What can the hungry do but digest their stomach?
Oh what can the thirsty do but squeeze water from a stone?
Did the sower scatter them knowing they would find no soil
And be eaten by birds or roasted in the sun?
I have written this before with different words, shuffled adjectives
Night a nearby knife or thumbnail
Punching through the tape sealed blue box i've sent to myself
In it are streetlights like glazed eyes in the mist
Wet pavement, sorted socks
And new words formed in undead light at the same height
Oh nobody slow and deliberate
Wavering like schematics of wind through my left
Mainlining pea soup, pining to sleepthrough daydreaming
A leech as long as my arm with a thousand red bulletpoint mouths
Feeding fall, no, stuffed into next season's chamber
A few more as if there is a mythic window color
Rigged to a onearmed bandit accepting thin crosssections of living tissue
Scrap this section and start over
So i'm sprinting through gravy
Slowmotion knees rising and driving down
In search of plant tile, swimming in air
Knitting hands like marshmallows on forked sticks fourteen feet away
Tapping a pine box lid in darkness
A christmas tree with no needles dropping its ornaments
Painted eggs spitting soft blades of yolk between my fingers
Sliced webless. i don't have it
I cannot candycoast on cartoon hope
For i have signed my teeth to an identical home
And bottled the ocean in the earpiece of the phone
I have drunk the foam
My wireless eyes on no bars carrying their bags through the fog
Palms alight and absorbed to sweet curlicues
Of the color i invented when i was four
A novocaine snarl counting backwards from ten
The snailwalker always apologizes but does not stop
Filling boxes with sand and talks in spot colors, hyped monochrome
Confidence is a self-fulfilling prophesy our slick modern seers sell
Cruising the corporate backstreets for tight drivethrus
And meat wrapped in shiny dresses
A space heater to dump down my gullet
Like my lungs could steal from my sweatstomach
Then drive back in silence as it hisses from my pores
Profile of a trade prince, no depth perception or wild
Gluing macaroni to construction paper for valentines day
Everything small wants to grow
To eat drive own and no more
It is not yet known
Some never find it at all
An axis to pasture the rolling emerald malls
Polished and vivid; lost, for there are no new novels:
‘a thousand words' is unnecessary where a cheerful mascot will do
Thirded and sweeping you over the hook at towering gla** skylines
Split down the sternum, bellies spilling lukewarm lakes over our lawns
Friends and followers to convince us we're not alone
That you are biding your time, not aging
That there is a starburst apocalypse locked within
Waiting to be hit by fate's broomstick
Chance is chalk forgotten after each epiphany
Blooming new like the yesterday we first awoke
And could not remember sleeping
The tomorrow where we felt the same
A string of past rooms that breed in dream
Childhood friends without faces or names
And now there is nothing to say to them
I was ruined from the moment i picked up a ruler
I spoke left and the words radiated backward before it was wrong
Chairs that could face song where young pundits could only laugh
With so many wallets but only a few pennies in each