Maybe the real work of our
lives start on a nothing Tuesday,

when you get stuck between
a question and its answer

resting on the tip of your tongue.
For that is where they really live —
all your answers.

They are never fully capable
of flying from out of your mouth,

they are words without wings and they
enjoy sitting atop their enamel throne,

so you spend the rest of your life
searching and grasping for them

in movie theatres, lit-up streets,
cold museums, lovers and silence,

to try and fully taste what it would
be like to live with their existence.

How shall I understand the nature of small?
crumble my body, folding my flesh in on
itself until I am round like
the rolling armadillo?

Praise the grains of sand that
make up our coast while
ignoring the sea?

Maybe I will just
write a haiku instead and
turn into a word.

And for her next act she
decided to become a pencil,
but only to use for the eraser,

her sharpened lead
made her look strong
and important,

and she enjoyed sitting
in her own pool
of possibility,

rather than contend with
the upkeep of her
success.

so she never really wrote anything,
she just paraded around town
as a pointed pencil and overused eraser

pantomiming her emotions,
hoping for someone to
drop a few quarters
into her ***** sidewalk hat.

Sometimes poems are so full of themselves,
loaded up on words and story,

with their "likes" and their "as"
to connect the most dissimilar things
     to denote clever

with their superior pinkys
erecting into the air

before prose ever made its
way into the catalogs of dialogue,

their indistinguishable punctuation
and schizophrenic indentation,

and the greatest of them all
never knowing when to stop,

sometimes deciding to merge into
the next book as you decide to
put them down.

"I sometimes fear the younger generation will be deprived of the pleasure of hoeing."
-John Updike

I sometimes fear the younger generation will be consumed
by the pleasure of scrolling,
there is no knowing,
how many souls have been split by this simple exercise.

The dry thumb like a weakened scab,
in perpetual rowing,
revealing the traveler's roam,
without ever leaving home.

How neatly they pile on the streets,
eyes due south into screens.
Wise is the ignorant boy who
has never performed this simple, stupid and useless wonder.

My skin felt invasive as
it was covering my soul,

I was shining so bright that day
as the rain kissed the ground,

and you felt like the clouds stampeding
over my sky, all billowy and inflamed

weighing me down and stuffing me in,
and yet at the same time a necessity.

I knew I couldn't survive the elements
without you, but oh how I wanted to.

You are there
and I am there,
or maybe I am there
and you are here,
or you are there
and I am here.
We are just toggling
back and forth
through the lanes
of time and space,
missing each other
always by just a
few seconds.