PBS

Fucking Lemurs.
Got to me again.
The plaintive calls of the mother ringtail,
Unanswerable.
The photographers capturing it all for me
Follow their prime directive
And do nothing.

And I think this must be what God's like,
Back in the trees, observing.
Crying as the baby lemurs fall to their deaths.
Afraid to intervene.
This makes sense to me,
And if I believed,
I'd hate him for it.
 
 

Procession

One-by-one the chalk outlines peel themselves from the frozen ground,
head west. As they walk they call to one another snapping
crisp hellos. Where they meet, they clasp hands, continue on,
a parade of poorly cut paper dolls rippling in the moonlight
down the black back-roads until dawn . . .

when the birds fall on them, easily biting through the crude
cartoon symbolism. They march even as they unravel.
The grateful birds slurp them up like gummi worms,
lining nests with the remains.

Darwin's Children

gazelles with bad attitudes
swagger across the grasslands
scorning their parent's flashier gymnastics
stronger     faster
too cool to prove it
they slip away to lounge around the pool

the lions are delighted

Simcity USA

     for Donna Haraway

above whom your machine moon rains
wine upon the crowd

her fishhook eyes

while dawn's bright blade nicks down your
street's slick shoulders

her flickering neon lips

before your storefront novocaine smiles

her sly slow spiral into pierced navel

your cyborg lovers glide with shockwave after
wedded to nature by

her fine fluorescent laughter

 
 
The Shadows, Themselves

the cool, quick, looks between leaves
the geometric couplings
the whimsy of magnolia breezes
the riot of whispers

schools of misshapen piranha
devouring themselves
draped in clouds of black blood
the shouts of the midday sun

the faint outline of a body
spread-eagled and impossible on the sidewalk
a sly cartoon peaking up her skirt
masks, threats, rumors

the shadows, themselves, know nothing of these
the shadows joke, "What's my motivation?"
 
 

Two-Penny Theophany

If God had had Legos,
Adam could have kept his rib.
And God's Mom would forever
have been sucking up
stray bits of creation in the vacuum.
I thought I told you to clean your room
she'd say. Ah, Mom -
that was going to be the cornerstone
in the Foundation of Reason!
 
 
 
Finding the Right Words

Such an ugly word to go out with,
You, who so loved words.
You should be giggled to death,
Strangled & mangled
By rogue dangling participles,
Or lovingly smothered
In a scandalous fromage à trois
(A cheesy death, but continental).
Hell, even "myocardial infarction"
Brings a certain sing-song quality to the killing.
But "metastasize" -
It smacks of material science.
Sounds more like the slow failure of plastics
Than the inconsolable sobbing of your survivors.
 
 

Self Portrait in D Minor

I am so tired, it would actually require
more energy to stop my heart than I am currently
capable of. Death, you understand, is
too much to expect of me today. Astronauts
caught in the gravity well of my ennui could
travel to distant galaxies and never age a day,
such is the dragging of time in my presence.

I am the flypaper of moments.