Time is the table where names rest at meetings.
The sustained disappointment of finding a familiar chair sits down.
Pour many glasses of water to get even with the clock.
To the jobless
and depression heavy among us a resourceful Mother said:
Be an Alcoholic!
Many forgotten longtime soaked in Vermouth afternoons
dried one at a time.
No one has a name that feels important
or even inviting to touch anymore.
People can be caressed with stories for a while
if all swear off authorship.
So: Just leave it at I'm an alcoholic like Mama said.
Is sloth a form of gagging?
Is greed a form of gluttony?
Is lust a form of wrath?
All are punish'd with the
hard labor of lying down until that
devolves into an absorbed hunger for peanut butter lusts.
Knife the side of the container and sure enough it is see through.
Then everything is clear, and the thirsts are still weeping from within.
People who love for more than a night draw hearts that resemble
apple
cores.
Some commit crimes just to know when their last meal will be.
Others would rather hang bottles by the neck until they are dead.
The people who know
neither the time nor the place fatten themselves
with eating and drinking
when really they are farthest and sorriest
in their
holiday of friends and photographers flashing
a seizure of empty togetherness
under the assumption they deserve,
and they do.
Somebody sentence humanity to another round or anything else that might make
life
one fewer day at a Time.
"For each has struggled
to construct a metaphor
to explain the unexplainable
within the context of its own culture."
—Galactus The Devourer Vol. 1, No. 1,September 1999
if faith is a mustard seed,
then too much fate is a relish packet asleep on the tile
tell the movers to notice
what is squashed when the mountains have to go
love is what an iron does to an ironing board
because a dress came between them
death is what floats
on the top of the sea
to replace all of the scuttled things
sorrow is a dinosaur slowly turning
into a plastic capsule
in a dry bathtub
masturbation is the only form of self help
that could really use a book deal
nevermind microeconomics
to live is to go through withdrawals on Easy Pay
to keep your current plan: do nothing.
a new amount is automatically gone
imagine breathing those last few breaths
on a slide almost as long as eternity
the person headed down after you
will wonder how to speed up like you did
when bodies pile in the wood-chips
the secret of getting ahead in life will be out
let yourself relax
until what is going on
does not know you
She bided her time making a knife out of a fork,
& he still took way too long to fall asleep,
but when he did...
She spooned him with it.
KJ would like to dedicate these poems to his friend Alyson who was nice enough to text him the phone number to a library he really needed to call.