‘Darkling I listen; and, for many a time/ I have been half in love with easeful Death’
Keats, Ode to a Nightingale
I'd like to book an easy death, please....
In memory of my teenage hero
When my son and I watch the anime "One-Punch Man", I always think of
Chuck Norris. All those jokes about the invincible Texas Ran...
there’s a window/maybe it’s an opportunity/and maybe it’s just a window/beneath the grey sky/a maroon couch sits on hard wood/i sit on the hard wood/friends tal...
When my son was small, we watched a lot of Hollywood cartoons.
Dory the fish’s memory became an important leitmotif.
I can’t count how many times Dory
...
I watch an X-Files episode about a murderous doll, while slicing potatoes with a borrowed mandolin for potatoes au gratin. I let the dog out onto the deck, dri...
Which I think is kinda bullshit
When I was an employee
I had a slight professional inclination
To pretend his brand of millennial male humor
Was something...
After My Fifteen-Year-Old Self
the cab ride home
the long way home
the poem no one read
the friend who wasn’t in the end
the Plot? Suspense? God and gore...
Did you watch him humbly recite his acceptance speech in French?
Did you happen to notice after the show, he acted
so stoked & grateful to be chatting...
My haircut wasn’t going well.
I looked like how seashells
feel when they are first sewn
to the shore. The person
cutting my hair explained
that this was pa...
Last time I saw you, we were trapped in a photo booth on planet Mars. I traced the anatomy of your knife sheath, your kydex holsters. Although we were unlicense...
Loyalty is molecular,
rasps the night, its throat scored
with string lights.
But sister-in-law—
Klonopin sometimes
unrhymes your DNA from my wife’s.
...
Did I mistake the water again
for forgiveness this morning? Washing
the piled-up dishes, the horseflies
in this sun-sticky mid-afternoon
buzz their uncoded ...
No one noticed when Icarus fell
either, one leg kicking
out of water,
the ploughman too deep
in his work to hear
the splash,
thinking about the next
...
Half mortal, half witch,
a twitch of my pert freckled nose
will bring tuxedoed warlock minions
bearing strawberry ice cream
with rainbow sprinkles,
Malibu ...
I am 170lbs and hitting a dab pen in the parking lot of a
Jewel-Osco. Home is the hospital in Naperville and the
one in Lake County and another one in Racine....
the bros and their podcasts,
the bros and their hurt;
consider their cherished
FACTS DON’T CARE ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS;
think of their parents,
steroid-ho...
Dysfunctional relationships aren’t nearly as fun
as they seem in the movies. No wacky sidekicks
cracking wise or hilarious hijinks begging
to ensue. It’s jus...
Keanu Reeves plays a failed angel who wants to have a successful career –
he is tasked with protecting drivers who use mobile phones on the road –
Keanu Reeve...
—after the film by the same name
A dying bloodwood tree in the backyard needs
timbering, and my neighbor, Jimbo, the amateur
butcher, bullies his cuniculture...
I have to tell you something. I need
to get this off my chest
Back sometime in 2009, I kept my phone on the entire flight
(by accident, of course) and
nothi...
A divine can in my hand teases me,
all beckoning with its colours of blue and white.
I am unable to resist, and so I’ll be
inhaling its vital light.
I’ve ...
The candles are fake burning in the new old windows of my movie set house
Like I have died and been reincarnated as Kevin Mcallister.
Still, I chose to pick a...
Algorithms may aggravate,
but they never forget.
They remember your needs:
wedding guest dress,
cheap meals,
how to survive a recession,
baby shower gif...
not literally, of course
every asshole i have eaten
has been boneless
but through the magic of song
i have conjured the brundle pod
and i am brundlezevon,
...
I.
Nebraska is Never Anything
Iowa passed in a series of
collapsing, unrelated images.
out of the fog, out of the fog, they said.
Cropped grasses and win...
Listening party line long
Paralleling the main drag
In this Bound Brook but not really
Standing in for some other unknown
Early autumn in “Central” Jersey
...
A found poem
a kind of green light in
the western sky. it
stopped beyond the
pine trees— a distant,
heavenly body. there is
nothing to fear: god’s
han...
Maudlin House wants me to write something weirder—
It’s a no on the love poem in the style of Yeats.
Fair enough. “Never give all the heart” and all that…
Ma...
I wake pale and encircled
encircled by a purpling
A purple encircling
encircling my orbits
I orbit strangely
strangely orbited
My gravity uncertain
...