belz

Jog like you’ve never been kneecapped.
Jump like you don’t live in shame.
Traipse like you’re not made of feathers,
and nap like you’re already dead.
Win like you’re not tired of losing,
and lose like you still want to play.
Sing like your dad isn’t drinking.
Shop like you’ve never been dumped.
Dance like your exes are watching.
Shriek like you’re not getting stabbed.
Barf like a toilet’s nearby, lease
billboards like yesterday’s here,
and let the peppers sauté like nobody’s
coming for dinner, like nobody’s
ever passed by this way—nor will they.
Tweet like you aren’t abandoned.
And live like you’ve never been loved.

• • •
 

What galls
me about Gallic
art is the balls
  it took to make
it all so phallic.
  I mean, apart
from O’Keefe’s flowers
everything is—
basically towers.

• • •
  

I do not think that I could drill

So many holes I could not fill

Them with the sand from every beach.

That, and my name’s not “Stacy Keach.”

• • •

From one point of view, now is twenty years ago.
That point is, of course, twenty years from now,
Standing perhaps where you’re standing, eating
The prune you’re eating as we watch this show.
I’ll suggest changing the channel: “I’m so bored.”
As prune juice and seeds spill down your arm
You remind me to do something I’d been
Putting off for decades. Let’s say, for the sake
Of argument, that something is planting a prune tree.
I might plant an entire grove today, but
That won’t have moved our constabulary
Any closer to the sea. Oceans between you and me,
Jefferson. I want you the way I want myself:
Somewhere buried in the remote if magical past.

• • •
 

Ayy, b! See the effigy?
A chai jay kale. Amen, Opie.
Cure Estée UV. Double UX,
Why? NZ.

Now I know my
ABCs. Next time won’t
using with me.

• • •

The wounds of a friend are hot, fiery kisses.
The reprimands of an enemy border
on flattery, perhaps even side-hugs.

A burning kiss, delivered by a dear friend,
plants deep into the middle of the mouth,
and the fruit thereof is being less of a jerk.

So much more unintriguing are the passing
compliments of those with whom one
is connected socially—and vaguely, at that.

For baubles and trinkets passed from
bored hand to bored hand are not even
returnable to Target: they are vapor.

They honestly remind me of surface rust
on the fender of a newer Kia. Who knows
how it got there? Polish it off, and roll on.

• • •
 

Before I tell you what happened,
Let me give you some context.
Many years ago I won a lifetime
supply of marshmallows. I know.
Sounds great until you consider
the amount of care that goes
into keeping endless marshmallows
fresh: Letting them out for air
and sun, “turning” them regularly
in their boxes. Verged on a full
time job until I met Bernie, a
woman in my neighborhood who had
a “soft spot” for marshmallows.
Well one day, and I’d say quite
recently, but that isn’t true—
it was a long time ago now, several
decades at least—one day Bernie
set them all out for a moment
of sun when just out of nowhere
one of those devil beating his wife
popup sunshowers came and went
and so did my fortune in marsh-
mallows, and so eventually did
Bernie, into a sticky, whitish mass.

•••
 

Hello. My name is Peter Jordanson,
and I am a cynical clichologist
at Tunaversity of Youronto.

You probably know me better
as a biter of rooks, and not just any
rooks: extremely popular ones.

So what has made me cynical?
I’m glad you axe. More like what
hasn’t made me cynical at this point.

Clichology, as a field, continues
to wane, even as I myself wax.
And no rook compares to the first.

I guess it’s just the feathers on you
that bring out the man in me.
And I know I can’t help myself

as you soar over land and sea.
Tastes like the first rook,
tastes like the very first rook.

• • •
 

I do, sometimes, wonder
about you. Not where you are,
particularly, or what you’re
doing — but why you are.
Why, indeed! Answers one
lobe of my brain to another
while the other two sit
whispering godless gossip
between them, like when was
Melanie kicked out of the
Strobes? Who lit Max’s pad
on fire till it dwindled into
its own white-hot acorn shell?
Even if the lobes know,
they’ll never tell, of course.
They’re too busy designing
sunlight made entirely out
of an end-times horse freshly
emerged from the bowels
of my own personal hell.
Which brings us back to why.
I don’t know your purpose,
Issachar Gravestone McFly;
but I’m 90% sure u have herpes.

• • •
 

The late afternoon sun, like a great ball
of burning gasses, shines in the sky,
which for its own part looks bluish.

I, like a man sort of down on his luck,
sit in my living room. Evening comes
on like the latter part of the day,

but miscellaneously—

as if perhaps any other day would have
done the trick just fine, and then cooled,
as a poet might say—“as cooling embers.”

The only painfulness here is perhaps
a lack of self-awareness in a city now
night-bound, a lack of authentic being.

For like a drowsing shadow have I become
a half-asleep outline of the man
I once was. But I was more evil back then.

Next, morning, like the break of a new day
will overtake this teeming metropolis
as though it were a city full of people

brought to life by light from above.
I love, during a brilliant mid-morning,
a brisk stroll around the town park!

• • •