Little Canada

We didn’t recognize one another,

which is not really that surprising

considering how different the postage

stamps look in difficult weather, and while

it does bother me quite a bit

that such imponderable forces forge

only a farewell frame of mind,

somewhere, it was hoped,

the lost czarina still tended

to her colony of bees.

But in the frozen graces of snow

and great canticles of distance,

one sees only an ocean of sparrows

while the other sees merely

a curtain of windows. Or

put another way, Hello is a long way

from hurricane, just as evergreen’s

a long way from rocket. An audience

buzzes at an audience buzzing.

We re-draw the map

without ever leaving home.

Wounded by Nerf

It’s summer again — time to fumble
all the way, all of it away under
a disport of demands unwelcome.
We didn’t become athletes,
but we did become dumb and huge,
and that, combined with our proclivity
for role-playing — acting and re-acting
our favorite tragic moments —
makes the hot sun sunnier, makes
the deaf as eccentric as the one word
that’s been forever choked
in the throat of this cramped village.
Long live the red-bird
brick in your face, and longer
the fat of my lip at the pool.
I have a handful of rocks
for inhaling a beating,
and you an entire arsenal
disguised as toys.

Acrobat Destroyer

Doesn’t the sea? Everything

returning suddenly, gestures of

the fiercest unsleeping,

the usual rain, paroxysms of contrast.

The blowfish hullabaloos its capture

but is quickly transformed into sushi.

Fugu? Fugu you! Related to the Han

“fuku” meaning both “happiness” and “to blow.”

Pharaoh embarrassments, infant destiny,

this language that delimits me.

A stranger ducks into a limousine.

A stuntman is dragged to work behind his horse.

Mysterious, only because a storm is blowing up

the horizon, its non-light casting shadows

in thirty wonderful flavors of love. The jingle goes:

La-la-la slaughterhouse la — my battleship O,

my battleship sunk.

Autoterrorist

I scramble the earth with my dog close behind me.
I’m not being honest with myself about Mars.
Observe the people around you.
Try and behave as they do.
This is called “blending in.” And when it isn’t
it’s called “Guy Debord” or “David Bowie.”
I have a theory — well, not really — I just like to think
about all the various possible explanations
for impossible, improbable, inexplicable things.
The way farmland goes right on happening to itself,
or how the Earth can survive a single day
even though it’s struck by lightning
100 times every second.
When it’s finally over,
I don’t want to keep any of this I can’t fit
in my glove compartment, the mouth hatch
of my papa, the Secretary of Offense.
My deportment to somewhere beneath me begins now.
Conjunction Junction, my function is a beech tree.
Why is it that everyone keeps looking at my clock?
Falling behind is no way to get one’s message through,
yet as the shadows force their concessions,
there are those who dare turn back to warn others.

The Fruits of Our Simultaneity

He looked around and found a baby
on a leaf. That can’t be true.

It’s a cruel world, baby.
Under tremendous pressure, some babies

expand into much larger babies called “adults.”
First, I can’t find my baby anywhere,

then later I find my baby everywhere:
under the carpet, on top of the refrigerator,

outside playing with the dump truck’s teeth.
Careful, little baby. Some people bury

their hatchet beneath a windmill,
while others use it fiercely to hack at the sea.