GRAVITYPANTS ROCKETBOY IS FASHIONING A FLYING APPARATUS

Gravitypants Rocketboy is fashioning a flying apparatus

made of old newspapers and wood from his childhood home.

You wouldn’t know GP Rocketboy if you saw him,

only revealing his face to invention—

head bowed, kicking his left foot with right,

walking past your breath, helium for take-off—

GPRB admits to himself:

when I was young, I moved with the grace

of a pair of cement legs on glass-face earth.

Gravitypants Rocketboy asks himself:

how long until we’re not the people we were before?

And, of course, it is never—

but he gives light

to each of his Russian-nesting-doll-selves—

weightlessness so their new ghostskins may leave

only the dense core of who he has been all along,

grounded on this rooftop, ready for flight.

LOSING SIGHT OF YOUR RIGOROUS SOCIAL INTERACTION MANUAL

—dropped your guidebook of motivational interpersonal

conversation suggestions, and it keeps getting kicked further

from reach. Sweat on your forehead when a stranger

asks a question, and you reply all good clouds want peace.

He stammers away in a fog … a billowing steam arm

from above taps your shoulder, says please speak for yourself

from now on, but that’s the problem, after all, and the manual

teeters on the lip of a sewer—every time you speak

a bullet ricochets off street signs, lodges in just

the wrong wall, which will post a billboard the very next day

that says Bullet Speaks for Boy—World, Suck It,

and that’ll be that and all rugs will be pulled out,

and not just the rug but the hard wood floor beneath

and you will be balancing on the pipes that run the world

until you say screw it, let it flood, the place filling with water

and there, as the phone rings in sonar, your guidebook

notebook floats out of the lead, now a concrete shut

artifact with your initials in its surface

and you think to say, a mouth full of dusty water,

yes, go ahead—please help me.