dragging their heart like a soft broom through leaves ...
and they go on hurting ... like the lit windows
of a dollhouse in winter ...
with a too-big horse outside ...
The ex-girlfriends are back
but in a romantically ambiguous way ...
The ex-girlfriends are back and have transcended
the patriarchal limitations of romance ...
unlike the new girlfriends ...
still handcuffed to monogamy ...
slowly writhing ...
with their naughty ... post-heterosexual fatalism
The ex-girlfriends are back
with their unfounded Soviet aspirations ...
and anti-hegemonic arts initiatives ...
draped over a piano on the edge of the thicket
playing the lonely upper hand of chopsticks ...
in their vague tropical displeasure ...
The ex-girlfriends are back ...
and the post-girlfriends ...
and the ‘let’s not put a label on this’ girlfriends ...
all of them at the same time, walking out through
a beaded curtain of water ...
like too much Persephone and not enough underworld ...
wearing nothing but an Arts degree ...
and the soft blowtorch of their eyes ....
You can feel their judgements come down upon you
like too-heavy butterflies ...
but there’s nothing you can do about it!
and worst of all
they don’t even want anything ...
they’re just standing there ... performing many
enigmatic life blinks
re-mentioning Deleuze and Guattari
in loneliness and natural lighting
The ex-girlfriends are back
with their sanity pangs
and various life fatigues ...
like a stuffed-crocodile exhibit
still begging for death relevance
in the glass case of your heart
But you are the museum director now!
Walking talent on a stiff gold leash
& there’s nothing anyone can do about it!
The ex-girlfriends are back
like the liquidation sale of an imported rug megastore
that’s been liquidating for centuries ...
getting rich off all that ... tasselled goodbye money
as they grind your face yet again into
the hand-knotted ...
semi-Persian wool blend ... of their hearts
begging once more for closure.
The ex-girlfriends are back
with their pre-distressed sadnesses
and their ... talent
unlike yourself
who is both undistressed and talent-free!
Yet somehow still above them all
like the grand arbiter of happiness
laughing in your ermine neck ruff
as you push them one by one down
the waxed fuck-off chute
of their bad erotic failures
PLANET OF THE APES
If there is a designated point at which return
becomes of no return, so far is how far
I am always beyond it.
We sit in the rain of your hangover
and I tell you the story about my dead aunt
who spent her sixteenth year digging a giant hole
in the field behind her house and never said why.
Anna I love you.
I love you in the jittering shade of a historic windmill.
I love you standing in the water wearing the river
like an invisible pair of shoes. I love you here
at the beginning of your only life and almost gone
getting high on your porch, light drifting between us
like ghost sequins.
I’ve always never felt this way about anyone
but the way in which I’ve never felt about you
is a way of never feeling so new it’s somehow old
like a cave painting of a fax machine
or falling asleep in the attic of a spaceship.
You make me want to think of you in a sentence with me in it.
You make me want to find a collapsed mineshaft
I can call your name in while searching for you.
You make me want to tell you what you make me want
but what can I even say to you—riding a desk chair
through the afternoon like a patron saint
of remaindered office furniture.
I don’t know what it means
to walk each night into a field alone
and dig, until you are standing in a hole so deep
you cannot be seen above ground.
I don’t know what it means to fall asleep on your porch
and wake with the illustrated guide to Planet of the Apes open in my hands.
I don’t know what it means to wake each morning and love you
and say nothing, as if nothing
were honesty’s default, or maybe just a way
for me to avoid the stupid things I need to tell you like
looking at you is like looking at a beautiful person far away
through a telescope that makes you seem the size you almost are
which is something I mean but don’t understand
like the new hieroglyphics of songbirds
or how the world in which I’m saying this to you
is already receding
that looking at you is like looking
backwards out the window of a slow-moving helicopter
into the nineteenth-century cornfield of your face
which my historical inaccuracy
has suddenly emptied of birds.
You make my life feel the size of itself.
You make my life a burning craft
on some distant and unintended hillside.
Anna you are the pale green arm
of the Statue of Liberty
reaching up through miles of sand
LOST SCROLLS
After Mark Leidner
Like a passive aggressive gun that fires ...... nothing instead of bullets
Or Nostradamus predicting the invention of the Capri pant ...
Like a primeval tornado collecting nothing but air ...
Like accidentally wishing on a satellite and getting women’s golf instead of happiness ...
Like your dad threatening to turn the planet around and keep driving ...
Like throwing your wedding bouquet backwards into a discount sporting goods store ...
Like substituting inspirational quotes for inspirational estimates ...
or dawn through a magnifying glass
Like slowly fingering your girlfriend to Bohemian Rhapsody ...
It should be like being buried in a denim-lined coffin ......
But it’s like a rose in an earthquake ...
It should be a bouquet of lilacs shackled to your ankle ....
But it’s black milk pouring out of the fountain ................
It’s like freezing containers of vomit to reheat and pour down the toilet ...
or animal activists throwing red paint at deer to save time in the long run ...
It’s like a calculator for hippies where the only button is ‘infinity man’ ...
or drinking Gatorade in your wedding dress
It’s like a garden salad thrown into the blades of a helicopter
It’s like something that cannot be said but must be said ... and in being said
slows the rapid expansion ... of the prison-industrial complex ...
It’s like your family commissioning a shrugging angel headstone ...
It should be like tits at dawn ...
or a million trees in winter ...
But it’s like setting the planet on fire ... by letting your kite fly too close to the sun
It’s like saving millions on camouflage gear by getting North Korea to invest in smart-casual trees ...
It’s like being so committed to living each day as if it were your last, you spend each afternoon having a cerebral hemorrhage in a rest home ...
Your neighbourhood is involved in a gang war and you are trying to stay neutral by wearing white, and your neighbour is stabbing you repeatedly in the chest whispering ‘White is not a colour, it’s a shade ...’
It’s summer on the Rio Grande and 10,000 bees fly towards you in the shape of your father and say .... ‘What do you mean you’re quitting baseball?’ ...
It’s like falling in love for the first time for the last time ...
or your dead wife returning to you in the body of a convicted paedophile ...
It’s like wishing on a star so distant the wish isn’t granted until you wake up on your forty-seventh birthday with cornrows ... and a set of chatter rings ...
It’s like a tornado in a harmonica shop, or a suicide note burned into a cornfield ...
It’s like using a mnemonic device based on complex chemical structures to remember your mother’s name ...
It should be like a film adaptation of the Home Alone novelisations ...
But it’s like writing the word hunger in gravy ...
It should be like fucking in a casket ...
But it’s sunlight falling on castle stones ....
It’s like punching someone in the face and saying ‘just kidding’ ...
or trying to find your way out a door museum ...
It’s the black wind through the maples, and the difficulty of getting tenure ...
It’s like loading a catapult with a catapult and catapulting it into irony ...
or a baby singing itself to sleep ...
It’s like a post-apocalyptic petting zoo, with cages full of old fur coats ...
It’s like the bonus level on Tekken where you punch a man’s face so hard
he becomes the evil version of himself ...
but there’s no such thing ... as punching a man’s face so hard
he becomes the evil version of himself ...
there’s no such thing as the evil version of anything ...
It’s like a movie where everything started out ... fine
and continued to be ... fine
until at the end of the movie it turned out everything had been ... fine all along
That’s what love is like ...
It’s like firing a gun into a time machine and accidentally hitting Hitler ...
It’s like masturbating to a documentary on South African mines and ejaculating real diamonds ...
It’s like wanting something so bad you would die to have it ...
but you do have it and nobody is asking you to die ...
Not the civil war re-enactors loading their muskets in the field behind the supermarket parking lot ...
Not the man on the bus, with the Ted Bundy biography
Not even the entire American military complex ...
Every night you come over and we watch some film ...
about people sprinting through the corridors of an abandoned space station ...
or
being stabbed to death ... in the glittering wetlands of Louisiana ...
and every night nobody comes to our house ...
and murders us in our sleep ...
LOVE COMES BACK
Like your father,
twenty years later with the packet of cigarettes he went out for
Like Monday but this is the nineteenth century
& you’re a monied aristocrat with no conception of the working week
Like a haunted board game
pried from the rubble of an archaeological dig site
You roll the dice & bats come flooding out your heart
like molten grappling hooks
your resolve weakening ...
like the cord of an antique disco ball ...
Love like the recurring decimal of some huge, indivisible number
or a well thrown boomerang
coming to rest in the soft curve of your hand
Love comes back ...
like a murderer returning to the scene of the crime ...
or not returning ...
yet still the crime remains ...
like love ...
observed or unobserved ...
written in blood on the walls of some ancient civilisation
in an idiom so old
we have no contemporary vernacular equivalent
Love like Windows 95
The greatest, most user-friendly Windows of them all
Those four little panes of light
Like the stained glass of an ancient church
vibrating in the sunlit rubble
of the twentieth century
Your face comes floating up in my crystal ball ....
The lights come on at the bottom of the ocean
& here we are alone again ...
Late November
we ride the black escalator of the mountain
& emerge into the altitude of our last year
The rabbit in the grass gives us something wild to aim for
It twists into spring like a living bell
I have to be here always telling you that
no matter how far I travel beyond you
love will stay tethered
like an evil kite I want to always reel back in
As if we could just turn and wade back
through the ghost of some ancient season
or wake each morning in the heat of a vanished life
Love comes back
from where it’s never gone ... It was here the whole time
like a genetic anomaly waiting to reveal itself
Like spring at the museum, after centuries of silence
Grecian urns sprouting new leaves ...
Love like a hand from the grave
trembling up into the sunlight of the credit sequence
the names of the dead
pouring down the screen
like cool spring rain
THE DAD JOKE IS OVER
sometimes when a great civilisation is too prosperous for too long
when a great civilisation marked by rapid periods of economic growth
and decline
expands beyond its own conceptual limits
& ventures into the uncharted space beyond what is ...... funny
sometimes, when there exists too much of a good thing
and
the market is oversaturated with cringing
and
years of puns have blighted the emotional landscape
a great empire can fall
& laughter grow up from the ruins
sometimes there are dad jokes, and they can’t take the heat
wandering from set-up to set-up, in their glistening barbecue aprons
their punchlines wither and dissolve, in the shimmering wetlands of
contemporary stand-up
like snowflakes upon the grill, leaving only .......... questions
like how many women does it take to change a joke format???
or
knock knock
....
....
....
& nobody answers
but the black wind of fate
The time of the dad joke is over, and things are getting ......... al fresco
their punchlines converted into anecdotes, and refurbished with a Tuscan feature wall
It’s the time of the mother joke & you wake to find a deer carcass in the garden
nothing on the wind .............................................. by Elizabeth Arden
Sometimes you wake up in the cold light of a new era
with the unerring certainty that your life’s work is just for ....... sham
&
nbsp; like ........ what do you get when you cross a joke and a poem?
or if a punchline falls in the forest, and no one is around to hear it
..................................... is it time to stop telling jokes in the forest?
I like to commit the sympathetic error of meaning all my jokes
but still ........................ I do not think that poetry should be saved
it should be like an attic in sunlight, with the bats scrubbed out
like you can buy this book & then set fire to it ............... for free
The time of the mother joke is upon us and you look exactly like Scarlett Johansson
you never looked like Scarlett Johansson before but here ...... in the time of the mom joke you do
you walk deeper and deeper into the setup, with your ........ vague celebrity
impressionism
you can sense a punchline, and it’s getting closer ...........................
When I was young, my mother couldn’t afford brand-name jokes
All we had to laugh at was ................ the unceasing bitterness of life
Even now, I am compelled to laugh in the face of heartbreak
but when a witticism is made ..................................................
The mother joke is here, and the punchline is
................................................................................... there is no punchline
it’s gone beyond the format of a joke, and is in your blood
everything is wrong, but you can’t stop laughing
ancient punishments repeating themselves
like nunchucks on a nursery frieze
The mother joke is here, and there is no punchline
this is a poem, not a joke, and the only way out is death
You stare and stare at your vast superfluity of life
it stretches out beyond itself, like too many razors on a kite tail
EVERYTHING IS WRONG
Everything is wrong, I really mean it Isobel
Everything is wrong and love is wrong
I know you believe me
I know you believe me because I know you know it too
This life is changing me already
Running in the empty field behind the salmon hatchery
I think about you
I think about you and the black star of loneliness
Burning me alive