The words argued otherwise, but they were too in tune with amber-red wine to put up a good fight. It simply didn’t matter in that moment of reckless release. They were in a jam (no bread to lay their worries on). So they sat, amidst the bills, wrinkled postcards, and penciled-in applications, who offered ineffective condolences to the quivering words in their haste. They wailed, wanting something else. They finally settled down, still wanting something else. Maybe the right to blur into an inky, illegible mess. It was a nice thought, but postage marks have little mercy in times of flight. So blessed be to the postman, an ordinary man set to deliver an unordinary letter. Blame it on the stamp little words. Blame it on your creator.

A Fable About Two Existences Found on Page Fifteen

She used to pray to something,
but no one cared, or cared to notice.

They just clapped their hands and sang
to a makeshift papier-mâché dummy on the stage.

It seemed the thing to do in that hour of forced jubilation.
The blind boy in the farthest seat from the fire escape

eyed her in suffocation. He could still see.
His handicap simply internalized everything.

He once knew her and the secret phrase
she hid inside her left stocking.

He knew it frightenly too well. It was too fragile to wave in the air.
She knew him too, and what he saw in his daily darkness

and when he fell asleep. If he fell asleep.
She thought him better off than the walking man

whose vision misses the flower that suddenly opens
in the uncanny presence of a hailstorm.

It was almost too much for them both –
the rope that shackled their ankles to charcoal black dew.

So they pretended not to care, but they noticed it
like their lives depended on it.

The Visit

A blue-buckled girl down the street shelters a swiss cheese heart. I know because she let me take a peek while she was eating curds and strawberries. One day, a sweet-toothed doctor came to her door. He tried to plug the holes in her chest with cotton candy, but he hadn't eaten for weeks. She said he ran off with the candy, and left her a note instead. It said she had nine bites to live. I think she has five more to go, unless Uncle Belly Ache gets to her first. It's kind of a shame if you think about it. She used to taste delicious. Yum, yum. Quite sugary. It was the real thing. Nothing about her was NutraSweet.