Nothing At All

Phosphorescent star shapes
Beam their cookie-cutter beams
Of pale green outer space
Against a ceiling.

I stare,
And I wait.

I might be waiting for

One to jump
Real rocket flare
For a sad wish.

I might be waiting for
The tape to give,
Letting one loose,
Ninja-star neon
In my left eyeball.

I might be waiting
For nothing at all.

I might just be looking

At an 11-year-old’s starry night
Of plastic space shapes
And nothing at all.

Persian Rugs

Laid out sacrificial not-saint
On meditative Persian rugs,
You are less.

Thread spins hair knots

Of not-saints deep into
Not-saint rugs of meditation,
And you are less.

8:00 PM coffee

Soaks Persian tendrils,
Matting down mats
Of even less.

Maybe

If your eyes bulged,
There would be more than
Old genie lamps filled with espresso,
And carpets that can’t fly due to
Not-saint dead weights.

Flamingo

I can’t bend my legs
Like real flamingos do.

Permanently perched

On a rotation of tenants,
I am sun-drained pink
Fooling blue water waves
Of a green lawn.

Had my feathers

Been made of feathers,
They’d be tufted and pestered
By the same reoccurring car alarm
Of each forgetful resident
Like a sing-song bird
Got its throat stuck
In the sing-song,
But instead they lay
Flat monotonous plastic.

Sweltering sun rays

Come down in boiling drops
Like rain without water.

I wonder

When I’ll melt;
Pink Pepto pool

Of no real bird.

Cat Lady

Dream hands
Wrap ribbon fingers
Around dream ankles,
Making a real gift
Out of it,
In a dream car
Of a dreaming head.

Rolling images
Of fingertips
And stick shifts
Shake, rattle, and roll
Wet dream orgasms
I don't believe
I even felt.

No climax.

Fantastic dimension
Can't incubate
At the call
Of my morning alarm.

REM falls out.
So do gift-wrapped ankles.

Fluffed feline tails
And sandpaper tongues
Fall in.

Some women
Dream of cats
And wake up
To men.

I dream of men
And wake up
To cats.

Bad Kimchi

The knife gleams
Without light
In the wrong hands:
His.

Perhaps when the kimchi has gone bad,

Or his inner cyborg ranted robotic orders
To drape a red bandana of no cloth
Upon his throat.

It was bad Asian food

Or Terminator programming
That stripped him
Bare buttocks
In the dark corner
Of the kitchen,
Waiting for the
Korean take-out
Delivery man
To enter—
The knife still gleaming.

It was

One or the other
That stuck the samurai sword
In the dry wall
Or yelled “rape” into raindrops
Soaking boxer briefs.

It was

One or the other
That cried tequila tears
Because he wants to fail
And can’t.

"There are rats jumping in my stomach."

Hunger sets
Like jumping rats
Ricocheting off stomach walls
In some indigenous Africa.

I'd like to be
Scurrying hairless tail whips
In your intestinal cage.

I've practiced tip-tapping
In non-air-conditioned stairwells
Because I know you're warm.

I've burrowed
Tunnels in the dirt
Like replicate digestive tubing.

Dreamt of
Bowel-bouncing rodent claws
Sinking into fleshy ducts,
Meandering me far along tracts,
But I can always find the center
Of your pulsating hot spot.

But what really happened is
I put my Moses
In a basket.

Sent him
Down the river
With a poem
And a curable
Disease
To find
His pharaoh.

It took a week
For the waves
To empy out
His last echoes,
Turning me all
Basket case skull,
Brain weave
Brain waves.

Today,
I bathe
In the Nile.

Question Mark

Question marks huddle
Arial black splotch fuzz
In the shape of California
In the high corner of my room
Like pulsating Daddy Long Leg clumps
Elongated.

They’re muddy

And indefinite
And never have
An answer.

They emit the same

Quiet buzzing sting
Of an unoccupied
Phone line;
Empty echoes
Of the hanging ring
When I pick up
To no one.

“Plastic polymer casing,

Or will you have skin?”

“Lover language casts out another.

Do you accept?”

“?”

“?”

“?”

I don’t have

An answer.

Eye decay.