Jenny Mechanical is too mecha for the main house
but too human for the tool shed.
She can turn stripped screws, whip up a perfect grilled cheese,
provide power during an outage and mow and mulch while she's at it.
She also dreams of a recharging kiss and poems appear at her fingertips.

Jenny had a little lamb whose fleece was made of synthetic polymer
and everywhere that Jenny went, the lamb was sure to follow her.

See Jenny Mechanical, stopped in the middle of the front yard,
telling her lamb to look at the new leaves with its LED eyes.
She has always been a perfectly average 5 foot 3, can open any jar, pick any lock,
but she is leaking into its faux wool because of something beyond utility.

Jenny Mechanical can eat no fat, nor either any lean
and yet between the two of them she knows her grease from cream.

Still, as Jenny could tell you, mere maintenance is not love
and the poems at her fingertips have diverged from factory settings,
glowing pink
then rose
then lavender
then blue
then indigo
to create from refraction a lovely illusion, a rainbow or so it seems.
___

within the binding
within the cover
the unseen pages
stitched together
silence and memory

curse the summer breeze,
despise the winter's harsh laugh,
this insanity is in every season,
the more I write, this invasive ****,
like the strongest tallest bamboo sticking,
drafts me again and again into the army
of just one more, and for every one I release,
a dozen more inventions, incensed interventions,
come asking, pleading, needy whining, but
for themselves only, not for me,
provide,
do not deny
them their own
new perspective,
an original fabulation,
and I remind them
of Balanchine's wit,
"there are only new combinations,"

and my mental thresher~combine,
explodes that numbered field,
of semi~scripted, planted
yet to be finished,
it only grows larger,
but not higher,
perhaps, sadly thinking,
but not better,

while my sighs of tired only grows louder…as my-race against  time, only shorter, the rat on the spinning wheel....
                                                       ­                                                    nml

this skin can barely hold a tender paradox
a first touch, a lost goodbye
like a taxidermist of time
your fingers drum on the tabletop
the coffe's steam rises like a ghost
the city blends its glass hours, the melting clocks
the hourly sigh of a smile, all that glitters turns into tear
I have to watch out for that precise instant  
when time fractures when our eyes meet

I could have gone to the cemetery,
or back to my high school lab,
find him lecturing from a podium,
bony finger raised,
demagogue of the dead.
I could break him down piece by piece,
cram him in a duffle,
a femur jutting the zipper.
Ignore the groan-
Skeletons are
by nature
never satisfied.

Instead I found myself
in the carnival lot,
The dog was long dead,
the sign kept guard.
Rusty rides slouched like tumbleweeds.
Cotton candy in memory-
blue tack crunching my teeth.
Lewd.

Skeletons fixed on poles,
spiked up through pelvis and spine.
Use ****.
Grip shoulders. twist. lift.
When one slid free,
he collapsed into my arms
all bone-light, lovely,
mine at last.

I just brought him home.
Sat at the kitchen table.
Named him Curly.
Zoom howled: WAG’s gone weird!
What’s his name? What’s his name?

His name is Curly,
I said, but I knew
his name was You.

We drink wine by the pool.
He never sips.
Sometimes I pour a second glass for the glint.
Sometimes he tells me Danny Elfman
wants to play his ribs like a xylophone.
Sometimes he sighs,
he hates Oingo Boingo.
I laugh. Obliging.
So do I.

When the wind kicks up
he smells of sugar and rust.
Sometimes he rattles the glassware.
Sometimes he won’t sit still.
Skeletons are
by nature
never satisfied.