St. Valentine's Recital

I want to write five poems
and assemble an audience
and recite each one slowly
Before each poem I will say
"This is about the only time
I've been in love"
And each time it will be true.
That is what you feel.

I crushed a bug on my wall with a book
Her insides flipped out,
Antennae bent wildly,
green, oozing. And,
i think I could see her heart.
I appreciated her honesty.
It was a beautiful expression of love.

You're sad and you don't even know it.
You're an illiterate typist, a blind glassblower.
You're the spoke that catches the hamster.
You're a metaphor constantly using wheels.

I have to write words like this
in order to feel like someone else.
It used to be that I'd just change
my hair or my clothes and that would be all.

I'm too old for that bullshit now.
I'm too old to not recognize how awful I am.

I judge people. I'm not that funny.
People think I treat women terribly.
I finally made all of those enemies I earned
because I opened my fucking mouth too much.

Bigmouth

Today I think my brain is in my back,
nestled in muscle, cradled by the bone,
sending messages from my blind-side:
be more flexible, worry less, do more
push-ups, just don't think, don't.

I cleaned my bathroom to clear my head
and I sprayed cleaning product in my eyes
on accident. It burned like things
I've never felt, because I avoid burning.

There are dreams I have sometimes
Where I'm yelling at some guy,
trying to pick a fight, and he's bigger than me.

And I don't talk my way out of this one,
and I wake up, scared, before the first punch.

Controlled Sonnet

I wrote series of facts and information
in numerically based grids to satisfy
a psychological urge only to realize
that things are often squares, and so am I,
and I create nothing but squares, squares
in my home and where my parents live.
I was raised on the square! I thrive
on the glowing rectangular frontier!
But the planet is a sphere. Gravity
rained knives on each side of my square,
collapsing the edges, ripping, tearing
it into nameless, shapeless entities

and then into a circle, the perfect thing.
I need to know God, madness, everything.

Time Capsule 2626

In those days God was a heap of blank
cassette tapes and twisted rabbit ears.
The people had more knowledge than sense,
and commercials could incite riots.
I guess things aren't any better now.
Our cars still have tires,
and jetpacks were outlawed a century ago.

Now, everyone knows that Elvis was real,

and that Microsoft was a myth,

and none of us want our meal
to come in a pill or powder.

We quit war, but that took the fun
out of football and professional wrestling,
and we grabbed our guns and invaded Mexico.
Religion finally gave up, then it massacred nations,
then gave up again. We made it illegal
Then again, cigarettes are illegal too,
but they're not going to smoke themselves,
though we have robots that can do that for us.
But, in those days, robots danced endlessly
in front of monster-truck dealerships.
The language was a series of clicks
bouncing off monstrous satellites in space.