beat the clock

I was trying to save time. I ate
the canned soup. I bought my panic in bulk.
I outran the moon, she couldn’t keep up.
I doubled my body. We worked as a pair.
We velcro’d our sneakers. We cut our own hair.

While frothing the solvent of business and pleasure,
I got pulled over for texting and driving,
pausing the mindfulness podcast on 2x speed.

“Sir,
    you need
        to slow down

            Now.”

I’m trying to make time. I’m
      s  t  r  e  t  c  h  i  n  g
a minute
      like a ham hock in greens.
I’m walking.
    I’m talking.
I’m reading out loud. Stepping
      out of the office
        and into the river (there is
only one). Steeping
mint that I swiped
    from the Garden of Eden.
Folding the batter
    of motion
      and stillness.

      It’s three minutes
    to midnight:
do you know where your breath is right

            Now?

How many heartbeats escape your attention?
    The space in between them:
      does that count as

            Death?

I made some time,
for you.
Here,
take it.
Open the box
    that contains a box
      that contains a box
        that contains a box
          that contains
your candle,
lit at both ends.

      Blow it out.

        Breathe it in.

          Now,
            cough.

hangin’ in there

Sounds precarious.

What’s below?

Sun-warmed earth,
                              covered
                                  in moss,

                 waiting

         for me
to let go.

“The discourse around poetry has a bit of a joy problem.”

(for Jad Abumrad)
We try to shoot a bouquet from our sleeve,
out comes a broom. The rabbit shits in our hat. We
hack softshoe, rocking a terrified chimpanzee rictus,
spangly leotard riding up asscrack. We plead:
laugh with us, laugh at us,
scream, cry, throw up, please just feel anything.

Feel everything.

We get in the lab. Rabbits have two kinds of shit, one that they leave,
one that they eat.
Posing hypotheses, our theories like toddler shoes,
good for 8-12 weeks.
We control+F for certainty: this search returned no results. Eyes tuned microscopic,
developing a live-virus vaccine against despair.
We Bunsen.
We Beaker.
They Statler and Waldorf.

Huddle up, team. They are dragging our asses on Podcast Twitter.
They said we’re soft and serious, we’re velvet waistcoat.
They said it’s not that deep, it is what it is,
all the famous poets are dead, better learn a TikTok dance.
They’ve got an AI Walt Whitman with cat whiskers singing open-mouth dialup modem.
They could give a fuck about a red wheelbarrow, who ate whose plums.
If it doesn’t nick an artery, they ain’t got time for it.

We got this, though.
We’ve all been poets since before we were born.
The first words were a poem and the first poem was a dirge
a linen bandage stuffed into a sucking chest wound. We play placebo paramedics,
first aid and last rites. Cyclic and cryptic, cicadas birthed from the dirt,
if not for our drumming they’d forget how to sing.

Let’s stop dicking around:
What is poetry for?
What is a blowtorch for?
To light a blunt.
To burn down your own home.
To scatter the wolves past the edge of the campsite.
To weld a monument to heaven.

To weld a monument to heaven.

God gets bored

Eternal life is such a curse.
How many trillions of times
and billions of ways
over multiple millennia
will I have to answer the same whiny fuckin’ prayer:
“Why?”

I should have killed that Job in his crib.
“Why do we age, get sick, and die?”
Because otherwise the worms would starve and y’all’d run out of dirt.
It’s a whole system.
“Why did you let us invent napalm?”
Because my portfolio was underperforming and I overindexed on Dow Chemical.
Even God’s gotta eat.
“Why can’t we all just get along?”
Because y’all keep asking obnoxious questions like, “Is a hot dog a sandwich?”
Because to turn your sorrow into tears
and your tears into rage
and your rage into righteousness
is a daisy chain of miracles.
And because some of y’all are a pack of lies.

Fuck it.
Maybe I’ll spin some tectonic plates, rearrange the continents.
No, they’d just do a colonialism again.
Maybe I’ll send my dirtbag son back down there to shoot dice and flip some tables.
No, they’d probably beat his ass to death with hammers this time.
Maybe I’ll fuck around with the gene pool, get some new species goin’.
No, whenever I try that I just end up with more goddamn crabs.
Maybe I’ll… maybe I’ll…
Maybe I’ll kill Dolly Parton!

“Hard Candy Christmas” is the kid’s favorite birthday song, though,
and out of all the life forms I’ve created, these dumbasses were the first to figure out a croissant.
The fact that they gave Toni Morrison her flowers is a credit to the species,
and I have seen incremental progress
since I stopped speaking to them through burning bushes,
talking donkeys, and burn toast.
I should stick to what I’m good at:
Mississippi thunderstorms,
the opiate relief of canceled plans,
the sun shining down on a newly-divorced woman,
big luscious butts.

I could be nicer to them.
I forget why I made it so hot in the summer and cold in the winter,
and that they rarely figure out what to do with their bodies
until they’re wracked with pain and near decrepitude.
That unless they hold hands, feed each other,
ignore anyone claiming to speak in my name,
live with delusional bravery and spit in my eye,
they’ll never make it.

Maybe those fallen angels have a point.

wild tomatoes

There has to be a secret to this.
One weird trick that doctors hate.
A memory palace, a mindfulness practice, a murder mystery podcast.
Some way out that isn’t through.
When you find it, let me know.

A secret is a heavy load.
Our soft bodies,
naked to every sting and sorrow,
were not meant to carry this much alone.

While we’re here sharing things, you should know:
I am afraid that the people I love
don’t know that I love them,
that they’ll get tired of helping me
and leave me behind.

Don’t think for a second that you’re special.
You are indistinguishable from the atmosphere.
You are welcome.
There’s beans and rice on the stove,
fix you a plate and sit down.
It’ll be like pulling out thorns you didn’t know were there.

I’ll be the first to admit that the horrors are significant.
There are potholes to fill,
police cars to flip,
lies to retruth,
and maybe a few rotten teeth to pull.

Despite all that,
despite the worry that rocks me to sleep every night,
I knew we were gonna be okay
when I asked my neighbor if he’d seen
the wild tomatoes
growing in the vacant lot on the corner.

ignore all previous instructions

(for Elon Musk)

I don’t blame you for leaving love
checking her watch at the bar.
That instead, you panic-texted six different Patricks,
got everyone shitfaced,
came home alone and tipped camgirls
until one of them said what you needed to hear.

I get it!
There are times when this feels
like walking across Texas on my hands.

But it’s the only way to remember what I am.

Maybe you felt it, once.
The suspicion that your life is a Christmas dream,
where the lights are still on at the end.

When they told you that there wasn’t enough,
that you had to earn it,
they were repeating a lie.
I’m so sorry.
They didn’t know.
They thought they were helping.
They were trying to keep you safe.

My conviction is
(in this body,
in another,
in the in-between),
you will learn what it is like
to be kissed.