Poem In Which Whitney Houston Engages In Modal Logic

It is possible that my five octave vocal range
causes precipitation in the Amazon basin.

It is necessary that I dance with somebody.
It is possible that The Bodyguard causes

fits of intense emotion, tears, et cetera,
among people whom I will never meet

vis a vis my masterful use of temporal logic,
i.e., always, always, always, always.

This is also known as tense logic.
My interaction axioms have been known to cause

sudden and terrifying clarity, even when
hastily sketched out on a soggy napkin.

Our Biggest Fan

All you wanted was a comfy chair.
Look what you got.
Maniacal kittens clawing through the balloons,
your big-ass and terrible novel.
Sometimes it's like you're the only one
without a plastic bag over your head
but instead of a plastic bag
it's a freezer. Don't know
about you but I remember
the PSAs from my youth
telling me not to play in empty
and abandoned refrigerators
and now, twenty years later,
I'm pissed because I've carried that
shit advice around with me for twenty years
and never once have I even seen
an abandoned refrigerator
though if I did I'd probably
crawl inside. Or maybe not.
Maybe I'd just keep walking,
thinking of what I've been
thinking about for over twenty years,
kittens, brave futility,
balloony sunshine in the swaying begonias,
Death gliding by in his speedboat
and cheering us on through the spray.

On Hiatus

Will be back soon.

Poem In Which We Trash the Hobbyhorse

Metaphysics in a plate of pasta.
Is a plate of pasta.

Same difference.
Why do you love me.

That cute little dog hopes you die.
You'll never understand.

That parakeet hates you too.
A star winks out.

No biggie.
No dark matter.

Metaphysical meatball.
The holiest mountain.

Soon you'll be gone.
I am frightened.

What will replace us.
The deadliest ninjas in the world.

Tantalus Is a Whiner

All day the fruits rained down upon us,
peaches and plums, pears, you name it.
Who knew the orchard
was a locus of unrelenting blows?
We thought were going for fresh oranges
now we're all painkillers and syringes.
Pale light filters through the windows,
linoleum squeaks and cable TV.
IV bags hang from their poles
like misshapen pieces of fruit,
which sends us into another fit of wailing,
which summons the nurse to our side
and his crinkly green eyes are kind
as leans over us and ushers in oblivion.

Even Now, Very Now

It looks like we're just sitting there,
not touching, not holding
hands or cats
or exclaiming over wedding photos
or making a hearty soup
as snow starts to fall
over the trash cans lining the alley
or heartbroken and confused,
losing friends,
making tea, catching a cold,
gripped by sickness, feverish,
missing someone with the pain
of a bandsaw buzzing through your leg,
but we're not, we're there
and really busy with the secret business
of fancy boots, the heart,
which is also sometimes called death.

Tiny Circling Planes

Those children are bone and wind.
The sound of displacement:
a slow hiss, barely a rattle.
The earth revolves, spins,
I've got laundry to do
and tiny, eel-like fish
displace the river with a slow shush,
the children blow noiselessly away.

Repatriated Hope

Red stockings caught in a window,
streets totally empty this time of night.
Who is that, coughing in the dark?

No, The Other Way Around

There's nothing you can't
not do about it,
forever, forever
being just one of the things
beyond our grasp.
So have a cup of tea, huh,
stare the sidewalk down.
Rain collects
in the branches of a leaning oak,
waiting for the right moment.
Any day now.
Not yet.
In the meantime,
deal with the tight coil
of fire snaking
across the plains,
the way the sky looks
like some loaded metaphor
or nothing at all.

How These Things Usually Go

No need to mourn the hawk
on the ground.
It was dying.
Now it's dead.
Only when we look
for someone to
point the way
do we realize
it's time to go home.

To a Hawk Dying on the Ground

Your cracked beak opens a little
and your nickel-sized eye
seizes on something past me.

Soon-to-be-dead-bird,
I wish I'd known you
in your better, sky-filled days.

Cracked pavement, I know you
well enough to know you
won't welcome the dying bird

but you too will be just as calm
as it when in the future
windy fire races over you.

Our Best Years

It took many years of study, a blown tire,
a fire, a flower, several pitchers of beer,
foreign language dictionaries, a ferry,
but finally we are over our various fears
and roses and shifting conceptions of beauty
that previously sent us reeling off in fits
of pants-less panic. Now we're safely inside

our own skulls, building and tending small fires,
not seeing the faces of our old loves in the moon
or hearing the absolute voice of death
whip through the scree. Think about what
you've done but already it's past, passing,
you're much older, tired, sitting in a chair
recalling a talking taxi that once saved the day.

Ten Trillion

The interview with the killing machine
didn't go too well.
It didn't go all that poorly, either.
It kept talking about poppy fields,
sunsets, gnashing gears.
There was a lot I didn't catch
but it didn't go too poorly
considering how in the end
there weren't any hard feelings
and we sat and watched
bubbles and feathers drift from the sky
into the river and then the churning sea.

Poem In Which We Tell A Harrowing Tale

We didn't realize just how screwed we were
until we ran out of hot dogs.
Orange juice? Ugh, forget it,
we were too busy digging
at our bug bites, watching the ticker tape
spell out our ruin in bright lights.
Long story short, we roasted Carl on a spit
and wept for the easy leveling of our humanity
then we went to the beach
where friendly dolphins wiped away our tears.

Impending Weather

It's the tiny bugs
that make the cauliflower
taste weird.
They're so gray and little
tracing routes
through the tight white bunches.
This is quickly
growing unendurable.

The Rest of the Year

A mouse can squeeze
through a hole the width
of a pencil.
How tiny we are with hope,
exiting one dark room
and entering another.

Flood of '86

The scary rainstorm swept everything away,
the barn, the fencing, the cattle,
the toy boats we swore by as kids
and left fish caught in the trees.
Your heart beat like a rabbit's
when I held you in the attic.
We watched the sky which was like
watching a black wall be loud.
The plains were plains still
but shifted on us as we sipped gin.
We weren't thinking then about our great
native birds and how strange it was going
to be not hearing them for a long time.

No Help Necessary

Around us noises spring up
and take leaf,
growing through the fencing.
What kind of noises?
Snapping, sure.
Cracking and breaking, naturally.
We've gone far enough.
Our faces are full of hate.

Early Thursday Morning

Look at this column

of big light

thick in the dark.

It fills us

with something.

Relief, perhaps,

racing into sky.

Dread or dream of moths

cluttering the source.

Melancholy Dreams of the Oligarchy

It hasn't been a good year.
My eye is getting worse, I think.
The sky is too blue.
I had a dream in which
I was talking to a crowd
on the deck of a ship.
They were cheering with complete abandon.
Love filled the air,
a gentle roaring,
it felt really nice.
That was a nice dream,
much better than the dream
in which I pushed
my wife down a flight of stairs.
Her red dress a brief flash,
then rippling as it went down, down.
This hasn't been a good year.
The sky is too blue.
There appears to be a failure of meaning.
"Vertiginous" is a word
that springs to mind
but I don't know why.
The too-dark night
rings and rings and rings.

The President Responds

On the topic of the sky I am of two minds. Let me see those numbers again. Similarly I'm divided on the practice of eating monkeys. Nutritious to be sure, I always feel strong like a bull after eating a monkey! Vroom and whoosh, who needs your sissy numbers! But also how strange to consume something that is so like yourself. I feel nearly sad as I consider a monkey's foot, how eerily small and delicate it seems in my own wrinkled hands, which carry it to my mouth.

The President's Morning Report

Environmental groups are protesting your activities. Namely your habit of consumption which produces several different forms of waste on a daily basis. Here is your periscope.

They hoist many colorful and disparaging signs; there is frequent wordplay among their signs and their rhythmic chanting, which is actually kind of catchy. There are puns on your surname. Anger runs perceptibly below the surface.

Can you believe that somewhere someone waits on line in a small bakery to buy a baguette? Such moments of quaint peace are indeed hard to imagine and I offer it to you in the spirit of condolence.

Also, drug wars continue to rage on your lawn. The participants and factions in the drug wars carry no signs, which is how we have come to recognize them. We're very good at recognizing those who do not carry large, colorful signs. Look, a cardinal perches on your white windowsill full of light.

At first we thought they were engaged in the search for knowledge, but these people, the ones who wish to differentiate significance and cause and effect relationships and to carefully delineate thought and higher brain functions, are easily recognized by their countenance, which is akin to that of weary pilgrims, and, like pilgrims, they have the habit of dropping senseless in the street.

They are unaware of the orange sawhorses we have erected.

My Greatest Fear

My greatest fear doesn't have
anything to do with spiders.

Here's a dark belt of booze.
Your greatest fear doesn't have

anything to do with me or mine
though I see it trace against

the night sky like an accident.
Pumpkins ripen on the vine,

the slide full of silver rain.
Someday we will be restored.

What Are You Waiting For

There are the tiny blue lines
I'm going to draw
all over your face.
This is a paper cup.
Deep breaths, deep breaths.
These are the implements
with which we make lovely compositions.
My life has been full
of full grown men weeping.
A dog falls over,
a terrible mess.
Your life is full
of disappointments, clearly.
It is my concern not
that the governing body doesn't know
what it's doing but that it doesn't care.
It is the difference
between the leaf
and the shadow of the leaf.
Dread gathers in the corners of rooms,
there's a need
for a mop.
Today I saw a bee buried in a flower.
The air was beautiful.
This is a nail, a paper cup,
a bird flying from the window.

Confessional School

It is true that I am often afraid.
The chief engineer says everything is just fine,
the walls are still sturdy.
The engine is running smoothly.
There is no knocking sound,
not coming from within.
The dictionary is hollow
and there hides a key.
The walls are smooth,
there are no holes or gouges.
I'm afraid all our dreams are meaningless.
There is a no-knocking not coming from within.
It is true that I am often afraid.
I do not want to drown. The sky
looks like rain but there is no smell of rain.
Sign this into legislation, there is no smell of rain
and I do not want to die. It is all right
that the engine is running smoothly,
the chief engineer said so.
Where did those launch codes go.
The chief engineer said the sky looks like rain.
How can't anyone not hear that.
I don't trust him,
I think he may drink too much.
Even now he walks over to the engine,
smoothly running.
Is he drunk.
Is this the moment when everything will change.
Sign this into law, the walls are sturdy
and things are running smoothly
and it is true that often I am afraid.
Is this the moment when everything will change.

My Mistake

The sun comes up over the alley.
You've got a face like
a broken bottle.
Would you like
some pizza and pop?
We can talk about Lorca
and butterflies,
sure, about how
in our youth
we used to crash through
tall dry grasses,
tiny bugs sticking to our shorts,
how we'd never have guessed
loss to be so indelible.
You've got a heart
like a bottle of tar.
Slow bubbles rise.
Probably it's real flammable.
Probably you've gotta go,
there's someone waiting at home,
a girl dancing in her socks.

An Open Love Letter

I love your unfortunate carpet bombing,
your inadvertent scorched earth policy.
You're orbiting some unknown star,
growing terrible plants
with your rays through no real
fault of your own. I hope
that someday you will lend me
your formidable incompetence
so that I too may turn
through dusty skulls with grace
and inexplicably be happy in the sun.