our good buddies the firebugs
there’s a woman who breathes walgreens with placebo susurrations (dot dot dash)
a MileCloak (period)
a garnish of gravy dumb-waitering (comma slash) eternity
or just specks (caps) of instances which cost less than movie projectors
so (implied comma) it started out that the time involved in waiting spent useless jacarandas
like (left-handed quotation mark) (nested quotation mark) chocolate-dipped (nested quotation mark) leaves (right-handed quotation mark)
only more insolent (apostrophe of the mind) and less concaving to the moment
grief laughed
a mordant cornflake (caret) whispered
“i think i think i think i can think…” (no quotes) (no ellipses)
guess
that’ll serve a mis-pronounced tulip of
dropped sedulity (humpback whale)
commandeering (just listen) the jeep-hug (guillemet) of cheap kindness (guillemet)
blissed into trashed motors of fruition
(period period) (serious period) (period silly backslash period)
holidays ran on her sighs
a woman who runs out of (perfumed vacuum-cleaner dust) cadillac tears
a woman who screams (exclamation points) punches to life
a who-once-where (singled out question mark) of a woman
and (gullwing) there’s gravy in the rain
(bracket) and there’s (bracket) genius in an over-the-ocean guess
plus a tad (pilcrow) (at sign)
minus a dawn’s early light (registered trade mark)
steeply on impulse driven (proper tidings) sane
there (cue holiday music) once was a diamond who sold a (bite me) century to a television
pot-holing (craven comma) about
around (interpunct) or (interpunct) all (interpunct) that’s over then
now so there’s this guy (loosely based on nobody) under-coated with reasonableness
his hat’s indispensable to current shifts in insolvency (generic currency symbol)
at least (bullet backslash asterisk) in half-courtings
(underscore) (period) eventual drawings raffled out in promissory notes (capital letter)
a lady (dagger) who (inverted exclamation point) guns down sudafed
gallant (colon) stridings (comma) towards bad timing
half (piece of cake) a lot
(semicolon) more (period)
it’s a (1,2,3) tie
but nobody’s running
the.sound.of.helicopter.blades.whirring.spindling.the.night.with.craniumdrumming.flaps
the hunch is that I will be a robotic moan issuing from the hole left after the world has left
and here we’re also left with bank statements pollarding the dullness of being happy
to grow and reinvest and take stock
and of course
endure
like being a victim of a stickup at a boxing match
but there is only a mulish envy left
at the bend in every untraceable road you choose
or just the usual circumstantial problems
of being left out too long
away
from stormy weather and other speculations about the togetherness of
being left torn all apart
because if it weren’t for the lasting impression made by
casual celebrities
and jackhammered daisies before sunrise
tears would seem the most antediluvian of solutions
but in the caress of leftover thoughts
we only think of other people when it’s convenient
convenience being merely a harbinger of impatience
while
like fireflies stamped out by sun
our tolerance for others dwindles
and we paste dollar bills on the inside of book jackets
a crocus falls from a buttonhole
a sleepy gumdrop decides the fate of the day
as the banks of night take deposits of love and love’s failures
evidence grows like foxtails between the pastures of purgatory
and apartment 2A
we sleep and borrow
and purge the pith from what it is
we are left saying out loud
a gull dips lavishly into the sky’s grape jelly
hitler’s ghost gets drunk on fox news
and we
with a sinister slurred satisfaction
sing bogus slogans
and put off decisions
in an imitation of happiness
an attempt to fend off the pettiness of boredom
while sleeping through malachite afternoons
wearing noise-proof headphones
bleating white noise and stock quotes
into our unlistening ears
Nobody’s ever heard of my first love.
Her name was
unimportant.
Things to be known about
her
were lost in the shambles of car-driven afternoons.
Kind was kind of the course we drove,
but it was more towards shifty and dangerous,
which was good
except that we promised guilt along with spelling feints,
and letters don’t always add up to chicanery or other desperate greedy swallows.
Nobody knew me.
It was before I mattered.
A dossier was kept.
A pool was kept free of algae and mosquitoes.
Carpet was lawn:
something to fall on.
Feel free to expostulate.
There’s always room for one more t-shirt vendor.
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