WHERE PARENTS END GOVERNMENT BEGINS

The moon has crawled inside us
and girls are dressed in puppies outside.
Your mother tells me these
observations are inconveniently friendly,
but breaking the law never tasted so good.
I just wish you were cleverer in your comebacks;
I can’t rewind my eyes.
So with these plastic prisons we go:
people have such pretty faces,
even when they’re ugly. Or as granny used to say,
Pretty is as pretty does.
I’m caught in the corner huffing perfume.
And even he, with his transitional hair,
doesn’t look specific enough, the hollow-eyed bebe
who has unfortunately asked me to dance.
I take my wallflower baby steps, at last.
In the end, the only endgame is panic,
so let’s not charge that on full blast just yet.
Let’s take the pope approach for now. 
Can I buy my place on the moon already?
I’ll go there with you, to the place of infinite space
if you respect Amerika, where nutshells still hurt
my teeth with all of the gnawing and iCloud space.

 

 

WOMAN DESCENDING THE STAIRCASE

The visible leg is repeated in mirrors,
the material ego
of following a year, the legend of the artist
in fishnet nylons making herself up.
On competitive occasions: coal smudges
run rivers into copies of her face
imprinted on paper plates
so that we eat off her eyes, lick her lips
to sluice the dregs.  Later,
Float the stairs and there you are.
On a pedestal and then some.
 
My interest is no longer in an immediate afterlife.
My interest is no longer immediate.
Christmas lights surrounding,
I thought you said the scales began to fall off, but
I hadn’t even begun drinking;
Xmas has that effect on me.
Thus the corseted waist drawn on by masters
is off the ball.  My interest
is now in the person
who paints us in swaths of Gerhard Richter,
a real echo, the song of composition’s postmortem.