The A.M. Crunchwrap
How do they keep the hash brown
Crispy for so long?

I never realized
How many birds
There really are

They seem to melt
Into the landscape
As they hop
To and fro
In the manicured
Suburban shrubs
And pepper the sky
Floating in place
Against some unfelt
Wind current

While walking
I locked gazes with
A slate colored dove
And we stared
I don't know how
He felt about me
Or what he felt
About me

I thought he was
Elegant
Even though he was
The color of fresh tar
While it bakes
In the Pennsylvania sun
In some hazy culdesac
In the corner of some
Replaceable
Reproducible
Childhood

He hopped off his perch
A rusty sign post
That had been bifurcated
By some unknown
Bolt or hand

And skittered behind some
Sickly looking ferns
In a dirt patch of an
Unknown neighbors yard

A gang of Robins
Flittered over my head
Landing down the street
Passing a pinecone
Between them
Pecking and tearing at it

I looked behind
The sickly ferns
And found the
Unknown neighbors cat
Doing the same thing
To my slate colored dove

I shooed it away
It dropped the dove
Hastily
In the loose dirt
And retreated

I looked down at the dove
And it laid there
Its breast heaving
Silent
One eye cast into the dirt
The other looking up
Watching the same Robins
Fly back to where
They had come from


And the slate slowly
Turned sanguine
As its down became
Saturated with the
Run off from the
Puncture wounds

The cat sat off
A few yards away
Flicking its tail
Calico and smug

And I stood by
The dove as
The heaving slowly
Stopped
Ground to a
Halt really
And then the eyes
Weren't looking
At the sky or the dirt

I finally felt
That unseen
Wind
And continued
On my way

Standing in a line
Elmo waves behind a cop
Searching bags for bombs

It's the same every time
Waking up in a panic
The hangover's dull
Gradual throbbing
The amplification of existence's malaise
Reducing my feet
To a slow shuffle

My girlfriend has been calling it the same way
For six years
"You'll get up and check your wallet and make sure you have your keys"
And I do
She's beautiful because she's right
She's also gorgeous
But continually right

I get up and slip my fingers into the
Many compartments of my wallet
Making sure I feel the greasy
Cold plastic of the credit cards

The three IDs
One to drive a car
One to carry a gun
One to count as a person

And the flood of relief I feel
When I finger these plastic cards
Is alarming
How my mind jumps from jovial
Drunken thoughts
To hard
Plastic ones
In the midst of sleep
At ungodly hours of the morning

My identity personified
In polyurethane rectangles

I get back into bed
And again
After confirming that all
The clasps that keep the mask
Snug to my face
Are still there

I embrace her warmth
Under the thin comforter
She drapes her leg across me
While I kiss her forehead
"You smell like liquor"
Before browning out again

Koozies keep the beer cold
They keep your hand warm
And your beer cold
Which is nice
When most thing are more complicated
Or more intricately disappointing

I find little to do
Besides stare from one screen to the next
And back and back again
Rechecking the same websites
The same hiss of the tab being popped

Sitting in one room
While thinking of many rooms
None of it really makes any sense
This inherited feeling of unease
Wanting just to be close to you
To actually kiss you
Meaning it
Having some feeling behind something

Not wanting to rush from one thing to the next
Just wanting to be stuck in that one moment with you
Tasting your saliva
Feeling your tongue, probing
Like some rogue octopus tentacle

There is nothing that fills the hollowness
Like you  
You are the echoing clatter of pebbles
Thrown down a dark ravine
Replacing space with substance
One haphazard toss
After another

I self diagnosed
Turns out my bubonic plague
Was posion ivy

My dad asks me if I have ever considered
Going back to school
To teach
"You'd be a great teacher" he confides
This after telling him that
I'd be working a second job

All the teachers I know
Are broke, unhappy, or quit
Or are bouncing around in substitute purgatory

Any bit of progress I seem to make
He treats like a step back
After graduating I guess he felt
That he was ripped off
When I didn't pull the next
Game of Thrones out of my ***
And buy him a Porsche 911

Those who don't create
Usually belittle the process
Acting like the muses
Are constantly rubbing your back
When in fact
They are stopping by
To take a piece of you with them