sex with things

all day long

sex with things

tickling your keyboard breathless

pressing your skirt between your legs

how you mouth your coffee cup

I keep my mind on my own

intercourses, do not envy

the pearls hot on your neck

how you lick that envelope wet

Love like riding bikes

Love, like riding bikes,
takes a lot of confidence,
a little balance.

You left your lipstick on my yellow mug.

You left your lipstick on my yellow mug.
Even after you had washed it and dried it, there it was ---
that kiss you missed
an accidental rosiness on it's rim, like when
you burst out laughing at what I had said
flashing your bright red teeth at me, red
with the soft hearts of the berries
that broke our fast.

Instructions

Do not keep
in a heated cabinet
over a week.

polish

the naming
of nail
polishes
appeals to
the sterile:
for who
but women deprived
would delight
in naming
each minute
shade
Blushing Beryl
Dewy Nude or
Ruddy Confusion
as they have
children in
their imagination

there are
the puns
unforgivable, unavoidable
in any venture
Hard as Nailfiles or
Chartruse with Envy, colors
unwearable except
as mis-
adventure
of being young
drumming them
against resumes
rendered null
by their neon
oranges and chip-
ping greens

there are
names that
taken literally
disturb:
Flaming Vixen?
put her out! names
like Angry Seduction
or Overripe Plum
hint at a series
of glum teachers
of shortest stories
offering
instruction,
hoping
for fame.

Malapropism

Name us
a famous poet --- Go on. Do it.
e.e. cummings doesn't count.
Leave Eliot out of it --- a living one
or it's like they said:
call no man famous
until he's dead.

Milking A Cow

"If an actor knows how to milk a cow, I always know it will not be difficult to be in business with him." Herzog has also previously claimed that when he walks into a room, he can tell who there has previously had hand to udder. Or, at the very least, would. "I can tell from miles away, yes," he confirms. "Woody Allen is not ever going to milk a cow."
~ A GQ Interview with Werner Hertzog

is more difficult than you might think. Like driving a car. I remember being very surprised the first time I drove a car, that you do not simply press the gas, continuously and with the same level of pressure, to go and press the break, continuously and with the same level of pressure, to stop. It came as a shock that you must be attentive to both the break and the gas pedals, pressing and releasing each often --- but equally often you must do so quite lightly, hardly at all. I remember being surprised that the car would continue to move forward when I was not pressing the gas pedal, and that it might slow and slow to a stop without applying pressure to the breaks.

You do not simply pull on a cow's teat. It is more a matter of manipulating the udder in such a way as to pull the milk down through the teat and into your pail. It is not like tugging on a thick bell-pull to call the servants. It is more like massaging the hand of a friend in trouble. Like pulling a friend in trouble away from a fence-line along a cliff's edge --- with compassion, but also with determination. It will feel as if you are doing something to relieve the cow, to help her. But instead, it is something you are doing to help yourself and your family. Voila! Milk!

A Vignette

Two black people were shouting, jolly
in the street. A white man came outside
asking questions, worried there was a fight.

The two black people exchanged a look. One said, "No.
We just talkin'. Everything's alright."

Without regret

Distrustful of such happiness, I thought
to break a window out of our small room and soon
had bloodied both my arms, had cut and caught
my wrists on shards, sharp shrapnel of a ruin-
ation I would try --- did try, and failed to fly or flee. Then you,
you, painstaking, reframed each single pane and turned
and asked me how the light looked then, and left
me still a moment, looking at the sky. My arms both burned
when you took me into yours. (I felt your heft.)
You showed me where the door had always been
and offered to undo the locks, unpry
the hinges that we two had closed together, painted over, sealed.
A brief whiteness passed the window: I turned to you.
Other things have yet to make me stay
like well-marked exits do.

A room with no egress---

or egrets either. An exitless,
regretless room where we regrew, reknew
uncertain innocence together: then ever
gregarious anew,
we both expressed unprepossess
ing love, unpressed. And who
could have guessed that we-with-no-egress, we two
still could be (with all we knew!) egregious
ly without distress---and also with
out egrets.

Still our arms link: A Perfect Plagiarism #2

Perfectly plagiarized from Sappho's "And their feet move"

Still, our arms link

fiercely, as freckled

arms of younger boys

linked then against the

current of time, parting

a circle in the strong

white-flowing water

Coming Down the Stairs: A Perfect Plagiarism #1

Perfectly plagiarized from "Walking Beside a Creek" by Ted Kooser

Coming down the stairs

at daybreak, the still house

filling with light,

you can feel the great joy

of the rooms, their skirts

flung out like dancing girls,

the sunlight streaming

through their wide, white aprons.

vice versa

Casting swine before pearls is also mistaken:

for all their shine,

pearls have no use for bacon.

Something Everyone Should Know How To Do

First you must free your left shoulder from the left strap of your knapsack. It works best to twitch your arm forward suddenly, shrugging inward so that the strap slips down your arm. Slide your left arm out of the knapsack's left strap. Then, grasp the right strap of the knapsack with your right hand, and swing the knapsack forward. Pass what was the right strap into your left hand, and slide your right arm into what was the left strap. You may slide your left arm into what was the right strap as well, if you wish. The aim is to execute these steps as one fluid, continuous movement.

Now your knapsack will be on "backwards." You will be carrying it in the front. Your profile will be that of a pregnant woman (though how pregnant a woman you will appear to be in profile depends on how much you are keeping in your knapsack!). Now you may add to, remove, or rearrange the contents of your knapsack with ease, without having to stop, or find a surface on which to rest your knapsack while doing so. You may remain standing while adding to, removing, or rearranging the contents of your knapsack, or, with a little practice, even continue walking!

An incident

One night, I went to sleep with my heel hurting me.

It pained me all night long. It made me sleep restlessly. I dreamed of it.

When I got up in the morning,

my foot was covered in blood.

Never once all night when my heel hurt

did I think to look at it.