NET WORTH

Everything I make is technically

A gross domestic product

Limp amends

Future offspring

Spittling and shitting

In swaddling clothes

I dream and the earth trembles

I don’t recall falling asleep

I snooze through sequenced alarms

Their mounting urgency

And my tepid response

Moving in apposition

 I form a committee about

 My lack of control

 Once a week

 We meet in the produce aisle

 Of the free market

 Where freedom is not

 Salivating over citrus

 We register competition

 And if I am turned on

 By someone’s invisible hand

 Each climax adds a minute to my life

 Another minute to be occupied

 As I always ought to appear

SORE TITS

What makes me touch

Each fabric in a row of dresses

As I grasp the concept of an enemy

How it is like nursing an asp

With its little circular mouth

Ringing around the threat

You give what you get

It’s a pose I’ll entertain

A mediocre indulgence

Like supermarket sushi

As you digitize altars

Devoted to your symmetry

The televisual drama

Veers gothic and off-format

Peeling foil off a stale fact

Klieg lights of recognition

Skate across the substance

Of my boutique concerns

And sympathetic notions

Which mattressed me too long

TOILET WATER 

I want to say something about

The obdurate slowness of a day

With nothing at stake

When time slips into something more comfortable

When I weigh the austerity of a bank

Against the unknowable capacity of the future

The circumstances that can land a person

In a shallow grave on the Jersey Shore

Beyond the pale but above the fold

A moment of silence

For a craving for justice

There’s nothing I can do besides

Put my cat on a diet

Prepare the trophy cabinet for its strange signifiers

Plot against the advances of a preordained wrinkle

I’ve made zero effort to monetize my wellness

However temporary

Preferring instead to challenge my organs

A kind of jeopardy played to a lullaby

Lottery numbers drawn from fortune cookies

Being alive is a biohazard

Still I nurture an impulse to nurture

It’s more autobiography than analysis

But I accept the moon’s critique of the sun

And I’m a quick study

I can resemble a mirror in the dark

It’s midnight in America

There’s nothing that can’t be bottled and sold

A fragrance line aiming to capture

The scent of a coupon stuffed mailbox

The fate of the African elephant

Humanity’s long trick candle wick

Toiling to stay lit