BEGGARS WOULD RIDE

If a poem 

were a disease,

it'd be the world's 

laziest fever—

one content to fester 

slowly behind the scenes, 

turning up your temperature 

by quiet half-degrees

rather than seizing you 

and burning you to death 

in a delirious fusilade 

of the most ecstatic sneezes.

*

If a poem were a garden plot, 

it'd be a hopeless patchwork 

of some the world's most 

delicate words, 

surrounded and nearly 

choked from existence 

by species after species  

of rude wild invasives.

Your best, if not your only 

chance at success

would be to perform a regular 

controlled-burn of the situation.

*

If a poem were a language game, 

it'd be a neon slot machine—

too garish to ignore,

and purpose-built 

to contain 

that meaning you need

but never just dispense it 

at the pull of a lever 

or slake your desire 

to break it wide open, 

plunder its treasure,

and drain its allure. 

APPREHENDED BUT NOT NAMED

All around the world, 

people long to share a bed.

Little children crawl

under the covers to snuggle 

with their fathers and mothers; 

men and women in 

all combinations, even once 

their lust is exhausted, 

still bend into spoons 

and nestle together. 

But have you ever noticed 

that, no matter how close 

you come to another, 

you must always 

dream alone—

or wondered why must it be 

that the truth of the both of you 

not knowing what that means 

is in itself the most 

intimate thing? 

SOLSTICE REMIX

The sleeptalk of winter 

performs its glossolalic functions;

the rain of romance breeds 

its nonchalant flowers; everywhere, 

medulla oblongata blossoms 

estrange the particular, flummoxing 

bees, leaving leaves to kiss 

like dense schools of fish, and transfixing

our desire, allowing the source 

of our powers to relax. Thusly 

do the high roof of summer's vital spasms 

banish the voices in our heads 

by the bunches—as if mashing-

up the godhead's trumpet blasts 

with the jackhammer tremors 

of all creation's deep ambivalence. 

OPEN WIDE

There's nothing 

you can do. Grace 

doesn't hug you

or invite you to come,

and it never offers 

grounds or reasons;

it snags you 

by the mouth 

like some draconian invention;

it gouges your cheek—

lodges deep there 

like a barbed hook 

and yanks you 

right out of the depths 

of your denial—

not even 

shrieking, but 

gasping for breath 

with your lungs 

cooking, full of that poison 

called liability

and into the alien light 

of absolution. 

WHY NATURE SUCKS

Although she abhors 

nothing that exists, 

she scorns any sense 

of that substance

as precious; 

bad enough 

that she gives all 

the same gift—worse 

when she asks 

for it back. 

ARGUMENT FROM EGOISM

Tell me, if you 

know: when a cell divides, 

in what sense 

can it be said 

to "survive?" 

Can one realistically 

turn into two 

without the former dying

and both of the latter 

being wholly new? 

And even if they were 

to recall 

the formerly recondite 

parent at all, 

what good would that do 

to the soul of the old 

mother protoplast 

whose now writhing 

and flailing her 

flagella in hell? 

Who among us would choose

at will to reproduce 

when to regenerate 

is to violently 

bifurcate identity—

to puncture a hole 

in the wall 

in the lung

of what was—to suffocate 

self, and to die? 

PERPETUITY

You pledge everything—

your life* for my kiss—and don't

mind that asterisk.