Ephemerati

Worthy, of course,
meaningful, sure,
but what's emptiness except
a chance to rent,
right-so brilliant, yes,
inventive, good,
but you don't sell intelligent,
answers end markets,
smart is the trawling promise,
not the rod and reel,
and we only deal in the real,
if you get what I'm
gutting you with,
so back to the positives,
provocative, pure genius,
and no sarcasm, electrifying,
and that word's still juicy
after generations of jolts,
and uplifting, I love it,
hammering onwards
and up the upscale
like my pronouncements
make waves into rungs and
the higher the climb,
the higher the climber,
none of this atmosphere
full of rebreathed
rocket fumes,
so moving, absolutely,
emotional, obviously,
deeply disturbing,
I can use that,
(beautiful is too easy)
funny, that's standard,
true, well true
is just a way of saying
free and
ready to be adapted.

The hook is good,
I'm glad you caught me,
love it, love you,
really, listen,
let me get back to you,
it's time to set fire
to the building I'm in
so I can hire some new
talent, like you.

Professional

The sweater knows best,
cardigan graymantle,
purls of wisdom twixt each knit;
scratch the surface
and find a snag
to hide a needle in.

Warmth spun out of one long line,
like a book explaining just one life,
gray doctor of philosophy's coat,
wooly badge of office hours,
long-waisted, floppy lapel,
hung on a hat-rack of a man
exposing his barkless bones,
dowel-rounded spine,
sanded-down truth
spoken so smooth by the tophook,

and under it, collar unbuttoned,
so he can swallow the impossible
into that ribless, flat-hanging
sweater stretched
down by the weight of his pockets,
filled with gilded symbols
or just his fists.

Semi-Question

How deep the slippage plumbed
by the free-falling reporter
going down with the story;
how red the shrinkage skimmed
by paper-handed managers
faking lemon-scented cuts?

How loud the sounds of bubble's dooms
as happy to pop as balloons on the moon;

how soon the new solution
since we could use a boom by noon?

How thick the goodly manual
for the newly invented class
(by appointment only)
of inspectors of the watches
made for the wrists of the
watchmaker watchers?

How empty the helpers
regurgitating wormy hope;
how laid bare the fear of the lonely bull;
how flood-loving hearts and banks
trust the brain-backed, economically viable
top-shelf sewage;
how drunk on saltwater potions
must be the anointed mutineers
to abuse their boatless, confused rescuers?
How no-one can find honor
in going down with a grounded hull.

Meat and Cheese

Complexity, thy name is cheeseburger!
Witness this infinite list of ingredients
ranked by palates with partisan fervor,
whether in a bag for drive-thru expedience
or homegrown heavy from grillmaster's hands,
variables favored by chompers fraught
with flag-waving, gut-shot-sure taste taught
by the loudest tongues of everyman gourmands
unable to agree on your pedigree,
how many passports can one sandwich own?
The cheesesteak side of your family tree
sports an old feud, but the sides are well-known.
Yours is a war of individuals,
where no honest mouth ever buys or sells.

On the Bench, the Bench

lowboy or like one, but unliked,
a sideboard peggery with maybeworks,
with steadyreadies for slungelow
apehands, whatever implements
are necessary to the task:
deep instead of high,
short to avoid teetering,
shallow in hopes of lowering
drownings,
everythingleton to hand,
handled eco-econ-ergonomically,
ready to plunge for your profits,
oh derivative,
unprintable paper idol,
straight into the sharphearted
bull-red-blood-eye
soft goods called consumers,
whatever tool is hiring hands,
whatever weapon is racking up
balls to get rolling,
whatever all-you-can-eat
you can get for the low price
of all-you-can-beat,
whatever stainless steel troughs
are set out upon the lowboy,
or his equally bent brothers,
oh lowboy,
all he is, is back.

Stand-In

Sometimes I see you when you are not here.
Your dress is, I confess, more nebulous
than your chin and cheeks, hair and eyes appear.
I rarely seem to dream of your feet. Less
odd is how your new body often robs
colors from walls and chairs as if built of
physically present bits and bobs
of an otherwise empty room, not love.

Your simulacrum is always welcome,
flickering in her skin or picture-still.
She seems to enjoy herself well enough,
at my imagination’s expense. Some
hours she hides in the bathroom until
I promise not to call her bluff.

Intermittent Symptoms

Something abstract wafted on the aether,
a rough-sketched contagion of fantastic,
although legal, dreams, sneezed itself hither
in hope of open, healthily pragmatic
spinal cords, well-fed by scientific,
economically sound exercise,
to inject, infect and induce idiotic
copies of newly proudly pregnant lies.

As backs bent to the freshest of toil,
for hot novelty or nostalgia keen
depending on their decade, as all seeds hate
to boil slower than their native soil,
one idea wrote itself in protein,
a fungus soon to reinvent the brain it ate.

Broken Bird of Paradise

A frond,
a sail in surfboard shape,
lays headlong on the table,
collapsed like a green drunk,
face planted to something stable,
stalk snapped at the tree,
watery blood smelling of celery,
all that strength become
bent threads.

Edges sunburned to papyrus
and ash, like a pirate map,
yellow spreading as fast
as age along the splits
sweeping out from the center
like a feather.

Whether the wind or it's own weight,
it's down.

Twisted under a forest green
cotton umbrella, there's no
chance at a second life
as a roofing shingle.

A week-long hangover it's had,
a slump worse than detention.
The owners also own a saw,
but they're waiting
on the gardener's arms.

This brotherless leaf,
this whole branch of leathery
self has been shed.
That's how the tree grows,
its new heart
has grown higher.

Perhaps it's still collecting
some sun, perhaps the wound
still accepts deliveries
from banished limbs.
Perhaps death feels
like sleeping it off.

Two Observe The Work

From two angles the honeybees are seen,
one pair of eyes bobs up from a coffee cup,
the other's compounded peripheral visions
just catch the motion above
their horizon of dog poop.

The former wonders if there is solace
in knowing the next task by rote,
gathering the same taste from each bloom,
and him to them some insane, unnatural
giant that consumes whole fruits,
knows smoke's secret and uses their livelihood
to sweeten tea; the latter a homeless housefly
whose amnesiac haphazard hubris
has gifted her six feet
with some uselessly green leaf,
as she wonders what all the buzzing fuss is,
like a raven amused by the interstate, she asks:
what profits such a headlong drive to harvest,
when there is so much death and shit to eat?

Another black-chassis, swept-wing chaote
alights on a tight, pink-tinged bud beside
two aggressively organized laborers;
unlike the waggle the workers impart
to their openly limp submissives,
the weightless pests impart nothing equal
or opposite by their unscheduled arrivals,
as if beneath the notice of physical law.

On the ground, the other observer
removes an ant from his banana,
from peel to fingernail,
from fingernail to brick,
then he opens it and now he has to hold it.

Ripeness sprays like spittle
as he tears the peel.
The dog comes to beg for some,
but the bees do not break rank.
The fly begins to circle.

The two observers regard
or disregard the other.
The bees continue unsupervised.

Scraping the Detritus

Have you ever seen a bee searching
dead petals for fallen pollen?

Ever heard one low-rank worker
skimming the wilted, skin-soft flakes
for gold not yet ground to dust?

In the camellia tree above,
life hunts life as it has
and cannot escape continuing to,
while on the brick below
one bee sorts the scents of shucked,
once-used blooms, careful
to waste no yellow,
to hound out flecks of needfulness.

The white flesh she forgets
like any other part of the floor.

Pattern Need Not Apply

Destiny is too light a counterweight
to history. Rootless head presently
upended in the hydroponic now,
buried neck deep in the current cellar
whose foundations erode every moment
in service of an ocean's wish for filling,
toes splayed from each flat-fated foot
claiming unfinished countries for old thrones,
dreamers demanding copyright to dreams,
builders plotting to righteously implode
structures they built for money, not purpose.

The norns never rhyme, they prefer to weep.

Destiny is an unstrung kite, no dredge
for plowing future waters good and deep.

The Two and Twelve of Cups

Seeker, do not search the dark for the light.
If it were there, you could see it plainly,
as pin-bright as the far-set stars proudly
simpering in their role as proof of height.

What unreflective occlusions could stand
mazelike between eyes and their long-sought sight
admit no navigation because night
is an empty country, built of distance.

And leave untried the available bright,
contrast instead the multitude of dims,
unimportance is full of why eyes might
evolve neglect for well-dreamt spectrums.

Seeker, the dark is vast, the secret slight;
written not in riddles, but shades of white.

Collapse

Ziptwiddling intentions,
puckersummits on a mercantile projection,
x-rayglow brainpanscanshow
here next and lean out
to catch what you can remember
this time around the ring
that passes the ring,
brasstacky, both glitterworth
and pragmatic gold certifiable,

alchemists trading time-shares,
another line to run down forever,

another answer
to swellsell the
rankings of professional
swellsellers,

have another
thinkum-go-diddle,
dream up one more
good emotidoodle,

here, hold this bubble.

We Brook No Bookishness

What words still dream of sharpness,
aswim in the gristle-mill
we egg and bread our children in?
What words so proofed, bound,
closed and folded after using
still expect their right of recitation
to be honored?

Any term worth its election
to the keyring, that silken
index of sluglines,
knows that history is a compression.
Events disappear into the pressure
of the present progressing to step
upon the past it presently was.

As if atoms could pop
like soap bubbles,
time makes droplets
out of globes,
whole centuries
become puddles
the expensive shoes
should avoid.

The happily dull words
playing checkers
on the shelf
either tut or chuckle,
it sounds the same
in a paperback muffle,
old things,
with secondary
definitions in their crinkles,

those words have seen enough
to know that only
the master is permitted
the luxury
of memories
off-task.

Still, a word can wish.

Do You Want That?

Lisa always wins at gin,
trampling statistics
with a queen-handed entitlement,
discouraging her luck from commentary,
whether inactive grumble
or dormant joy,
until the cards go flat and true
and her face permits the parade.

Sweatshirt Slick or Salsa Sue,
or Sweet Blinky Dimple,
if she played a higher proof than gin,
if the numbers ended in her pocket
rather than crumpled up with Scrabble tallies,
there'd be a snarky name to go with that smile.

Her only foible, hard to capitalize on,
is complaining if she gets the same cards.
Doing the math twice in her head
is a shark-trick.
She shuffles so hard she creases the cards,
demanding they come back to her random,
and if you're watching for a clue,
oh no, she never puts them in order
until she sets them in the order
they're going down in.

No dogs allowed
on her lap while she claps
colors, shapes and cardinals
into the three-legged shackles
of her plan
or grants them freedom
to drown in the rising pile of rejects;
only a sip of water
before the counting of mine, not-mine,
dead and not-yet slips off
with last hand's score.

She laughs when she wins,
she laughs when she loses.

Could be wisdom,
could be self-assurance,
or it could be a soul
happy to play.

Six Degrees In Economics

Buying requires money.
Selling requires owning,
owning requires either
buying, manufacturing,
laying claim or stealing.
Manufacturing requires
resources and labor,
resources require owning,
labor requires paying.

Paying also requires money.

Huh.