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imagine all the ways
you’d like to be identified
spiraling out like galactic arms
from a center which is actual fate

yes fate was discovered
and contacted there was a raven
with a hot dog slice in its mouth
it had no beak just lips and teeth
all very unsettling
and overall unhelpful

imagine making out
with a raven
do not imagine
getting to second base
trust me

imagine that friend
who used to be dressed in priest clothes
is now dressed in ghost skin
and runs into a church
but the church people don’t think
he’s a naked ghost
so it’s not that kind of thing
it’s a kind of thing that’s upsetting
in a different way

imagine trying to explain
the way in which
that was upsetting for you
to a raven with lips and teeth

imagine someone you know
is standing in front of you
but when you say something
like do you remember
and you say second person’s name
the first person turns around
and has a third person’s face

imagine that but differently
because you’re doing it wrong
and i can’t figure out what’s so hard
about the thing i’m asking you to do

imagine you’re imagining what
i’m asking you to imagine o.o

imagine changing clocks
three times a year instead of twice
and in the same direction

imagine how far we’d get

imagine a better answer
imagine a dumber question
imagine beans in a stranger salad

imagine a hand applying pressure
to the wound on your body
keeping all the garbage inside
which is how you learned
you’re wounded and full of garbage

imagine people crowding
into the megalopolis
to love more profoundly
on motlier millions

imagine freshly ground coffee
freshlier dammit o.o
fleshly ground coffee

imagine the washing machine
baked you a cake
and instead of being like
wow what a special washing machine you are
you say i would also like some punch

you would have to be an animal to say that
you would have to be an animal to speak
or a plant

imagine a booth in an outback steakhouse
as humiliation as heavy as a star
starts folding you into the cushions
and it smells like all your insecurities
farted at the same time
and some peed a little bit

imagine being folded
so flat and tiny
only light
could have made you

imagine the voices
of your self-hate speech
in state-authorized protest
marching behind you with drums
whistles and megaphones
chanting in the first person

imagine the righteous indignation

imagine someone with kind eyes
slipping a scrappage program notice
into your mouth

imagine molecules and phenomena
ending every second you spend
looking at your feet

imagine being able to cry again
almost four years later
and the loss of everything that broke
feels truer than the having

imagine a truer way of holding
a person in searing pain

imagine everything that ended and broke
had its own music
and it’s got so quiet
even the crying is silent

imagine losing the unseeing
unspeaking rage
you could always count on
imagine the loneliness
imagine the lightness

imagine the injuries
and indignities that formed
in and around your eyes
express the way in which
you are beautiful now

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Nothing ever happens, she complained.
That’s because we’re tired, I explained.
Certain circumstances are vying to defeat us.

Another thing I’ve noticed,
she continued, is that there’s never any mention
of your family, about your actual life.

Be very quiet, I whispered.
Sound travels differently on other planets.
Knowing a thing doesn’t make it right.

And something else I don’t like, she went on to say,
as if it were important that I should understand —
it’s the way your poems end…

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The post Acknowledgement appeared first on The New Absurdist.

Oh fiddian crake
brined in battered sunlight
weeping shorn wool
and skin reel flake

Oh fiddian crake
drake sighed and cresting
clatterbroom sky child
three heart strings make

Orphean crake
of cricksunder dawns
the pillow stuffing
beaked saphron forsake

Oh festering crake
in madram feathers
timbermawed songnail
hammered on the take

Oh fiddian crake
endangered mortician
carker ready boneduster
the last of you drowned, in the lake.

Fascists Raising Children

Sweet child of mine
pleather to my leather
product of my lather
my streng and rime

Sweet child of mine
slick rickshawed from mother
her vessel a-puepoured
her blood yours to dine

Sweet seed of mine
spent in my lip-piggy
Hormagaunting right
grow piquant vine

Churl child of mine
ball dropping ingrate
voxiferous spawn
smacked into line

Sweet child of mine
raise one ham fist high
do as I will you
slit pill-faces pink, grow up fine.

Fascists Planting Bulbs

Perfect Garden.
Where no green poppies
grow to umbra and
pollute eden.

Perfect Garden.
Fragrant pesticide
belifluous and
ordered and ridden.

Prunéd Garden.
White thumbed thresh machine
trimmed drooping strange fruit
from birch wooden.

Fickle Garden. 
Potassium nit 
rate, a free burning 
to ugly roots. 

Perfect Garden. 
Rich and uniform 
monochrome and tasp 
with plenty of bone, to feed soil.

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a woman builds a paper boat 

out of overdue notices 

and lets it drift across her kitchen floor. 

Her daughter folds spoons into antennae—

tries to catch voices 

from a radio station that doesn’t exist

but still hums like something alive. 

Outside, 

the neighborhood leans toward fire.

Mailboxes swallow letters unopened.

Doors forget how to open back. 

At the bus stop, 

a man tapes Polaroids 

of things he’s lost 

to the underside of the bench: 

a dog’s tooth, 

a ribcage x-ray, 

a love letter with half the ink eaten by mold. 

This is 

not an edge 

but a ritual of almosts. 

Some call it surviving. 

Others call it rehearsing for disappearance. 

The woman lights a candle 

under a colander 

and says it keeps the roof from falling in.

Who are we to argue? 

By dusk, the paper boat 

has made it to the front door. 

No one opens it. 

They just watch.

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