the female selling coffee
was startlingly hot
caught me by surprise
i tried to engage her
but she blew me off
in appropriately hot girl style

trump’s gonna decimate the tourist industry
you think people said
“gee, i wanna visit **** germany
looks like fun”?

i enter unit A-19
the place to be for car accidents, gunplay
and the mayhem people get into
i'm humming que sera sera
get to my space and turn on the radio
baroque sunday
ahhh
now bring on the death and destruction

say you’re exhausted at work
your shoulders are anchors
your eyes are lead
you gotta sleep
but you gotta keep going
no choice
you must stay awake all afternoon
into the evening

now let’s say you’re in bed at last
head on the pillow
blanket on your belly
cat on your knees
you remember the afternoon’s exhaustion
as you melt into sleep

happiness

the function of words is to communicate
not flaunt vocabulary
dazzle with metaphor
or shock with syntax

but then there's poetry

a relentless weekend in the ER

i kid you not
a man fell off the couch
and we had to rush him to the OR
to pry off half his skull
and staunch the bleeding
to keep him alive

we had another fella
6’6 with the biggest head in the universe
probably 400 pounds
he hadn’t bathed in five years
he was a white man and his skin was black
the nurses scrubbed him clean later in the ICU
an epic endeavor
he couldn’t walk
amazingly he had a girlfiend
who shoved him from bed to chair
to toilet and back for years
supplied him with pain meds for years too
the big guy’s in big trouble now
needs a tracheostomy to keep him breathing
but can’t get one because his neck
is as thick as a chimney
and he’s young—35
his mother and sister came up from florida
they hadn’t seen him in ten years
and had no idea how he’d deteriorated

and let’s not forget the uber driver
who had a heart attack while driving
poor woman never made it
out of the trauma bay

now it’s monday
i’m eating a frozen pizza
watching Paris, Texas
Wim Wenders, Sam Shepard
and Harry Dean Stanton all agree
this world
and every world
is tough to navigate

i could brag about my night
but to who?
what sentient being is epicurean enough
to appreciate my palate?
cosmopolitan enough
to follow my exploration?
who has mastered the physics
to dig my trajectory?
there’s only one
back to the mirror!