Best Puzzle Ever

Once there was a girl who loved... let's say it was puzzles. Picture puzzles. She was new to the town and met a boy who said that he also liked picture puzzles. She went on and on about how she had just rediscovered picture puzzles. He told her that he had loved picture puzzles since he was a small child and had been thinking about them too lately. She told him about how they seemed to be a symbol of life and by reconnecting the disconnections you could piece things together that had been separated. She told him about her whole philosophy of life based on the picture puzzle. He said that his fascination with them was more personal and declined to talk about it.

They dated for a little while. His friends looked at her like she was funny in the head when she told them that they had connected over a conversation about puzzles because they had never really known him to show much interest in puzzles. She took this to be a sign that she knew about him, a special part of him, a secret soul part of him that he had shared with her and no one else.

For his birthday, the girl bought him a big beautiful picture puzzle. It was the biggest must beautifully intricate puzzle she had ever seen and they both were very excited when he opened the gift.

A few days later, she came to his house and found him in his room, with the puzzle spread out before him. She ask him if it was the best puzzle he had ever had. He smiled a big smile and dunked a piece of it in a jar of peanut butter and popped it in his mouth. He said yes. He had loved puzzles since childhood, but this was the Best Puzzle Ever.

Dinnertime Carol

Predictions gave
your voices away.
I knew you would arrive,
to sing the new
Christmas carols.
A Grecian Chorus
perches rakishly
about my counterpane.
I feel your talons,
I who hide under the blankets
from the creditor
I invited to dinner
in better times.
It was always just the theater,
the silvered twin of life.
Now there's Don Giovanni
playing in the heat ducts.
The Stone Guest arrives
dragging me down
taking my car.

sure nest

I wonder exactly what it was that was lost.

I wonder how it was lost.

I wonder if it was tossed too messily

for any hands to catch

like rice

or by being too small or too wispy

for his clumsy hands to grip

or too big.

if it escaped

if it was was stolen

If it was thrown away

...by accident

...by accident on purpose

If it was given up for dead and was buried somewhere

...and is waiting to sprout

...if is it entombed there

If, quietly,

I placed what I see him without

in the sure nest of his hands...

if he would make me take it back

just because he lost the first one.

The Birdman of Detroit

The dream was that I was living in a really post-industrial wasteland
and everything was vacant and beautiful and crumbling but poisoned.
The kind of place where they could never build a house or school or
anything because even the dirt was deadly.  There were no weeds
even, barely any trees and what trees there were were those unkillable
Sumac trees.

After maybe being out all night ...and at that part of the morning where
nothing makes sense anymore someone took my arm and told me he had a surprise for me and that it was the coolest thing ever.  I didn't know this person but was interested in anything that could make anyone have any enthusiasm about anything anymore.

We went to a tall building that was in a severe state of disrepair.
You could tell from the outside that the upper floors had fallen in and
the windows were clear to the sky.  You could see the the scaffolding
was showing around the top of the building from the outside.  The
upper floors were stripped of bricks.  It looked dangerous.  The
interior of the building was also stripped by the metal pirates that
break into old buildings for scrap iron and copper.  There was a
staircase... like a grand marble staircase.  We went up a bunch of
floors on this marble staircase then when that staircase ended we
walked to a metal staircase that went around the periphery of the
building's interior.  The building appeared to be getting round as we kept climbing through the place where the floors disappeared.  There was a giant wrought iron round dome window at the top.  All of the glass had fallen or broken out of making a giant black birdcage.

We went up into the cage and there were probably six to ten other
people up in the cage.  As the sun rose, everyone started making
birdcalls.  The guy explained to me that all of the birds had left
Detroit.  In order to make the sun rise now, people had to go up into
the top of the building... and make all of the bird noises for the
whole city.  So, as the sun rose... the group of us whistled away
happily.  In a big birdcage.  Atop a building.  Somewhere above the
wreckage of Detroit.  It made perfect sense.

Fight Or Flight Cartography

Flatland's kamikaze
suicide attack squadron
ambushed me in
the bathroom of the bar.
Four sheets to the wind
my hold bursting with
homesick dragons
the U.S.S. Edge of The Earth or Bust
went decisively
way too far east
and came back round.
Completely batshit
fucking retarded
beautiful idiot that I am
I forgot
it's a globe,
not a map.

Kabuki Blues

not perfect
know that
moving  toward
not there
may I never arrive

the learning
the mistakes
because I  am
not correct
may I never arrive

always open
to changes
a wrong thing
not learned
may I never

the process
beautiful, painful
only way
of teaching
may I  never

I wake up
I stand on
the  balcony
watching  rain
a lightning rod

may you never learn
may you never arrive
my cold hand
your warm  hair
a lightning rod

please may you
may I never awake
to  learning other
or to arriving there

Caffe Venezia

The smoking section sign...
each night it was at large and
drifted backward table by table.
Never where it should have been.
We wrote on the bathroom walls
until they gave us a chalkboard.
Then we wrote on the walls
around the chalkboard
as the staff played
Miles Davis "Kind of Blue"
on repeat. On repeat.

You pictured yourself as a
Kerouac or Bukowski,
but you couldn't drink yet...
and college towns are
hard places to find a good,
hard, underage drink.
So we were the Expatriates
we were the Hemingways
we were the Fitzgeralds.
Stains and cigarette ash on
our vintage wool and cottons,
on my beaded dress...
We were purists then:
we dressed like grandparents
and read things in French.

Our tongues lodged so very
firmly in our cheeks
that it became impossible
to talk so we watched
our condescension drip slowly
down the plate glass window
picturing the hole we'd punch
in reality by going out
young and beautiful.
We'd outlived Kurt Cobain.
We thought we were brave
but we were
just
young
and terribly
over-caffeinated.