Amy KING
Miniature Disasters
Accordion adventures, they're the best instrument
to windbag, to bleat, to push air through daisies
for an alphabet's sake. Androgyny and honesty
ought to play frozen roses on apocalyptic landscapes,
the landscape of Amy King's face fused
with artificial intelligence on which hers lies
infinitely predictable. Blindfolded books could do worse
than the diction of bedtime verse. These character-
enhancing scars make my crimes of fashion sag, but
lately, I'm craving minimum cravings, dusty old records
that smell like a wood-paneled basement,
posters of Elvis on velvet, and the evolution
of ethnic foods on the Lower East Side.
We've gone from Indian to Choctaw.
Eccentric is out. Burned to the basement's street.
Exploring the world in eye patches heralds
the latest craze: fonts, found objects, and photos
since sidelined. I'm into hurting myself through
high fashion photography today. Tomorrow, iconolatry
could, once again, suit the masses. Who wouldn't want
better breasts after lovin' like that though? I drink
my kittens from juice glasses; their peering-out
eyes squiggle the cockles of my heart. But before they
go down, they've been safely tested in gravity-defying
caffeines on an upstate farm, organic and free-range.
Most mews make the mark, and yet, these linguistics
rub off like a liquid eyeliner under drunken duress.
My poison's a dark brew or plasticine concoction
pulled from some New Jersey factory's moral ambiguity
as in, It's good for us to do less damage than we might.
When I go out for said fun, my boots reach my belly button.
Others venture all in assless pants hoping that repeating
the 70's could salvage our capacities for living.
Some revert to peacoats and pencil-thin mustaches, &
as such, I tried to tie you to a kitchen chair and make you sing
hallelujah – not my words – pouring cold coffee past your jugular.
The whole while we sat so prettily in the garden of the living room,
a real restoration began before the window box sun, gazing
out on roadside art driven by robots that keep appearing
without weeks rolling on. Eventually, you did
say something about holy and holy, so that in that verse
any serial killers caught making purchases from
secondhand stores across the nation fell into immediate
serendipity, never to enter subterranean homesteads again.
You grew taller then, an inversion of growing old,
of superfluous punctuation selling our bodies out
to sweater weather. We can only be so many tall tales at a time,
which is also a sort of travel that ignores vintage clothes wrapped
around the arms and legs of the undead, for they need warmth
as well. Even villains take walks in the woods,
though Woody Allen would have told us that, once there,
there's nowhere to go, nothing to look at. You need a place
with buildings and streets for those beings to lurch along,
gaping at so many others who appear wired with purpose
and accordions between street stalls, dodging bumpers
into headlights and whatever whirligigs befall,
insisting their lives depended on the dodge and dare from
propelling legs to stoke this sense of death within ourselves.
Inhabiting Consciousness
Anxious to garner the fat on the fly,
the first to cry mercy assumes the kingdom
of the human ghetto will be dethroned
for these earth-driven creatures who
thought we were Paris, animals of ourselves.
Atoms too tend toward material, then, stuck
in a cobweb of sameness, face our buzzing natures.
With impossibility, God colors the coffee,
lays out his crooked rain,
& sleeping still, I sleep until
the waking of this invisible question.
To rise for day is to deposit with shovels
and make the air a shapeless dream of spring?
We bachelors of approximate projects
go on to wing it and fly above on the serenade.
Taking the Time
When the only thing left to ask is when
will you join me in our gallery of projected
attractions, still another inquiry waits in the wings:
How has this seasonal Sunday of a continually
flowering sundown and everyone gliding
on sidewalks after dusk kept up
in matching short sets and white muscle tanks
without turning their emotional battle arms over
to the authorities? I mean, must we all be riddled by
the need to fix closeness and distance? In flip flops?
Downtown, I noticed the bent bowlegged shop woman
up ahead reading Proust at a faux-Parisian café.
Away from her hats and scarves, she refuses
a response to the usual cues. She pounds
down sentence lengths my own stomach balked at.
Business must be slow with this heat. A wind-up
hummingbird flew just below my ear to confirm
the ease with which I had put her in the awkward
position of acknowledging tomorrow before
it arrives, knocks hard, hands over baggage,
and changes its name to Yesterday.
One table over, the milky lily dares you to love it.
As in our cozy backyards, trees gulp along to keep
up with a carbonated atmosphere we imbibe in.
The yellow pearls hugging her loose skin are
a universe of shows that apologize
for each forgotten glance incited.
Their stories hope the distributing medicine
is followed by kinder gestures toward
a breeze that lifts our slips, opens our lungs,
and allows tradition, a la carte, to disguise itself.