Three poems

DISTRACTED AT BREAKFAST

A row of ants try to drown in a jam stain I’ve left under the table where I accidentally dropped my knife. I did not understand the celestial urgency that propelled them towards the jam. To bathe in it. To find oneself surrounded by beautiful sweet things. To never want to leave. I am distracted because someone is trying to sell me their opinion but I keep catching gulps of glimpses as the ants march to drown. It seems, decidedly, a metaphor of some kind that I’ve been offered by my own carelessness. By my inability to keep remembering that metal slides when placed in a suggestive position. What seems to me a few drops of jam is actually the country club pool with a jacuzzi for the group marching below. Most of living is just a matter of perspective. The first ant in line braces itself for the impact but material resistance is more than just an idea. Ask any Marxist. The material resistance of jam is more than memory, more than a broken constituency. The resistance is the jam. And the ants are the ants. I’m thinking of the pain now. Fragmented. If the ants don’t die drowning, they’ll be so sticky they’ll be skin-with-crumbs-stuck, the few remaining will be eaten by others who see them as walking sweetness. I notice more ants coming. excuse me I say to you as you continue detailing the huge rectal mass that exists in contemporary poetry, but I would like to look at the ants in silence or maybe I said yes I agree, no one writes poems anymore for some reason I can’t remember what my answer was but I do remember the ants going in, piling on top of each other.  

A CHILD’S SLED

A child’s sled propped up all summer against the front door of a house. Some things are best left abandoned. Your choice of destination was later invested as disaster-related alimony. Or maybe you really didn’t know when you pierced through the metal wire at the bottom of the hill. And on to the highway. Overcome with the fleeting opportunity of rain and motion. And for a moment the only thing the cars below could see was where the snails had laid to rest over that long period of stagnation on the sled. It was a recognizable form of snail slime, used to make the snails move to not move. Dried up and cracking. It was a recognizable form of not shooting a bird but just looking at it, the sled in the air, not quite falling but waiting.

AND CAME TO RUIN 

I took your counsel 

and now live 

in a soapbox-era dreamworld 

where there is nothing 

but sound and light 

I took your counsel and 

brought back the lost 

child in the fruit aisle. 

He cried the whole time

& I couldn’t calm him down,

Had nothing to offer 

But Dr. Dre couplets 

And the seaside spit in my mouth

He passed out from the fear 

in my living room

Whenever there is something

Wet, I become suspicious 

So, I took your counsel and 

now when I jump 

over puddles I do so

trying my hardest to

not look like an imbecile. 

I cry when a dog dies in the movies 

even though I hate them

Dogs are libertarians 

and they definitely do not

try to not look like imbeciles 

when they jump over puddles 

Every time I feel 

sorry for myself 

I walk around Tesco

naked so people can 

feel even sorrier for me 

Undivided attention 

Is difficult to have

It’s like what Kevin Spacey said

Wanting people to listen

You can’t tap them on the shoulder

Anymore you have to hit them with

A sledgehammer