It's either the airline food or the thought of you that's making my heart win the marathon.
All I'm waiting for is the plane to melt through the clouds and wash the snow away,
because sometimes ten days is longer than that.

Windex mice squeak through the windows,
biting newspaper as it scrapes across.

Soap from a new age fills the kitchen,

sheeps' fat long forgotten,
the sod-house of Laura Ingalls Wilder left behind
with its crumbling Lincoln logs,
the ceiling that drops dirt crumbs like a gritty pastry.

Our world is shiny,
so blinding that even the cough of newsprint makes it brighter.

A bottle sneezes across the counter, spurts those
bubbles of ammonia, gathers with the
rivers and tides that surge with ethanol,

it bursts the air with a neon smell and erases
everything that has come before.

Gum is another tongue in your mouth,
taste-bud studded with sugar and pink

Hubba Bubba Double Bubble

Your jaw feels like expanding bread
when you rest from chewing
flatten it into a saucer and
let it balloon from your mouth,

it distends like an internal *****
or the full stomach of a frog
spilling from your lips

(When he stretches, you see veins
******* across his amphibian chest)

It hooks itself on your nose
and wilts into a pink tangle.