Showed Up On Time, No Problem
We hired a weird guy recently. He got the job,
said he’d start on Saturday, showed up on time, no problem.
Then, immediately: he kept getting up from his desk
to go on long walks. His job was to flip
the pancakes on the hot grill.
So he caused a bunch of fires.
He’d go out for his long walks, the pancakes would burn,
actually go up in flames, combust,
because they have these chemicals in the batter
that make the pancakes stay hot longer if you cook em right
but that also make the pancakes explode if you let them
burn to a crisp, like burn til they’re totally black.
So I said “hey don’t go on your walks” and he said “If I don’t
go on my walks, I’ll have no choice but to kill you.”
I called his bluff on that one and said “don’t go on any walks,
goddammit!” So he fumed at his grill for a while. Then he flipped
a couple of pancakes and found out that he liked doing it.
“Hey! I like doing this!” He screamed. And he kept screaming
“I like doing this!” over and over
until it started to freak our customers out
and only then did I really have to fire him.
Ambitious Poem
Day 1: light. Day 2: motion. Day 3: information, and as a byproduct, creatures.
Day one trillion six hundred fifty-eight billion one hundred ninety-four million: threaded needles inserted into human skin with intent to repair wounds.
Day about a half a million days after that: a conference rents out the Family Life Insurance building’s third floor for a day so that free people from around the region with $100 to spare can attend talks on “The Business of Art.”
Topics we’ll cover: accounting/QuickBooks training, intellectual property/copyright, developing legal contracts, the use of digital/social media, wellness/health, the video gaming industry, public speaking, the use of artificial intelligence, grant writing, and telling your story.
This afternoon: to avoid “the problematic and burdened word ‘soul’” I translate your assumption into: “With whole-life insurance you are covered based on a ‘snapshot’ of your health at the moment you took out the policy. Whatever happens after then doesn’t matter.”
This evening: to avoid “the problematic and burdened word ‘snapshot’” I translate your assumption into: “Plans for installing a joint nuclear power plant on the moon’s surface within the next decade are being considered by Russian and Chinese officials…”
Tomorrow: to avoid being branded “a witch hiding in the modern world” and condemned to torture as such, “I left my home town when I was 21. Both my parents were dead and I had no other close relatives.”
This Old Lumberjack
Gargling Clorox under a sunlamp
Am I going to die?
No, you won't die
You are mildly sick
Get answers, not search results
I have a million dollar insurance claim
Because the carriers plug in their phones
There are 200 a year that explode
Answers, not search results
Haunted waltzes
I hope I’m well enough to attend
Triple-washed non-GMO spring mix
It’s nice to feel superior
Bring your hot girlfriend to work day
Ride the coattails of her wealth
Legally you don’t have to
You can’t help but have garlic again
Mess your face up with bitter tears
But most places won’t hire you
Legally you don’t have to
Why did God give this old lumberjack a memory?
Came to the neighborhood when it was just new
Needle-binding a pair of socks
The bar was closed on Sunday morning
When the air is chilly and the sun is warm
(That’s my next poem
“I still remember the bed of thistles,” I’ll say
Collect a few of me everyday)
I kinda envy an ignobility
The fading splendor of the 12 point buck
The operator under our half of the bridge
The realm of hungry ghosts
Haunted waltzes
I hope I’m well enough to attend
Little Sunshine’s Holiday
My children did you ever watch a sunrise? no?
I’ve seen one hundred and seventy three
Of a little sunshine’s holiday
And their jobs were called fooling around
Suddenly took themselves to bed
Bed sudden manner indeed fat now feebly
Not lazily from your bedroom window, but out in the open air,
Where you seem to hear and see the earth which is, one guesses,
That anything goes that might as well be good looking
Fooling Around
Do you ever fool around and write poems?
Seems folly if in given scale.
If by an appetite, no humoured returned informed.
Too cultivated use solicitude frequently.
Perhaps with awareness of the business sense of the word,
But it also had an earlier sense,
In reference to men, of “to court or beg the favor of”
A man aged, but determined he consisted
Primarily of age, therefore
They didn’t keep her
From her botox and filler
Dinner, too, was served beyond regret
A table on a rooftop with no chairs around it
Fall Arts Preview
Survive on as little as you can
For as long as you can
They enjoyed the Constable painting
Just add drums to it
Sloths sing in perfect hexachords
The sleeper hit of the fest for me
Little bugs were wedged in
And a couple of pigeons
If you wanna get better
Hire a tutor
I suck at chess
You have a style
It was lunch
In a half hour
I sat by a feather
And read Scott Walker
I could get those gaps, you see, between phrases
Walking up and down the steps
There are other things I’m good at
I promise
The Snowy Wastes
Don’t let the turkeys get you down
Get your wife's son a graphics card
In the snowy wastes
Try the intuitive platform
Doored in the hallway
The baby was experimental
Experimental baby
The baby was avant-garde
World Space Week
Heightened irrelevant senses
The clock is a piece
Wished I had a terminal illness
Right cuisine, wrong establishment
The major active ingredient
Fully a placebo
I prefer to sip it
From the snowy wastes testatious
He rises to her apology
Rolling my neck around and seeing stars
I said hi and they shyly said hi seeing stars
Take the off-puttingly angry song
Written at the piano
Transpose it to blocky drum machine
And thin synth pads
I would have kept it in my pocket
And fed it seawater from a ziploc bag
Don’t tell anybody this but
You write a finite number of words
Smart Pagination
This poem has been smartly paginated away
And filler added wherever necessary
Don’t freak out, I’m okay, but I found
One of those corkboard tacks in my sleeve
I guess I should work on the poem more often
Tell mom I’m going to heaven—a little earlier than planned
There’s something I want to learn to do there
“There will be an animal you must learn to use”
There’s creamy and then there’s this
Secret mod I make to every Mass
A sub-vocalized prayer
Equivalent to one glass of wine
The sugar in fruit
Imitating some ancestor
Which is a quote of a lyric
“There will be an animal you must learn to use”
This pencil sharpener it is magical
It would be found on an architect’s desk
The smoggy day after a divorce
I can’t listen to music and do work
The time of year kids cross the street holding scythes
Only to be informed that they have all missed the plane
Which would have taken them to Stalingrad
All major chords are C and all minor chords are bad
Concentrated in the hands of the few
Our books unavailable everywhere
Poet wife and husband say
Jeff Goldblum it seems is also in bad shape
Do you know what was the second domino to fall?
Ambient Schoenberg in the medicine maker’s shop
Nothing like that mindless idiot’s manly world
To take us lands away
What Else Is A Cutting Board
Do you know what else is a cutting board?
How much time you have left and how good you can be
I have all my layers on still
Reduced to one local volume
Thanks to two and a half concussions
No successor to that cigar
Even colors make me mad
When Angus King was governor
The bank that you see before you today
Led a dance and dedicated it to that loser
Whose only job was to call snow days
Holes in the month that I was spackling over
The brain prepped the face muscles to laugh
Sidestepping the indecisive mammal
Mostly I parked, in a shady spot
But definitions are testable, so it’s part of the curriculum
For a grumpy old atheist like me to square the circle
The graduate writing program at Manhattanville college
You fish for compliments, you’re gonna get hooked
Doing woo woo fist in air
It’s a giant boulder in the road
It’s saying look at all this talk
Let me add that there are microphones
You have an amazing hidden talent, it’s just not this
I want to stand on the glass that looks down at the Grand Canyon
Humane society dachshund strengthening its resolve
