People are metal
We color ourselves silver
Or gold or copper
We conduct electricity
And have the strength to do anything
We are resilient enough
To be burnt and twisted
And live on
Fighting against the rust

People are glass
Fragile and breakable
We open ourselves up
Let others shine through us
Seeing our true self
That is a rare gift
A beauty taking more courage
Than any could imagine
And when we have such courage
The irony is that we can be shattered
By a simple fall
From between tiny fingers

People are wood
We bear life
And green leaves
But cut us down with
A sharp bladed axe
We burn easy
But it's impossible
To rid our mark
That we leave
Smeared in black ashes

People are rubber
Bending to the will of others
This and that
Always bent out of shape
Springing to our flattened
Normal selves when no one
Else is watching
Striving, stretching to beauty,
Beauty impossible to achieve
When all the eyes are on us

People are like paper
They crumple and rip and tear
And no matter how much
You straighten it out
The crease is always there
They can be bent folded and broken
Destroyed beyond repair
Damaged from water stains and more
From animals beware
One sheet alone is strong and weak
It can do a lot
But wrap a thousand more nearby
And suddenly they are unstoppable
Able to hold 300 pounds
Or more

My thoughts are rubber

My words are cement


My thoughts grip me

and snap back

into my head full force

each time they try to escape


My words are concrete and imposing

I can't seem to take them back

no matter how hard I try

He came and went;
the smell of burning rubber
strong between her legs.

The child fell in mid-July
When he held three rings
Rippling out from his bones.
His knew smiled a toothless
grin that dropped guts & goo
While the child screamed
Hoping that mother would set
Down her dishes and break
In half her paint brush. He hoped
That mother would stitch him back
Together. A scarecrow wears a costume
Of a strong superhero three months
Later with the help of rubber bands
And metal barbs.
The child fell in mid-July &
Left a scar but not a bruise.

angry men who do not know I do not have a dollar or a cig to spare. Ugly irrefutable contagion-handed howlers. Angry mischievous heathens that pantomime on 6:00a.m. sidewalk, Wicker Park gallow stop-sign, choreographed gutter-punk drunk walk. And of all he wants and could ever want splits down his gooey membrane brain in the outline of a noun shaped fragment of a clause, "Couldja spare 80¢ for the train," but of course I don't spare on the ellipsis or the period. Semi-colons I won't! My rubber-bottomed leather boots lash out, heavy scraping sounds trail this mirrored shadow half an angle behind me.

*****!! Blonde framed sunglasses from American Apparel, a gift from my sister in a folded Ray-Ban case is scattered on last nights bedroom floor, my girlfriend has certainly not noticed, the gloom-coated morning sun spray has not noticed; but I have unzipped a fissure in the ocular lens. My heart skips a beat. Her bedroom might as well have swallowed them whole. Now the house can halt and have the shade, swaying in Spring air in 10:22a.m. shadows. The aviator himself Howard Hughes would strike me with his 488 aircraft. Edwin Starr in his invincible sinister calypso of War would turn me round. I was sturdy as a rock until I began to forget my forgottens. These unknown unknowns I knew I needed. I'm over a quarter-century on to noon going nowhere- and quite blindly.

But then, still she could stand upright and find me. Her neck crooked, looking onward through the East, the gristly roots of rhubarb buried in her searching fingernails. She's threaded worse, and of course if I could just tell her- this is the kind of nursing which requires acute temperament and flexibility. I am thus on a journey to strike nonsense and fear from the idiotic vocabulary that put this nonsense in my head. Split through me like a butter knife into my apotropaic. Perhaps tar water could cure my ails. If not, certainly a sliver of vanilla would set me straight. Or if could just rain rain rain all day, then I'd make do without, but she is at school. My pistons are racked and nervous, and I'm not going anywhere but my rucksack stoop. I am camped in midwestern Spring soup. Fog, rain, and shade. The nightmare of day.