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Whatever You May Have Said Before
Now say whatever you want:
I flex my esophagus.
We thought our ears were sonnets.
Be aware that saying one of these (or something else entirely,
e.g. "I kissed a man in his sleep")
probably won't make you famous,
but it might get you out of going
to a really awful party.
Here's one called hermeneutics.
And here's one wherein the sky is falling
to the vanishing point
beyond the purple mountain.
"Yuck," says the Irish ancestor. "Crap," say the Japanese.
"Distance is an illusion," someone says distractedly,
"but the space between my teeth is real."
Once I lifted my eyes to the moon
and saw 14 escapees having high-wire tea.
"Hooray, hooray," I often say in self-defense.
"Abracadabra, mechanical rabbit."
Also, "Rechargeable fang."
The punchline in a poem is always death.
The fiery curtain.
The cat and the cow.
In the same way, the path through the forest is riddled with forest.
If you're happy and you know it...
If your face turns fallow in the early morning light.
Another firecracker, motherfucker.
With pleasure.
With pleasure and pressure and the proper implements
your chest opens sadly on the set of a sitcom
where your parents are waiting
and it seems you've let them down again.
"How could you," says the director.
"Well...," you begin, but you haven't got a clue.
Send in the owls, they'll know what to do.
Who?
The wiseacres, that's who.
Ask, "What shall I do," into a canyon
and hear it echoed by the canyon.
But ask the same thing into a black hole
and hear nothing but theory.
Mention the girl is lovely and luck may follow,
but say her brain is milk
and find yourself empty.
Say whatever you want,
but always say it with conviction
and connected in waves to the musculature of swans.
The earth is vanishing.
America is vanishing.
A hundred years ago the free spirit was only just forming.
Now it's a lung full of razor sharp seeds.
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In the Gloaming
I was standing I was standing up.
I was picking my way through a puddle of awk!
I was well aware of the uneaten green beans
and they were well aware of my well-meaning intentions.
My mission: To save the most the best-dressed for dessert,
to assert myself in the gloaming, while wondering about gloaming
and looking it up and feeling all the while tangential.
I can barely see in this light
the new puppy named Daisy.
I'm not much in the way of understanding
the things I do or why that loaf of bread and not
this one with the sunflower seeds overwhelming.
Slip me the truth in a worn out roller coaster.
Give me a sound I can make with one cricket.
I've come to fix the sink. I've been freaking over a flower.
I thought my head was half its age.
The tide washes in/ washes out.
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