Inside their cages
the rabbits
shit on the ducks shit
on the chickens.
The butchers
are all attractive women,
less blood stained than one would guess,
wearing their white coats too well.
The stench reaches the other side of the street,
mixing with that of a nearby deli
where meat is roasting on a stick.
A young girl raps on the window
and waves to a rabbit.
She probably thinks of it
as a “bunny.”
The most common use of surreptitious is with the -ly suffix: Surreptitiously.
But to use it as a noun, “He is surreptitious” is surely loquacious behavior.
However, I’ve been more interested in the root: Surrep-
which can sound like syrup depending on how you pronounce it.
Although there’s always been something unsavory (no pun intended) about syrup.
It lacks couth, where molasses, with similar viscosity, seems able to maintain integrity.
Syrup, or especially surrep- owns decidedly clandestine attributes.
I stole the idea of molasses, it seems to say, replacing it with an imposter.
And perhaps you aren’t even aware of the difference.
According to etymology crisp is defined as meaning
“to become brittle”
though the use of brittle, I attest, would have to be its pejorative form.
Brittle’s connotations suggest something less desirable
as though calling a potato chip “brittle” would be an insult,
which is the highest of inconsistencies,
since I doubt anyone would want their chip soggy or leastways, malleable.
It is not a mistake that Chips and Crisp are nearly identical and easily mistaken in their spatial relationships:
The isss sounds with no ‘Z’ and the hard ‘P’ defends its case with its own onomatopoeia;
the sound of a chip crisply snapped;
or breaded and fried chicken crunching in my mouth;
or a hard pretzel crumbling over molars;
or glacial mountains thundering with a splash into the ocean;
or the popping of meat over a fire; edges browning, blackening until carbon laces the steak in gristle.
Crisp’s associations with brisk are prevalent.
A winter morning is both crisp, and brisk.
And the proximity of both words in tandem is utterly delicious.
Say it, you’ll see. Crisp. Brisk. Mmm.
The crisp briskness is a crisply aural sound;
the hard sucking of teeth in response to pain or in sympathy to it;
the crust of the snow that has melted and refrozen atop the powder;
the temporal slate that squirrels skitter over unimpeded by the snow’s depth.
My own boots, for a moment look like they will walk on water before crashing inward;
Snapping like a crisp chip, salt particles flinging into the air.
The backlight is lit and flashing.
The phone is rattling in my hand.
But I wonder if I will answer?
I see him in a hole in my sock.
His peach-colored handiwork swirls
Peek out into a fabric-less world
Where my footprint is his fingerprint.
The words you have said—
I am the door
I am the living bread
I am the light of the world
I am the good shepherd
I am the resurrection
I am the true vine
I am the way
I am the truth
I am the life
I am Jesus
—can I believe that?
Why have you made such a fragile me?
I’m masquerading false humility.
What good is it?
If I got turned inside out
And saw the way I really am
What would I think of me then?
Not intestines, entrails and organs.
But abstractions and presumptions.
I am dead while I breath.
This is fodder to feed my fears
And proof that problems
Never go away by ignoring them.
Hello? I say.
It’s me, he says.
I know.
On the sand it all makes sense:
Lay flat, balance, position is important.
Feet at the end of the stick, paddle out
And paddle through the whitewater.
I’ve got to go outside.
I’ve got to go to the unbroken waves.
I keep staying in the whitewater.
Go straight out through the oncoming whitewater—
You’ve always told me
Take that surfboard straight through the waves—
But I’m stuck in the whitewater.
You tell me to trust you.
You tell me to take courage.
That you will keep me afloat.
That you will save me.
Can’t I stay in the whitewater?
Why must I be Peter?
Wasn’t he enough?
I am content, so don’t call to me.
That’s a lie.
I’m in the whitewater.
But don’t call to me.
It’s churning and I could never—Come
Haven’t I come far enough? Can’t you come to me?
But I have
You’re beyond the whitewater.
When will I stand up?
I must kneel first.
Will I ever kneel first?
I’ve got to go through the whitewater.
—for Mike
I can make a clone
if you give me the right ingredients.
Brewer: Me.
As far as batch size is considered,
taste my preferred draft first and if you like it enough, have as much as you want.
The color should come as no surprise: Dark—one might say brooding—and ambiguous with a bite.
Yes, it’s very bitter.
ABV? It’s called intoxication for a reason. The less I have to think, the better.
And most of my fellow brewers would agree.
I call it the All American Dream Ale.
Equipment? My equipment, of course. It’s all anybody’s got.
The Boil Time is all day, every day. Never know when you’ll need to be ready.
Don’t want to be caught unprepared.
Mash Profile: Single infusion, heavy body(burdensome even), and a lot of mash out.
Taste Rating: As long you’re not a connoisseur you won’t be able to tell the difference.
I can make gallons of this stuff
so close, you can’t tell I’m a counterfeit.
Let’s join the Byrd gang and all go throw rocks through windows.
Let’s make Friday wait for us.
You are part knife, part slab of meat.
The world is a shark.
You know what comes next.
i understand the river
of thought and learn
to breath among the
creatures of the riverbed
i speak but the words
get carried away
back down the curvature
of the giant sphere
i add my own water
to the stream but it
seems a pointless
endeavour
it becomes foreign
immediately
just like my reflection,
the morning after
one thing remains true:
that i cannot breath
in this land
of fish and mossy rocks
i feel freer with
my feet hovering just
inches above the ground
and drier, too.
And when they gunned you down
with your friend on the phone
I hope you knew why they sought to
shred your flesh with bullets
and I’m glad to hear you were rent
so you yourself could rend no more,
that the red poured freely from each
puncture and tear, that your eyes
rolled back and your fingers twitched,
still clutching that toy gun of yours
and I’m sure your heart was black
and half-dead, anyway. And I’m sure
that your soul was as empty as
a six-lane freeway in Southern Pyongyang
on raymond there is no
game to hunt
like chess you must
stay moves ahead
starvation cannot
get to you
if the families on raymond
push you out
just like any game
you make a move
and stay three
steps ahead
to win or otherwise
topple the king.
beware, and forge
ahead
with the youth in
your heart
the things that lie
behind you
now plain to see
and in front
so blurred
beware, and more
importantly:
forge ahead
and learn to love
the confusion of
today
without hesitation
between footsteps
So it was a cold dark January in Michigan
as they often are and we
would pull together for warmth every
now and then and I would consider you
and I think you would consider me, also
While the cars screamed down the avenues
and gangs of howling young-adults roved
to and fro before your otherwise relatively
peaceful abode I tried to steel myself
from the knives you would find
The lacerations always sting a bit but
they usually heal quickly enough with
a lot of pressure and
a little bit of time but they cut
somewhat deeper than they look sometimes,
those knives of yours
Sometimes while nursing a particularly
gruesome slice I would be speechless,
though I never mean to keep you waiting
and I want you to know that I won’t bleed out
and I need you to know that I’m sorry
Sometimes during these long cold Januarys
I know you have your own wounds to clean
because it’s still cold and dark here in Michigan
and I find plenty of my own knives, too.
if i could only write one good
poem
it would be about when we went
south
and the humidity of
the middle part
of alabama
how it did fog up
my glasses in
just seconds
it would be about how i felt like
a stowaway
the whole time i knew you
a small puppy hidden under
your bed
and when we got to golf shores
i felt the foreboding of
being set free
by your sullen parents
in this, the best of my poems
i would remember and in detail
explain the last moment we
spoke
in person
but only the beach remains
that
sunbleached afternoon
walking barefoot and
the new freckles
i would fall between
and i would end the poem
very poignantly
and much before i spent a week
at my grandmother’s
in ocala
far from home
vomiting out religiously
all the sickness i had
endured.
I no longer chase ghosts
through a wasteland of slow-
loading forum pages or a
frigid sea of unreliable chat
applications but some nights
when I sit up (half as late
as I once did) I can not help
but wonder what became
of all the ghosts I left behind
‘Everyone’s heart is leaking’
she said, as she looked at me sideways
but all I heard was we were all destined for nothingness
that everyone is dying all of the time
A television showed a horror on its screen
while a strange instrument emitted dulcet tones
But the pain in my stomach was tightening
and my heart beat faster and my ears rang out and
Everything spun in the darkness
Or that’s how I felt, at any rate
She did not seem so concerned however
still jamming her wand in to my chest
so I laid still like I was instructed previously
imagining my heart as it undoubtedly leaked out
i spent night
with my aching past
t’ward the poorly
lit 31st street
it’s been so long since
i spent time in that world
we built ourselves
i wait, breathless
to hear the whispers
of only 17
i am a ghost in this
world
and to stay too long would
freeze me
have i been on this couch
before?
with the record player on
the shelf
reclined, afront a vinyl
big-screen
you nuzzle your freckles against
my skinny
frame
did we watch the movie flubber?
was it cold like this,
back then?
i wasn’t
disappearing.
of that i am
certain.
Robert Creely imitation—
“The Warning”
I wish my hands were bigger so that I could hold more of you;
that my arms would grow longer to wrap around you like mummified linens.
I wish I could exhume your deepest secrets like an unstuffed taxidermy;
pull them out, pile them up, and print them in the dailies.
I wish I could pluck your out your eyes,
stringing them like Christmas lights that would glow through July.
I wish I could trace your outline with police chalk,
so I could snap photographs of your curves to shelve in the evidence room.
I wish I could crack your breasts like eggs, pouring them into a molding cast
to preserve them in bronze marvels at an excavation.
I wish I could rip off your ears like pink mushrooms growing along trunk roots;
clasping them up to my throat so you can hear every sweet nothing whisper.
I wish I could swallow the looping licorice crescents of your lips
savoring the finest cut of rare steak with each bite.
I wish I could knock out your teeth and tongue to keep in jars;
shaking an instrument the emanates the sound of your voice.
I wish I could replicate your hair, unsheathing strands like scrolled blueprints,
thumb-tacking each down to sketch the angles with a pencil.
For bigger, for better, for more of you, I would.
And yes,
For love-I would split open your head
and put a candle in behind the eyes.
When I say I love you, this is what I mean: I am never satisfied with being close enough.
I wish I could graft myself to you with a blow torch,
heating our skin until it melts together.
Like when our fingers intertwine into a ball of squirming snakes,
hungrily swallowing each other to get warm.
I want to cross section every piece of you,
So that I can know you inside and out like my own personal Mudder Museum.
the lights were
still on the music
still loud when you
ran crying into the
cold night
the sand ate up
your steps and
when you met the
sea it was so cold,
and so uninviting
what did you expect?
maybe a caring and
warm omnipotent
cloud whose womb
you would climb inside
of and wish it all away
yet the air outside
the wedding tent was cold
as was the water that
lept at your toes
as you stood backwards
let go
fall into
the ocean
wait for
the dj to
stop alltogether
and the
party to
come for
you
drift into
the icey
ocean of
your feelings
and your
ambitions and
your perfect
universe never
to be
or, don’t you have the balls?
or, walk back to the tent
let the sand eat your steps
wipe the salt water off your face
and toast the happy couple.
others lay around and slowly
beat the wind with their wings
refusing to give in
fighting to keep on resisting
chasing life support
from the sun or the iron lung.
knowing the difference between
the two
and when a situation calls
for one and not the other
can be the difference
between slow
and quick
death
Poem From The Woman Sitting Across From Me On The Subway
Look at this boy looking at me.
Tossing his eyes so secret-like.
Like I don’t see him each time
I look up from my book, pretending
he’s embarrassed to be caught.
This is not a game of cat and mouse,
boy, I just want to see how close we are
to Canal so I can get off.
Stop
trying to see what book I’m reading.
No, you probably have not read it. No,
it is not exciting that we both like books.
Stop taking all your books
out of your backpack to show me
that you have them, it does not
look like you’re organizing. It looks
like you’re trying to show me all your books.
Boy,
why are you wearing those bags
under your eyes so proudly? Why
neck cracking like a mating call? We
are all tired. All beat. Your legs
are not more sore than anyone else’s.
It is still okay that you did not offer
your seat to anyone, this is New York,
but don’t think you deserve it.
Hey,
they call it stealing glances because
I’m not looking to give them away.
When our eyes just met, it was not
a cute mistake. I was staring
to fucking intimidate you into looking
at somebody else. And
I saw you fix your hair in the reflection
of the train. Making it the
“right”
kind of messy. I’ve got my finger on the trigger
of your intimacy now, don’t I? You let it slip.
The way you made sure your hair was flat
on the sides and double checked the cross
of your legs. You wont ever say anything.
I can smell pent up pick-up lines
on your breath, you’ve been holding
them in your mouth for that long.
Look,
I don’t want that one-way ticket
to your day dream. This is not a poem.
This is the N train. I’ve got places to be
and no time for the type of silence
your kind deals in. And anyways,
I do not need wooing. My heart
does not need the keys you hope
to shape for it. Some of us
don’t
keep our hearts chained.
So erase all of this. Put away the pen.
I’m just someone on the subway. Not
the vehicle for your epiphany. Not
the photo thumb-tacked inside your
heart locker. I do not need
to be written about to be whole.
And anyways, I don’t need help with that.
You do.
the sieve and the sand 
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