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."