Chapters:

Today, They Yawn

Backyard Planetarium

Wriggle in the nook hanging light years beneath

the pewter cheese grater’s unused quadrant

with Romans, Greeks, and nerds abundant

playing dodgeball with the Boeing collective.


Under the key lime astrology, insects jam,

flaunting their thoracic cellos and contrabassoons

in ballads and madrigals that seem to skip nimbly

through pipe puffs and atrophied bonfire seeds

like plasma screens across Lake Erie.


A shadow membrane of priestly trees

pontificates through pronged stipules

with insomniac warblers about the merits

of rumble strips and neighborhood watchmen,

who perch on the transmission pylons

and mummify in the lonely line of fire.


Interstate 78 traces the ozone layer

with jake brake wraiths,

connecting the corsucating Big Red wads

in aircraft warning mobiles hung

across the mountains etched in topography

as rudimentary spider webs

lumbered by Thoreaus with GoPros.


I lay shivering on the frittering porch roof,

chewing leaks and shovel scratches

through backbone marrow, chased

with blurry creeks of woolen warmth

from a snack of arthritic almond skin,

a mosquito’s tai chi demonstration,

howls from obstinate headlight blossoms,

and the chrysalis of hunter’s moon shadows.


I Always Hate Going In There

Nobody should be getting migraines from buying deodorant,

but here I am: clenching my senses in agony

amidst Wal-Mart’s museum of aromatic push-pops,

sporting a woefully agnostic disposition in the realm of olfactology.

Everyone’s got an opinion, just like everyone’s got a nose.


Who am I to assume that my purchase will universally dub me

the patron saint of smelling awesome?

Humanity has never smelled concretely good,

it’s only smelled better than before,

when our armpits screamed galactic fumes of sulfuric tar

through brambly follicles sheltered ‘neath cotton sleeves.


The cure? My curse.

Typically, this self-argument would solve itself

by simply donning the safari garments of a bargain hunter, but prior experience

with Right Guard transformed my underarms into a family of hairy slugs.

Those glorified poachers in the marketing department suckered me into thinking that

I would smell like the Arctic and using the official deodorant of the NBA

would lead to me playing bumper pool with my new pal Kobe.


Such misdirection can, too, be found in the advertising playbook of AXE.

The TV promised me a pre-packaged female stampede to chase me down an interstate,

but all I got was two swatches of chalky skin and a wallet that echoes.

But rumination isn’t absolving my biological malfeasance, so the hunt progresses.


Why would anyone of reasonable consciousness buy the nostril-singeing Brut?

All the flapper girls in the world are now topsoil, so what’s the appeal?

And I know better than to trade currency for the services of Old Spice.

The resultant red rashy bite-sized skiing moguls convinced me that

rubbing myself with aged coriander might likely prove a more fruitful endeavor.


Speed Stick Ocean Surf Deodorant. Net Wt 3 Oz (85g).

Am I to assume that these antiperspirant barons have actually encapsulated

the ocean into something that’s supposed to make me smell better?

Have they smelled the ocean? The biting atmospheric marinade

of seagull waste, simmering snow cones and straight-from-the-periodic-table sodium?

Not even close! Their idea of oceanic, as represented by this tube

of waxy cerulean dough is more akin to Freon-glazed honeydew.

Still, though, I see no gaudy endorsements, I’m not breaking out in hives,

my nostrils don’t have fire in them and I feel financially ambivalent. Sold!


Go to the Porch

Burly is the union

of Zildjian and arterial spasms,

of primal eloquence,

guttural unintelligibility

that shrieks the saccharin

barbs of discontent

like speedboats in my ear canal,

now a gaping lake post-sonic supernova.


You've infected my soul with Elephantitis.

Side effects may include

impromptu Chick fil A mosh pits,

savage steering wheel drum-offs,

philosophy lectures.


A narcotic, like an Oreo

that knows karate

and wipes itself with pacifism.

Bicuspids skyrocket,

skeleton like Floam,

and I'm eager to hit the replay button.

It's a spiritual choice, my propensity

for submitting to the Flow.


Jersey Girl

Few people know that art museums are blood relatives of cemeteries and libraries,

conjoined by an over-reverent stillness: the soundtrack of masterpiece desaturation,

voices in the fossilized soil still hissing the mute molten demons of self-promotion.


Hardly anyone wants to look at me. Be it a painting or a face in a clay pot,

they turn their gaze, almost ashamed to know that such an abundance of existence

came after the implosion of their individual world. But then there was her:


the Young Woman Holding a Sheet of Music from 1755 through the imagination

of Louis-Jean-François Lagrenée. Something tells me this dude is French.

I’ll call him Professor Croissant for short, but that’s wholly irrelevant.


It only took four and a half seconds for me to enter the freefall of her roadside hypnosis.

She was mine as I was hers to gaze at, our steak-like irises aligning

like a liaison of volcanic nebulae in a Pixar movie. Her lustrous egg bagel gaze exploded off the canvas through all four walls, vaporizing her diffident counterparts as if to say

“You can talk to me. I’m here for you. Cool socks.”


My iPod intervenes, as good a wingman as any:

You’re just too good to be true…

Frankie Valli. How appropriate for 18th century France.

Can’t take my eyes off of you…

Never mind. It does nobody good to underestimate iTunes Genius mode.

You’d be like heaven to touch…

The Don’t Touch Gestapo turns its trenchant housefly glare to us,

lurching in thatchy sweater vests at the thought of fingerprint touchdown.

I wanna hold you so much…

What would that feel like? Would it be different from actually holding this lady?

Or does her skin match the complexion of old canvas? Maybe she has psoriasis.

At long last love has arrived…

No. Wrong choice of words, Frankie. The right choice of words would be something along the lines of “fetishistic,” and that would look weird on my résumé.

And I thank God I’m alive

You’re just too good to be true

Can’t take my eyes off of you…

Her longing gaze remains the same as mine, like the Pompeii lovers

post-Vesuvius, frozen in the eternal bliss of having found each other.

We revel in the formaldehyde of our too-perfect scoring.

Pardon the way that I stare

There’s nothing else to compare…

I wonder what’s on that sheet music she’s holding.

At this point, it might as well be an amalgam of New Jersey doo-wop.

The sight of you leaves me weak…

Sincerely. My legs are getting tired. Going to museums takes a lot out of the living.

There are no words left to speak…

Also true. Much like cemeteries and graveyards, speaking in overly audible tongues

is strictly frowned upon by the respective salaried Gestapoes.

So if you feel like I feel

Please let me know that it's real…

If only she’d let me know, give me a sign. Imagine if she leaped off the wall and into my

arms like something out of a bad Nick Sparks novel. Shut up, imagination.

Now I’m expecting that to happen.

You're just too good to be true

Can't take my eyes off of you…

Was that the end? I hope so. Best to leave it there than anywhere else.

I LOVE YOU BAEE-BAYY…

Uh oh.

And if it's quite all right,

I need you baby to warm the lonely nights…

Nope. Nope. Shut it down. Too much. This goes leagues beyond what the Don’t Touch

Gestapo frowns upon. Sorry about that, Ms. Holding a Sheet of Music. Frankie gets a little too excited sometimes. Thanks for the dance, though. A smile is a smile and you provided me with a large bag of them, for which I am undyingly grateful.


I-78W

In piety, I hike to the acute

alcoves of an I-78 underpass

with the waning gibbous moon

a smear of Miracle Whip

through onion peel eyelids

jitterbugging to stray

from the gelid, paralytic unconscious.


Jagged, recalcitrant flakes

of sycophant slate scramble

like a fishbowl's rainbow

rocks and rubble with each tenuous stride

unbraiding on the fusty slope

irradiated with tinctures of traffic,

spectral silt of accidents,


hearts of the photojournalists

slated to document reckonings

of convertibles transmuted

into macabre origami,

of teardrops rushing in whitecaps

from maelstroms of mourners

sprawling as conservation canopies

across their broken babies.


I tack my silence to washboard ceiling

as a surrogate rose, shaving of my soul

for rent to haunt the newsmongers,

live on through their viewfinders.

Blueberry and tomato comets scrape

over the cigarette butt barriers,

dampen my socks as officers bat away

concern like cobwebs. Nothing to see here.


T.M.I.

Cooling towers rose like volcanoes from the crust,

a scourge of geological acne squirting steam

into the monochromatic gulf of night

like Godzilla's league of understudies.


Tighten the mask, hop the gate, be sure to stay low,

lest the unholy edifices snatch you from the dark.


Its overkill of dormant sirens and toxic yellow symbology

paint the bordering forest a sickly mustard.

The Susquehanna's muffled shrieks of horror stories

lap dutifully on the gnarled levee's mulch-peppered shore.


Stifle your lungs, erase your heartbeat, pick up your feet,

lest you wind up an ashen stain on its porch.


At the plant, we hear the stocky quartet gurgle its favorite chant

of ruby airline deflectors, shimmering like cherry cough drops.

Proud are their caterwauls, a rusted proclamation

sent galloping over Londonderry rooftops.


Uranium land mines, The China Syndrome 2, delusions of disfigurement;

the lumps form an indomitable wall from further aesthetic enjoyment.


The way back is paved with cricket sonatas

that wrap dizzying aerials around our buzzing brains

along Engle Road, the getaway flume to pastures grown and overknown

beyond that omniscient glower of the horizon's monsters.


White Wall

Your face of dry, nearly jerky meatloaf

is a ragged antihistamine

running woolen down my feet.

Proclamations of Sharpie-stained lust

and chipping nationalism

don’t quite equate to classy attire,

but I’d venture to wager you’re glad for the company.


Are you bitter at us for leaving you

colorless like unknown bones?

I see spacklings of hazelnut blood flakes,

yellow of heat stroke sweat,

but nothing the HR department

of bleach and elbow grease can’t train away.


Yours is a sorrow so corked and aged,

waiting for the perfect occasion to spill and breathe.

What electrocution does your flavor singe our tongues?

What shade will you paint the reptilian roofs

of our mouths when the anguish finds a pulse?

Will you still be the auxiliary backbone

or are you content to crumble as your first finality,

an independent ultimatum?


Blanketed

They came in measured streamlines

down tangerine tides into the fireplace

and breathe with me in nursery rhyme patterns.

Box scores, oatmeal coupons, and poison report cards

seethe into the frilled roar, now coursing

out the chimney's nostril as an uppercut

to the petrifying snowflake hammers.

Inclemency will always win by mercy rule,

but such a menace never knows the classified,

toasty quakes of their embrace.


Each silken strand hums the solos of tentative candleblaze,

sprouts like willow branches on my chest

to quell the noxious chills, undo

winter's sinister erasures. Woes and obligations

wait their turn under the bed, vicariously basking

in my glow beyond perception's periphery.

"Let him have today," they yawn,

hanging nimbly from the baseboard slats

as eyelids and embers flicker into ash,

supplanting the anesthetic snow.


Cakepop

You left the stick in the back seat,

a microscopic knob of frosting still discernable

where the cake’s bulge waned.

You never finish it in that totality,

as though you were leaving the tiniest dreg

of splendor for the rest of the world

to enjoy, admire, imbibe upon

and vicariously wash in your sweetness.


Vanilla with rainbow jimmies,

our favorite. You always manage

to educate me on the finer points of existing

just by eating a cakepop.

I, in my typical boobish fashion,

am of a dead-set proclivity to guzzle

my dessert like a mercenary tyrannosaur,

but you always stop me just in time

before the empty stick prevails.


Ever your pupil, I analyzed

your every meticulous gnaw.

Your habit of savoring every centimeter

mesmerized as you strummed the sprinkle

into your taste buds’ gooey grasp.

I could feel the sugars and inkhorn chemicals

shimmying their colors down your throat

in an ecstasy of alleluias.


The fingerprints of your confectionary revolution

still cover me like a thick flannel.

I cuddle in its ample fuzziness and burrow

through the blizzard with the stick.

I use it as a cane to supplement

my ever-debilitating skeleton, which shudders

beneath a colony cloud of fruit flies.

These thorny strangers in my midst are the cancer

to my marrow, a caliginous calamity

I’m force to breath in labored gulps of overdose.

Though skin and sweat may dissolve

in tired hides, my spine remains,

low-fat frosting knob and all.


I will subsist.

My undercooked psalm will continue

hitting one false note after another.

The tawdry legacy of me will dodge

the senescent sickle’s cleave

because I ate a cakepop with you on Memorial Day,

receiving sunset’s fruit salad

blessing on the overlook.