The theme of this party is the Old Masters
and I’m the spitting image of Led Zeppelin.
The theme of this party is the future
and I arrive like a crass proposition.
The theme of this party is keg stands
and the boys all want to tap your ass.
The theme of this party is Weekend at Bernie’s
so we all come as Guildenstern and/or Rosencrantz.
The theme of this party is Alexander Graham Bell
so I come as a footnote to his Wikipedia entry.
The theme of this party is body shots –
as I drink I age hideously.
The theme of this party is mummification
and my date is your Facebook account.
The theme of this party is commencement speeches;
luckily I have a tattoo of the Sermon on the Mount.
The theme of this party is National Masturbation Month
so I paper the tree of myself in tissue.
The theme of this party is childhood role models
and I’m the unspeakable off-screen deeds of Scooby-Doo.
The theme of this party is running on empty
and I’m the P.R. firm for a commercial organ harvest.
The theme of this party is Catholic
and I dress like an ex–altar boy’s therapist.
The theme of this party is catholic
ergo we take a little E and smoke weed.
The theme of this party is making amends
so I ground up your debts and bake you bread.
The theme of this party is transparency
so I wear panties made of snow.
The theme of this party is the digital age
and I’m pleasuring myself with a fibre optic dildo.
The theme of this party is authenticity
so I sketch your portrait as an emoticon.
The theme of this party is the present;
I’m a plane kissing your Pentagon.
The theme of this party is quietude
and I swaddle an infant hangover.
The theme of this party is a slouching beast
that drops, crawls on all fours.
The theme of this party is awful beer
so we play it through a French horn.
The theme of this party is to come as you are
thus I fashion a crown from Courtney Love’s tax return.
The theme of this party is meaningless ‘love’
and I come as Thomas Kinkade.
The theme of this party is ‘meaningless’ love
and I suck on the straw in your milkshake.
The theme of this party is poems about stars
and I come dressed as a hard-on.
The theme of this party is heavy metal
so I etch a tableau of my death in iron.
The theme of this party is modern medicine
and it’s generously sponsored by LASIK.
The theme of this party is the Real
and we’re just trying to keep it.
The theme of this party is bringing home the bacon
so I wear an apron to the bloodbath.
The theme of this party is the industrial age
and you come in dressed like a trainwreck.
The theme of this party is feeling shitty –
I’m dressed as the cliffs of Dover.
The theme of this party is the fun we’ve had –
I’m a dissertation on Schopenhauer.
The theme of this party is the fun we have
so I set my disappointment to Auto-Tune.
The theme of this party is animal morality
and I’m Matthew Arnold in a tiger costume.
The theme of this party is When in Rome;
you’ve brought a lighter, I’ve dressed as a fiddle.
The theme of this party is a zygote,
and we agree to split it down the middle.
The theme of this party is Indians and cowboys
but I’m home with the pox.
The theme of this party is the miracle of flight
and my costume’s your little black box.
BIG SIGHS
What’s not to like? Days coast in
and then coast out on a frothy surf,
as if surfing from one foam latté
to the next were the good life.
the truncated garden hose dangling
from a gas tank like a necktie
will get us the rest of the way.
Up here in the rafters – and stop me
if you’ve heard this one – I’ve staged
a small pageant to sort our various passions.
The resemblance to a smokestack is uncanny,
obnoxious, an accordion that hugs
its inner turmoil and wheezes.
What a production, music,
how it works you like a pro.
And by you I mean me,
and by me I mean I’ve tried to be good
to you in my own way, carried
you with me like a flask in your time of need.
You with your airplane heart and me,
a bad mechanic, leaving a wrench
like an extra bone in your landing gear.
You’re so cute by the light of the evening news,
fuselage scattered desperately across a stretch of asphalt
like sun-starved foreigners on a beach.
Oh, the bodies of sweat that drip from us.
COUNTRY LIVING
It’s all in your head, the articles say,
your life slanting at weird afternoon angles
against which you bump your head. Then the sudden bloom,
a second spring, and your noggin swells like interest rates.
It’s not easy to live like this, but it’s doable.
A friend stops by. He’s sad, so you buy him a beer
and he tells you some things.
Then he gets on a train and leaves town for a while,
but it’s still summer, there are people out.
Some of them are pretty, their skin tanned.
They’re sweating – as are you – as if greasing their way
through popsicle season. In tongue-bath weather,
couples drive out to the country to hold hands.
It’s not that I’m lonely, your friend had said,
but the hayloft of his brain behaves otherwise.
SMALL-TOWN BANK
Look, pinball, my Clementine,
this is gonna ricochet all wrong
but one moment can’t always account
for another.
Cobble together your looser sentiments
into something approaching a lean-to,
or at least what a lean-to
stands for.
Hope the colour of sea foam
gives its address
as a back alley. How am I
supposed to know which mailbox
to leave its bank statement in?
DINOSAUR PORN
Things have names we learn and repeat:
Missionary, Cowgirl, Double Lutz
with a Half-Corkscrew Finish and a Fist Pump
for the Cameras. What’s not to love
but the gesture we’re used to?
So the stripmall
touches itself. A couple of punk kids
rush the adult video store, lily-white
hand-rolled cigarettes hinged to their lips.
Sixteen, maybe seventeen, old enough
to slip wrist-deep up a skirt at a stoplight
and think, Finger like the clutch.
And now, fingers under a sweater like a gun’s
blunt point, roughly clubbing the clerk
with a slab of dumb violence.
They grab what they can.
Naturally, Dinosaur Porn is an attractive choice:
a man in a foam
T. Rex outfit delivers pizza
to an all-girls college dorm. And when the kids
rush out, hands full of VHS tits and a wad of cash,
they broadside a promotional cardboard cutout
of the man-lizard – his green penis condom-capped
and jutting out like a tongue about to speak –
and topple him face-down on the carpet,
snout crumpled like a snail spooning itself in its shell.
One cardboard claw grips the floor, as if the porn star
is trying to crawl on all fours back to his apartment
where he’ll thread the film of himself through a VCR
and unravel. At the end of the day, don’t we all want
to unzip the animal suit and slosh drippingly to shore?
CONVENIENCE STORE
Quaint as a fax machine chugging
through lunch, the door chimes.
The fluorescents shiver and twitch,
like a button on a Nintendo controller
that’s depressed and, sticky, just stays there.
In strip plazas everywhere
a procession of factories throws up.
A can of Dr. Pepper reproduces itself
deep in the aluminum vein. In the back
there are skids and skids and
skids of this shit and for years
someone just pushes them around.
I am replaceable. If you just don’t care,
I think you know where your hands should be.
ACKNOWLEDGE YOUR SOURCES
It was a sky-draped year. We collected data like habits,
stockpiled information to have something to look into.
We were all about identity. Our primary theme was abstraction –
I know, right? With small words we touched it, and with big words
we brought it home. At a right-wing party’s office, a bomb explodes.
At a leftist rally, something something. It was the year Heidegger
walked among us and seemed especially deep. Like, at the bottom.
A little red light signalled some really important shit.
As a gift to individualism, I eschewed the individual.
As a gift to myself, I learned to hail a cab like a flower
bending towards the newly departed. We kissed strangers,
stayed up late, depended on discipline to save the day.
That summer Justin Bieber insinuated himself into your heart
like an undercover agent. The Insurgencies of Love topped all
the charts. It was a good year for wanting and my stocks did well.
But you thought I’d gone all art deco in the mind
and the four-roomed apartment we’d claimed as ours
was a little too … something for you.
You were raging for pastels. You wanted to move. So we spent
those eighteen months in a mid-sized European city whose transit
map, when crumpled, resembled a once-popular cognitive theory.
We tried to avoid cancer like the plague.
We wanted a sky the colour of a painting,
any painting, just something you don’t have to think about.
One Saturday God went out, left us $20 for pizza
and said He’d be back in the morning.
The point was that we could have done anything.
Friends stood before us like a porchlight that night
and we fought over who would ring the doorbell.
You began writing letters to Jennifer Aniston
but in a really, like, political way.
As in, between two people.
Dear, no one’s mind is right.
But then you left exactly how all the sad songs said you would
and I moved into a hotel the way a fastball chooses the mitt
it’s tossed to: the glove’s there and there’s throwing to be done.
For a while, the world was everything in my suitcase.
The morning rose up like a Parisian mob, made unreasonable
demands, then settled in for an afternoon coffee. Or café, as they say.
In terms of currently accepted physics I was pretty fucking sad.
There were birds. I made my heart into the shape of the moon,
or perhaps it was the other way around,
but you must have seen my longing in the sky
because you came back. God helps those He really likes,
as Benjamin Franklin used to say.
I was coming down with something.
Beset with symptoms, I gave up style with panache.
That is: with panache, I gave up style. I tied my tie up tight.
Is there a doctor in the house? Drumroll, punchline, drumfill.
But, seriously, is there?
Because I’m finding it hard to breathe.
PARTY
This party is awesome. It’s doped up. Def.
Dumb. I’m rocking this party like Sisyphus.
Broadly speaking, this party is an animal
that escapes from the zoo, has its photo captured
on the cover of several major newspapers
and is quietly euthanized a few weeks later.
Narrowly speaking, this party is as novel as a new tattoo.
Parliamentary democracy, journalistic responsibility
and this party: these are the pillars that hold society up
like a bandit. With its mickey of vodka and dayglo heart,
this party embodies seven fun facts about fun.
By a bed of roses this party lays me down. Its hand
at my belt. This party tugs gently.
PROVE TO ME YOU'RE NOT A ROBOT
People are so boring, though I shouldn’t say so.
The great sea in their eyes, the keel and transom of them.
It wouldn’t be fair to be all, No, you’re a ship in the night,
but you get the drift. The flash and yearn of an Old Navy ad
with the look of the smell of a beach, but without an ocean
of dead things. No living things either, just the tranquil
Photoshop glow of Fun, a vigorous set of pearly whites,
a zombie-like satisfaction dressed in a laboriously starched collar
as if what counts for brains around here is a well-stitched button-up.
I confess to a sense of others as stimulus.
But, really, let’s say I follow the laws of my various wants,
the here, the now, ache of boredom like a rotten tooth …
testimony of the self as fuzzy and charming as a three-gin glow.
But this is all just pop solipsism. I know you’re there. I just don’t care.
Your overbite, your participation in assorted sample sizes.
Like I said: there’s a great yawning gap, a heavy yawn.
There is yawning going on.
I’m thinking of what your inner life means to me:
faint scuttle below the deck, a quick hitch untied. I’m off.
SONG OF THE THINGS I'VE DONE
In this, the International Year of Wealth Management,
I had a fever about to break like a promise.
I spent my money wisely. The banks shivered, snapped,
spent a few months in a cast and emerged pale and new.
I insisted on actual rain in the claymation video.
I lingered in the committee room. When singing was needed,
I sung. I wrote a book on the new slang –
summary: the rigging’s faulty, the lighting all wrong.
Night squeezed my shoulder and said,
Good shift, son. I looked up at the stars, gathered them in
like a shepherd gathers his flock before dinner.
I spent my money wisely. I ate well.
STAGE DIRECTIONS: EXEUNT, WITH FLOURISH
There’s the bullet and then the bullet
hole, the victim and the school play’s
death scene. There’s th
e love poem
and then there’s licking yourself clean.
Your couplet of visible ribs.
The brass charms that rattle around
your chest’s hollow crib.
A rust-flecked reservoir, filling.
IL MIGLIOR FABIO
If you are what you eat then I
am the ass of a high school cheerleader,
high on boredom, behind the bleachers
after school. I am listening to robot rock at dawn
in a Ferrari made of glass. My body is hairless,
strong as OxyContin. I sweat oxytocin.
I gather the wind in my pipe and puff, puff.
I will not pass. I transpose your love song
from C-major to apathetic. The secret fifth chamber
of my heart weeps for your scoliosis,
but style does as style is, so I’ll be cruising
the night with my gilded twelve-foot dick.
From my smithy I’ll craft you a velvet half-hour.
I hope you catch my drift, emphasis lick.
ROY HALLADAY
‘It’s not fair.’
– Aubrey Huff
Take life, whatever it is, one broken
spoke at a time. Rosy-fingered
appendectomy, rusty five-day dawn.
Look, we do what we can.
By we, I mean fans.
I mean the Organization.
I mean the fingers
required to throw a cutter.
Men want to be you –
though that’s not the point,
men want to be everything –
but have you ever tried on a new pair of jeans
and thought: I want this close to me?
By you I mean: 8.0 IP 5 H 2 R 1 ER 3 BB 4 SO.
If something truly loves you