from WHAT YOU WANT WITH YOUR MONEY
Some of us have taken off our wigs.
The immense, the colossal weight
of our hope. Sex is part of it.
Do you think I’m pretty?
[The future will present itself with unimaginable
ruthlessness. But we can guess.]
—Kate Greenstreet, “619”
When you’re absolutely alone
There’s usually still a white grasshopper nearby
Just out of sight.
Call it white grasshopper lining.
As if your life depended on it.
Call it your larval stage
If you need a pick-me-up.
I have. I do.
Still, how best proceed with friends who act like gingerbread?
I mean, you can’t return them.
You might be able to frustrate their maker
But that’s not the same as believing
Snow comes in all shapes & sizes.
My babysitter taught me all this
As she slapped Tyvek over each side of her.
I wept into my warranty. This weren’t love.
*
I’m comfortable with this continuing for 3-7 years if: pizzas keep coming, our cots never take on water, my thighs always touch, vowels return to the national parks, amish neighbors redesign our dance floor, rubies get written off, hudson keeps its grades up, depression forever remains 7/10ths of the law, & everyday we look up at a hoof-filled Titian sky & get pardoned.
*
Old-fashioned sex w/ horseshoes & low pressure systems pairs beautifully with ghostly roar of condo complex lemonade, which is on the house until it ain’t.
Baby, the right amount of smoke can make anyone stentorian.
I learned the hard way, though I (transcribe it!) REGRET NOTH.
*
At one point I knew some things about Aristotle.
Like he was full of pigeon shit.
Like he was all pigeon in all the right places,
Which was, as you’ll recall, His Airness’ claim to fame.
Not a very ethical claim, but just the type of bathetic que sera sera
Our insurance might at least attempt to cover in the near, kind future.
The only drawback to the watercolorist dictator Aristotle supported is: watercocks dry up, leave everyone hungry.
Or so it was expressed by that apocalyptic yard sale we conveyed last Wednesday when we married again.
It had to end somewhere.
*
In New York City I hear crust
Not only self-rises but permutes
A cardinal’s origin story i.e.
Teach a fry to fry itself &
You have the beginnings
Of your very own constellation,
Elementary like popular accounts
Of making out w/ the Mariana Trench.
Our ocean comes w/ no instructions or instructors.
Let’s not try to be either.
*
Something inside me, something inside is opening up
To the possibility of adopting
An adolescent yak breath.
That’s big of you.
But I don’t have the energy to congratulate my old friend on her new baby
Or her husband’s new article/face.
That was cold.
Rest easy—Bowie’s alive.
We know this by the scone-like doves
Flying out of our thin ice mouths
Back to the harbor where
Our poems can be seen from outer space.
Inhospitably they live
On borrowed time.
They’re not picky—
They like big butts
& they eat white rice
Like the Whitney
Ran out of ideas—
All their family money
Invested in B+ Ayurvedic strip malls
In the frozen city of Paris.
*
A catfish spayed me & before I knew it
I was kidnapping my own hourglass self
& relocating to a 55-&-over community
Low on energy but medium-hard on deviled eggs
& floatation devices like Marc Jacobs purses,
Your average community, really, just winging it—
Expecting postcards from former lovers
But only ever sending out onion skins.
TYPO
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