I smell cookies baking
There are no cookies baking
What do I smell?

A childhood memory to a
Time and place of comfort?
Wanting the past to last?

Other triggers:
Grilled cheese sandwiches
Campbell’s tomato soup
Breaded fish sticks
Polka-dotted Wonder bread
Liverwurst and catsup
The tasty tang of tang

The nose knows; I’m
Olfactory traveling
Memory meandering

Still, I really smell
Those cookies baking…
I want to go home again

I scratch till blood
An itch that persists
Unresolved issues
Buried below

I try to know;
It whorls, churns
Secrets purple red
Break skin

Red burst bloom
Embarrassing truths
Concealed quickly
Don’t show your cards

Sublime timeline—
Yours or mine?

Which switch?
Which time?

The distinction fine
Defines which which

Relatively selectivity:
Your past or my next?

My now or your then?
Who’s here or there?

Outcomes of which
We must now contend

A pride of lions
A parade of elephants and
A shrewdness of apes

A prickle of porcupines
A crash of rhinoceroses with
A chatter of budgerigars

A gaggle of geese
Gleefully honking
Heads held high

A horde of crows
Cackling and cawing
Wings spread wide

A kerfuffle of Flosses
A gatherings of clans
A thankful flocking

Kerfuffle is commotion
A happy hoopla
Movement together

Noisy, gleeful, cantankerous
Laughing, loving, boisterous
Family to the end

ARMCHAIR

The ugly chair
Is still there
Leave I say
It stays

The ugly chair
Is stubborn
Taciturn
Not feng shui

The ugly chair
Isn’t really
It just sits too near
In the way

(Or, really; cyber-**** me?)

“I know your name
I know your password
I know the **** you rut in
$7000 in bitcoin or else:

I’ll ruin your life!

You will be outed
To friends and family alike
As you view humans
Doing what humans do!

Everyone will know!“

That you are human
That you have base desires
That you pleasure yourself
That you are Everyman

Well, if it’s show and tell time:

Sure, don’t you?
She knows. Not news.
Won’t play this shame game–
Nothing really to lose. Phew!

No longer an extortion ******

(this just happened to me)

Fists up
Square off
Who’s more right
Ends in a fight

You pummel
I parry left, you
Counter right
As you should

Left hook!
Upper cut!
Sucker punch,
Rhetorical quarreling

The ending tie
Is preordained
Win or loss
It’s all a gain