A Double Negative

of amnesia retains a memory like the word ‘gift’ means 'poison' in German.

A fictive sneeze barrels its way into the Big Brain Hall of Fame and then instantly falls ill under the dysfunction of a dilapidated pour-over.

You victory dance behind your dust goggles like Marcel Mastroianni toggled a tight line between irony and death.

I'm gonna use an oboe as a tape measure to track with pencil ticks the history length of my schlong where the doorjamb of historical materialism is a stubborn animal.

The cascades took from me that which a bed of daisies cannot sing back to life any less selectively than a wad of serotonin can ape a Mennonite sunset.

There was, don’t forget, that show with the slide-guitar intro. It caught us hesitating in the prime of our lives when you bungled the most beautiful word in the world and said, 'Goldenschlager'.

I begged for a fourth act and you rode me until I broke and admitted my tweed suits are a joke.

Alcohol now comes in a glass skull but I want to Yorik apple juice in a choo-choo mug and carpet bomb a blood rite.

That nose of yours, always ready with a blue bead of conceit.

There’s loss for sale but you say let’s hunt for closure.
Necessary Needs


A Peruvian opal glands a stomp sequence into my bloodstream.

A bird, maybe a gnat, sings out a night song: Seep, seep, seep!

I’m not sold on signals unless the walls have been stripped bare of binaries, a ballistic encounter screened from a chin rest.

Chopin’s aeolomelodicon, anticipating a comic century of dismemberments, freezes mid-cough as if musicality bleeds milk and a tight t-shirt frogs a gut.

So a whistle shined-up senseless with sorries is unable to soothsay the exact crises to ignore.

Impelled at thirteen to take up a trade, I chose to be a shearer of shanks, to invest in the day when ploughshares shall talk up a storm and piggy-back on the wheel of a 10 year liquidity crunch.

I’ll get through this hangover with a saucy comeback, a side-glance at some guy’s sister, a skinny sunken ship that reminds me of Rimbaud, his haystack hair and that quick kid laugh before a spanking.
Cycle

Winter means less words.

A cloud shadow slices like a cleaver over my pleats.

I bait a reptilian with an empty Bic lighter.

I have a homburg to romance with a plastic chain and a pine cone.

The hour of a monk radiates like the flesh of a blood orange.

My anger erases everything and makes silence a righteous stone spitting on a line of dancers.

I know analgesia as a prototype of self. Three icicles: Of & of & of.

Into the mortar of my own ribs I can strike with a smile.

Into the cycling dishwasher of order I can laugh.

It's weather. It's a dinner of wet cement. It's a bookmark without a quicksand fantasy.

The files of faults need apology less than action. It's 3 a.m. again.

Let me sleep outside this poem. It's walls, I know, are thick. Its air dented metal.

The free-birding wrath of caffeine bites down on dawn. Draws a gunk of literacy and fur.

Work covers costs. Nothing I know weaker stands.
Diagnosis: Hoarding


Toss me a hard candy.

Divide me from my Meccano.

Offer me an invitation to study Korean free styling.

My palms shield the opera light of a dyed-in-the-wool solar flare.

I rain down sheets of nomination upon your loved-worn coffee houses.

The Cornelius Cardew Think Tank is underperforming beyond acceptable levels.

Pedagogy of the Oppressed has been my beach book since the floating-rate bond pamphlet group denounced self object needs.

I say uncle under the half-nelson of franchise percentages.

It's no secret my facilitator at the Menninger wore booty shorts and subsisted on coffee cake.

Serene healers wear sweaters even at the height of arousal.

I walk trails without knowing the name of one murderous blood sugar spike.

Who knew I had affect allegiances?

I break my teeth off the glass edge of a tropical dream.

The word 'shelter' fizzes away like ginger-ale.

I drag my rotary phone to the nearest school of formalism.

Squirrels in masks of the elderly circle around a $100.00 bagel.

Hungry for discharge, the wind band takes a break to shampoo Che Guevara’s Norton.

I traded in my e-scooter for a cosmic surfboard.

I use Zen as a sleep aid.

I find an Oxford comma under my pillow in the mornings.

I'm less lonely than a body can reasonably grow to be.

If you think pleasure is involved, we need to chat.