Knowing myself usually feels like the consolation prize

of watching your team lose,
then knowing they lost,
when you told everybody in the bar
in your hometown that they would, 
and they didn't believe you, didn't want to believe you,
heckled you even,
and the burning desire to prove them wrong
dug fault lines in your brow,
the suspense was a dimensional imbalance
and overshadowed the outcome of the game
so that seeing the end felt like swallowing
a mouthful of moist white bread.

Horace Mann High

Assemblies of vine-like wires and electrical cords hang
from the perforated ceiling,
a jungle fed by abandoned late bells.
The classroom, whose floor is a carpet of broken glass and rubble,
has been reduced to three desks.
One sits upright, beside the window, the wood sun-worn and pale.
The second is on its side beside the green chalkboard,
which reads “NICOLE HAS BIG PUSSY LIPS.”
(A small rectangle of 2:30 winter amber sundown spotlights
the word HAS.)
One of the rusty metal legs is a middle finger
directed upward,
defiantly fuckyouing the comatose clock
that not-ticks between shoulder blades of two, small American flags.
The minute and second hand permanently instruct
1:13,
despite the sliding light
that lectures across the dust.
The third desk rests in pieces in the middle of the room,
a fire extinguisher hatchet beside it,
splinters lockerdoor teeth spouting apologies
for education system failures.
For a moment, I am static in the wreckage.
Silence cups its ghostly fingers ‘round my winter breath;
the kind of silence that can only exist in the space
between actively twiddling thumbs
or in the glints of eager, unblinking eyes on a clock
that still has something to give.

Man's Gotta Eat

The silver pitcher sits on my wife’s ass

full of cicadas.

I like it when there’s tar in my hair.

Know what tar is?

It’s when a man and a steam engine

make a llama together, but

the llama spends its whole life searching for

a small temple in rural China.

The riot police keep showing up

with canisters of bees

to dump em on striking factory workers

who drop their picket signs, lay down

and recite the Third Book of Psalms.

In the corner a spider is tossing

coins, but her copy of the I-Ching

is from the future

and so much of the original text has been misinterpreted

and erased that

it always tells her to make lemonade.

Toshiba has decided to sell laptops outta gumball machines

and all the consumers have decided it’s smarter

to just use your money to make more money

and all the disenfranchised have decided

they’d be better off going to college

to study how to be mice,

so now we’ve got a cist

in the earth’s mantle—see it

ballooning out of every volcano?

They tell us the tumor isn’t cancerous

even though it’s clearly getting bigger.

The llama looks troubled.

The steam engine cries every night in her nursing home

for her boy, lost in a sea of green,

never realizing home is where his hoofs are.

That spider senses something’s wrong

but the coins never lie.

Come on, baby, just a few more days

you’ll have the world record

for lying belly-down balancing

something pointless on your bottom

dollar, then we, too, will have

our names in the Book of Lice.

Early Morning

Hey everyone! I'm looking forward to seeing how this 30/30 thing goes. Here's attempt #1:



The sun doesn't come up when you're smoking
on your front porch at 6 in the morning.
Instead the houses, which arch over you
like spectators on the scene of a car crash,
grow thin dirty halos. Daylight is of
these halos somehow, the way a cluster of cells
is of an infant but not yet infant.
It doesn't grow if you look right at it,
but you look down at the dark spot
where your shoes are, and by the time you look up,
the houses' halos have almost reached each other,
their asphalt grey giving way to brighter rind,
and it is almost bright enough to clearly
see your shoes and there are sudden people walking
to the bus stop and cars stopping at the block's stop sign
and you now realize how tired you are and take
one last drag of filter, unlock the door, and go to bed.