I Don't Do Haiku (But I Do Miss Winter)

Hot chocolate, wrapped in

Hot porcelain, wrapped in cold

Hands, wrapped in time-fog.

Catalog Poem

Real silverware, polished well, how it shines!
Yours for the price of two twenty-nine.

Candy-apple-red dress, like you’d see in a store
For sixty-three dollars and seventy-four.

Electrical football, players buzz like a hive
For a low price of seventy-eight ninety-five.

Stiff, rough, unstonewashed, bark-like and blue:
Work jeans for only forty-five ninety-two.

Baker’s yeast: white-brown grains to make your bread leaven
Will only cost two dollars seventy-seven.

Rocking chair kneeling on your porch as it repents:
Fifty-five dollars and fifty-five cents.

Lincoln-logs (brown-painted, roughly-notched sticks)
Go for thirty-five dollars, and cents twenty-six.

Purple polka-dotted parachute pants, eighties fun:
Used, for a price of five ninety-one.

Pleated pants, sized for most, in the color of slate
Cost just under a hundred: ninety-nine ninety eight.

Towering, teetering entry-way tree
Of a coat rack for twenty-five seventy-three.

Hot rod of a holly-berry Harley,
Spokes straining the wind like a field of barley,
Shining pipes with wide mouths that holler
For the low price of twenty-five thousand dollars.

The Practice of Self-Denial as a Substitute for Social Skills

I was struck by your beauty the first time we met;
Revelation, the second, that no closer we'd get.
My thoughts of you might often stray to that place,
So I buffer with hours--and three feet of space,
and I finish our chats, lay off light-hearted humor
Far before the worst gossip might start any rumor,
For relationships fish with a deepening hook.
You were taken, once; now you're especially took.
So it's not really you that I write to extol,
But my virtue and power of gross self-control.

To Strikeouts and Fourth Downs

I have the grip of a gorilla.

I won't give the ball away.

The punt's a big momentum-killer.

Pitching to contact's a mistake.

My first tries undershot the glorious,

But no matter where I land

I won't settle for vicarious.

I will live my life firsthand.

Bulking Up: an Increase in Weakness?

Oh folly, accident of birth!
That which I need is not of Earth,
and even less of human matter—
I've loved the first, but not the latter.
When I seek holiness or pray
All this meat gets in the way,
Though it's a fact that I've been thinner
and just as much (or more) a sinner.

Forty-Six Less 2, or My Ego’s Id

What happened the old me, the word-feast, the poet’s poet seed,

The feel-good, for-self’s-sake sower of stories?

What happened to the spiteless fighter of bias, the truthteller?

What happened to having nothing better to do but to do better?

How was he replaced by this, his bitter, cynical mimic

Who would search to scorch, excoriate, scourge from the earth

The least, littlest fleeting flake of genuine feeling?

Am I so fast to escape the fate of those whose delight is proved a lie

That I see the human species as polluters incapable of truth?

Are my ducts just in denial, or is my heart making bile?

On JL Abiyoso, Wednesday, Mar. 4

I've seen it on hangers, on rack upon rack—
What industrial culture would pass off as black.
Man can't torture in more than a pretty-dark gray,
Which at night can be seen from some distance away
Unless, by bad fortune, the power goes out.
Nature beats manufacture, with no contest or doubt.