kid: what are those words?
me: I'm writing poetry.

kid: party tray?
me: poetry.

kid: polo tree?
me: poetry.

kid: poe uh chee?
me: close enough.

I love it like when people sing incorrect lyrics. But more, because kid has the cute and is missing a tooth.

The joint in your hand quaked
Under the pressure of your diagnosis,
Its flame slipping into the air,
While your last puff trickled into left lung.
At first you smoked for depression.
Now it was a cry to God,
A beg for mercy from lifeless feet,
A trip down a flight or two of stairs,
A fall in the shower.

I didn't know how you would walk again without your toes
Knees
Hips.
But I learned your condition is a silent killer -
it started with the smallest flakes of skin,
As Satan lit an accurate match to singe your nerves.

You told me you had MS
And I didn't know why your breaths became frantic,
Or your tears screaming.
"Mean spirited",
"Mouthy sister",
Was what I told my friends.
God was playing jump rope with his spinal cord.
Multiple sclerosis didn't roll off my tongue so quickly,
first attempts were stutters at best -
I had to grow up first.
And while I was lying about your health
You were in agony over your grandmother,
Dead for five years on a stained hospital sheet.

In the end she begged for death,
And we have years to go.

Laurie, it's almost Christmas.
That's why so many quietly desperate people
wear old woolen sweaters, fantasizing about being in
on a joke,
just this once.
Your friends are wildly cackling,
you're not dressed like the others.
I prefer my desperation loud, too.
I'm rather skeptical,
however,
of
forty-year-old Lauries wearing lace tops and wedding rings,
with wet words
sloshing from dank tumblers.

Each seeming mispronunciation evokes
excedingly excessive expectations
in the form of imagined saliva beads extruding
between bottom and top lips.
But they aren't mispronunciations, are they.
It seems that, over time, words have come to sound this way,
for us.
And you've done nothing wrong,
But twenty years ago, you wouldn't have any reason
even to speak to me.
It's fascinating to watch
the canopy of aging shield
youth's shallow perspective
from those rapidly fading stars
of disquieting mortality
which fall, bringing with them
forty years of confused burning
into vision.


How many times have you come to a place,
chatted with a stranger,
and gotten them to leave with you,
in your life?
I've never been able to, myself, but it's different when you're a guy.
I struggle with subtlety, but not as much as you.
There's just no room for ambiguity, were I to brace their lower back,
then casually walk by.
I have no doubt this approach has worked for you.
Only, from my perspective, your effort pulls
that growing chin
further from your forehead,
leaving room for misused eye-
contact with me.

Laurie, I know where you are.
You're in on the joke
outside this bar.
You're still in Nebraska,
as far as bodies go, so am I.
"The Good Life!" you slur,
having never left home,
you never want to go.

Laurie.

Laurie.

Laurie!

Please move.
I'm trying to shoot.
You impede my cue,
thrusting between my fingers.
My actions, words create an un-registering ricochet.
Fine, mock me when I miss.
I am not good at this game,
but I don't want to be.
It's not flirting.

If Nebraska IS the good life
it is the good LIFE, for one.
Like Jesus lived once, so do we, in this room.
He would also agree birthdays are meaningless.
Regardless, I can't be with you here,
because I don't know who is living that one good life,
but it isn't you or I.

I didn't ask about your husband,
I'm left to speculate. Assume.
You'll buy your children presents
and give your husband head he's used to.
Isn't that what rings means this time of year,
or is that only what you used to do?
Did he stop eating like you tell him?
Does he take care of you.
You probably think someone like me
would be willing, know exactly how to.
I can see you touching my arm,
I can feel your friends
rubbing me with their eyes.
My thighs recoil with every shot
as people say their goodbyes.
I know you're ready to leave me behind
and take my body's memory with you
to sleep within your head.

I'll miss you, Laurie.
You remind me that there may be one good life in this state.
Or, at least, someone who wants to **** me without knowing my name.
But the closest thing to a good life I can hope for in Nebraska
is to be noticed by a woman
who will help my imagination
think of a place better than here.
Before I reach your age, Laurie,
I want to find her.

Youth's last call yells loud,
and quells years of chased memories.
I know you can't hear it, Laurie,
but those years are over for you and me.
If you keep the thought of me alive at all,
do this kind and silly thing:
give your children gentle kisses
on their heads before they sleep.
Tell them that they have the one good life
the way my mother lied to me.

Mishaps and mispronunciation,
messy rooms and messy beards,
crops and crop duster airplanes.
Too many insiders,
too many to count.
We counted on the fresh air
in our bike tires to get us out.
Out in the open world,
the woods, the fields,
the lakes, the ponds,
the Indiana bonds
too tight to ignore.
A prison with open doors
if nothing more.

self-reflection churns out an image of a clicking cicada of an aggressively ****** young girl, who due to the pressing weight of a blue silk chord around her throat possesses

a shiny dark, green exoskeleton (refracting light and resistant to moisture)
(SO ******* KAFKAESQUE) (!!!)

who sings as she rubs furry legs together and has decided to spill pain whenever possible onto screens and sheets, throwing up wherever she lands, without true cause in a careless disarray, breeding narcissism (let's throw a party)

biting into shattered satin, like a moth feeding off of human wetness and stains while punctuating words with mispronunciation and self-absorbtion
because she is deathly afraid of being boring and a daily routine, how predictable

(the crowd looks on miserably, fanning their faces with paper plates, sweating profusely)

this poem is predictable;
sorry.

I never have tried to **** myself, it would be silly to think that not killing yourself or killing yourself would have an actual influential impact on most of the world, except in rare cases.

Death is looming, I am grinning, I have not yet seen it so I guess I will live forever and subside off the hearts of men (no, not really, I'm kidding).

A woman I once worked with
Was ordinarily quite intelligent
But when it came to pronunciation
She could become belligerent.
Her way was the right way
And she brooked no question.
Braving her ire, I decided there
Was one I had to mention.

She said the word comf-tubble
And I said that was incorrect.
She got so very irate with me
That I feared for my own neck.
She called it socially acceptable,
Her ghastly mispronunciation.
I said it was a sign of the times
The slippery ***** of our nation.
If people were to go on and cease
An honored way of speaking
Then, we are all of us adrift
In a doomed skiff that is leaking.

She said some more to me
But I quit paying much attention.
There were too many “I means”
And “you knows” to mention.
There were ‘haftas’ and ‘ominas’
And the sad utterance, ‘wannabees”.
This poor soul would not pass
The first hour of a spelling bee.
I wondered if this poor soul
Had seen on a computer screen.
The words just as she was saying
On some website she had seen?

I accept that nobody in the USA
Or even in Merry Old Blighty
Says words like Wednesday
Comfortable or February rightly.
It’s like there is an international
Formal and binding declaration
That nobody need say these words
Correctly in English speaking nations.
We can lapse into hickbonics,
We jess *** tah stumble along
And say set instead of sit, and
Others we so often say wrong.

We kin say double pneumonia
And quay’s eye and nukeyoulurr,
Irregardless and even *** cans,
And nobuddy questions wut fur.
We c’n say thangs like reel utter,
SimmYooLurr, BennaFishErAiry.
Innerest, furrmillyurr, Mason Airy,
Flustration and shudder LieBerry.
But as sure as there is air to breathe
And that every day will follow night
Most people pronouncing words
A certain way doesn’t make it right.

POLITCALLY CORRECT**

Is it saying the wrong word?
Is it the tone of which you address someone?
How can we have courage in society if we can be oppressed by a mere mispronunciation?
Why does the way one introduces things affect the end result?
Who stands up for those who speak their mind?
Society preaches to stand up for what you believe while they tell you how to stand and present yourself in the process
Creativity is defeated
Uniformity of proper approaches destroys over achievers
Doing things different is thought of as wrong
If everyone is doing the same things to get to the same places
Imagine where one could end up by doing things differently
Open your mind
Try in everything you do, be good, be sincere
but never do things because how everyone else does it
or because its how its suppose to be done
Be real and yourself

3/18/2019
I don't know what I'm saying
This is a foreign language
It balances on the tip of my tongue
And crawls around the roof of my mouth
This is a romance language more romantic than
Spanish, or French, or Italian
This accent is startling but softer still I whisper
As you murmur sweet pieces of everything into my ear
You seem to be fluent in this language
As if love was your first spoken tongue
While I stumble over the words unable to say a simple phrase
The phrase unspoken for fear of mispronunciation
Because it's so easy to say wrong
Because vulnerability is another dialect I do not speak
Though it flows off of your tongue so easily
As if your teeth are sure of where they land
And your lips form the words that I need to hear
Even though I never knew I needed to hear them
This language that I don't speak
Comes from a country where the most beautiful people live
Where the happiest of smiles look up to the sky
Where the hearts are pure and simple and loving
But I do not come from that country
And my passport was brand new and unused
I have learned to live by myself on my own island of walls
The walls I build to keep out those who care
For I might hurt them if they came in
But you speak words that fill the cracks
And the love you give expands and breaks the wall
And you teach me this language I don't quite understand why
But you make sure that I know myself
Before I know you
Or the language
Or the world around me
You flew me to that country on an airplane made of the clouds themselves
And taught me this language that I will never forget
This language of love and happiness
This language of you and me
This language of the world as it should be