How We Meet (Your Security Expectations)

what you think you’re observing
as a learning trigger, a martini
hour distraction or foreshadowing
potential deathbed riddle is in fact
nothing but a large self-instigating cloud
you could write your name in whose shadows
it both blows into and off you.

just the songs for a staring contest.

a song or a series of songs as interruption.
pardon me ma’am, your desert for one is ready.
no voluntary beast could be as chipper
as you and your stand-in pretend.

possibly get a bob. it worked for Irene Castle.
she had nothing left to apologize for.

those gaps are all vacuums, the bones
elaborate styli. you’ve spilled your umpteenth
breakfast on your Bizzy Buzz-Buzz (registered)
that doesn’t mean you’re necessarily beneath
anyone’s bed in a lurking legs up attitude

or working a deface painting booth at the S&M faire.

the images as described are in the public domain.
you may experience a slight sensation of being
but don’t worry the shitstorm print quality will blunt
you and what appear to be flocks will be redacted,
just scratches where time wanted out
and unquantifiable color artifacts, color
never having been present in the negative.

word to the wise; carry your own gangplank.

he discovers he’s going blind and blames
you, thinking it had said something
about a dream bush or idea tree
at your latest non-local uncle’s wake.

but that light was always coming from
not going to if you’d only remove from your head
the soft box, incubate first then fret
about the strobe replicating your childhood
in meticulously lit and coifed dreads, stealing
all your best chickens and turning them back
into you, peeling, naked as a zoopraxiscope
of nervous layers on collection day.

on the subject of the persistence of relativism,
do not confuse the thaumatrope with your mom
and a man she referred to as Uncle Tonight.
between any two cels there is a no standing zone,
haven’t you noticed how the sailor holds
his ground? Moving Hold (registered) as the people
around you only dress up their presences
so loss intensive, albeit super stylish, to create
a place of tranquility that smells like orange
cake.

remind me to tell you how I’ll die, the logistics
are a bitch but the headstone promises to be
delicious if the rain doesn’t melt the legend
before everyone’s had their piece.

the wrist fractures just so, drawn down
by the weight of the spurious concept
of a wrist as a series of choices, strokes
on cue though surely this cannot be a kind
of play? they all believe they are privy to
the victim’s next move, the next crooked stem
from the bouquet.

everything is boneless for a reason.

try breathing through your air.
the crows will confuse and lose
their group think, leaving you
the out you may not actually desire.
I only tell you these things on spec
against a slow first quarter.

tactile heat waves have made your highway
a legitimate blowout risk. this is the tightwire
music walks and yes, sex the same, the fits
are what differentiate us from them.

I’ve been instructed that money matters.
I now recognize that it’s the other way ‘round
and the dormancy of the peak is nothing
to do with the peak at all, but the plates
being loosened just enough by a quality
grade vodka.

the trick is in the knowing
how much will be enough to produce
a second date and how much too much
not to avoid annihilation of the entire race
of early circus innovators.

this is one case where it can be argued
obliteration is not it’s own most emergent
industrial byproduct. a civilization is
only as strong as the weaker of the forces
that loses the race to destroy it.

yes, again, you are a delicate flower.
but you cancel nothing that wasn’t worth
moving into the storm’s path in the first place.

you say plump, I say tomato, it takes all kinds
to make a sundae after church.

but the thumbnail of the ghost is growing
too detailed. I had to back away
to regain some sense of forced perspective.

one quits playing the bass as transparent
plea to be begged to play the bass, the other
is writing about Sandy Koufax in an echo
chamber from the early days of sound.

the programs that were left on the seats
were made of cornbread. It rendered their collectible
value nil. but as souvenirs they were sweet.
mine had a large imperfect garnet in it. I was
carried back to mardi gras and the tooth
broken on the baby. these risks are difficult
to accept as commensurate with their rewards.

true, it’s really all just like butter, isn’t it?
like butter you supplant with bleeding first
responder red by cover girl, or vicey versey.

the business about the one fifth of a second
and your multitude of unconventional shoes
and I’m carried back to a time when I knew
a lot more about such things and wasted
so many hours laying down an airstrike
of utterly unutterably enduring genius
before feigning the motions that precede
feigned sleep.

every word of this is true and not
one not less than a perfection of the cowardly.

I should have told you you were brave
as a newborn under a spark shower
in a foundry gone one hundred percent
automation. I should have stripped you
of all that pleasure, taken you out into
the exercise yard, shown you the aeonium
I grew from seeds from the colon
of a Red Kite, died of natural causes, April 19, 2011.

I should have kissed you or the sound
of your teeth against candy, one, tomorrow
when I still had the chance.