Two Poems Taking their Respective Stanzas

You can score it when you try to break it. If the edge is serrated you'll make it. When the what wore the how out; a knot tying bow; bought the dough but don't know how to bake it

Salted pretzel alighted a lark. Flash! The soda ignited a spark. Now I scrape off the ash (When I asked for a dash it outpoured from an unherald'd hark).

Keep Up with the Switches, Decide to Unquit Elsewhere

I want to read her from my known-poem-thrown poem--it picked a topic when the West was unshown (A bit myopic now that best been done grown). Grabbed a ticket to the train stop packed poem--Don't care a nickel bout my suitcase misstown (Awake at trainstop lights and her blue cell phone). Ate an apple of the mistracked switch thrown--Plopped the top off of a three stacked cream cone (Into alligator pursed-lips dial tone). Warped the siding off my new wall all lone--Fear alighted when the seam seamed missewn (I mistinkered 'til it sprung past mine own).

My eyes grew tired of reading for content. I decided to try it anew. If the form was the content all along then what the fuck was I doing searching so hard behind the form. I needed a new structure so I invented a new way of approaching the form that was already there, like climbing into bed up the fire escape. I began to read for the font. For the sounds of words in my head. For the sounds of words as I mouthed along. But somewhere along the way I lost how those pieces fit together. A disilusão. So I grew bored and saw the houses as spackle and drywall and not for the families that I no longer imagined inside. My life and those of the friends I had still played out in the roles of audiences in the theater of books and televisions and KDWB and yet those politicians I see on the news still represent me to the extent they now do in a feedback loop of state highways and streaming video and over speculated upon housing, spangled with the thought that we're pilgrims and birth-righted both. If Obama's a foreigner, he'll survive. At worst a special on VH1. Malia will get her time in the sky. Atticked until we burst. I couldn't find a job so I found one that I don't like. Feeling obliged to something I don't want to do. Quite a first for the former word reading boy I once were.

CIT down and take your pill
it's a hard one to swallow
But with a heart some sizes smaller
than it'll take to save Christmas
We'll find some way to inject capital
Back into the roast beast.

distort

When I hit the net there's no need to pack
Never need for doing laundry you ain't comin' back
I spike you center court like a heart attack

Dipped and douséd dumplings
Wanton disrespect
The hors d'oeuvres ordered plainly
Then drowned down in neglect

In glacial, sparkled windows
Reflections, looking through
The brainstorms overreaching
'til the moment they're unknew

Maintenance, maintenance, grabbing at straws in the dark
I perambulate with a baby in tow
and we gracefully pass through the park
The onlookers gawk as we go on our walk
But their kids always circle like storms
But who's keener eyes: those judging outside,
Or the ones in the midst of the swarms?

Karaoke karaoke, a sideways syllabic achoo,
I just had a lisp that I lost late last night
with the hay season what will I do?
My medicine's gone, like night unto dawn
I borrowed the time and it's blue
I knew knots to tie, yet nothing that I
Could lace up and call it a shoe.

Help me out, I'm in a jam
that oozes orange and sticks
and so I'm stuck, my pores are crammed
No way out of this fix

I need a job, I need a house
A doormat to defile
With rushéd footsteps, back-brushed hair
to join the rank and file

A boredom dawns with each new day
the next quite like the last
A boredom wanes and goes away
but then returns, alas

I saw on teevee, one Glenn Beck
Advise us not to squirrel
Away our hopes, "instead suspect
of ACORN" said the churl

Yet the more I linger in this state
the less of it I'm sure
how much my privilege will pro-rate
and how much I'll abjure

But now my moocow as self doubt
begins to ring her bell
It seems so childish just to shout
over the noise, to quell

For now this marmalade abides
and may just feekr on
I'll learn to live with syr'py tides
Until one day, I'm gone

Be bored as we may
the great grand grind
ain't gonna to help any
In fact, it's only
fixing to get worse
Like a backyard tire swing
Rehung with discount string
Whose moocow light enough
to stay aloft and sway?

'Cause my moocow came crashing
Down to earth,
Like the lord Bob Saget
Handed me a camera and started it rolling
And I turned it inward on the herd

A Key Change and A Time Signature

Two miles away from making bail
and six cigarettes short of party
A soft yet accentuated smell lingers
just beneath your lip
like a milk mustache that
you just forgot to wash

Half a centimeter of fingernails
from the last clear thoughts you
pieced together, two more minutes
and you'd have written yourself a book
but instead you've got two used
ticket stubs and a couple small salsa stains

Which color transit do you stub your ticket
for now? When you can only count the people
you know in this city backwards, penned inside
your overcoat and more decay exposing
itself more with each chatter

But as long as you're at least one sunset
from finding her again, and two missed
meals from those deep deep pangs, stand
up and move about, because your blood's
beating out still that slow waltz
When she's been tangoing away
for about six or seven of Trebek's Champions,
those finding the questions to ask
when they've been given all the answers

I gnawed away and yawned, betrayed
Belied beside my flooded eyes
Its piquant flavor made it hard to savor
And then fresh milk's our only savior
My moocow gleams at astral scenes
Does maths and finds the astral size
In light curves greyed by errors made
They're lacrimate in the prospects of a
Tender ending, fender bending
Losing teeth and faith in faeries
Distrusting dawn to show more than hide
Or that my reign will affect a great abide
So chew
Or you
will fry

A pimple popped with an audible thwop
as it smashed against the mirror
And I stained my sock in a precocious dollop
The fell well below it's target much atop
The end, culinary career.

Maw Maw, More Manitobas

Gary gave a dollar to the man who took the bills
but the bottom of the bookshelf fit me think
of fastened thrills of a brand new opened novel
with the creases be all ours, so I took my money
backwards telling time atop'a flowrs when
a moocow was a baby that is when we called her calf
My initial thought about her was to bring her to the
aft but the starboard side awaited an arrival of her too
when the cows are born a sailing there's not one thing we can
do to decide for them their future undirected by the stars
lanterns astrolabes and compass cannot fixate them as ours but
the time ol' badge of songcraft and a mellifluous voice of
a solitary siren sending sounds without a choice whether she
can stand the tempest wit'a battled verse 'r two or if she must
stay on firm ground wit da tunes that we all knew, yea while we
were all escaping Gary grew an inch or two as Adamastor
played billy-goat (boar) in aborting all my crew

Chartered Bocks

A Diner at Dinner
R.A. Stevesson

He penned a poem without thinking of it so
A beast, unleashed, dividing
Onward it spread like toast
on bread
chars, burns
all coinciding

He sat off-put in his brandnew authored soot
Unpleased, knockkneed, time-biding
When came alas a fresh
backdraft
Ash tost,
and slowly gliding

And by his seat, landing flatly at his feet
Afresh, abreast, deriding
Were thoughts construed, betrayed
renewed
Or lost
in their colliding?

Willies Wondrous Wandrings

Will went on wondrin'
Since the moocow wouldn't say
If they'd e're throw in the towel;
'nstead told him to choose the way

Yet Willy wished she would've
Because broken to the bone
Coward willy couldn't mount for
What it took to pick alone

As fate drew near
Young Willy's fear
turned reason on its head
the boy called out,
"Although you doubt
that I won't soon be dead,
my uddered friend
may meet her end
save that I intervene
I shan't think twice
'bout sacrifice
On forward, clear and keen"

Any deep down inside young Willy
He had held his only choice
For when fine friends find fair trouble
Even willies find their voice

Bishop Brown

Bishop brown
came to town
Saw our flag
and he's torn it down

How did he look
when he hit the horiz'
Smelling of Juniper
Flames in his eyes?

He spoke long on truth
And could kill with a joke
Bowled-over, buggy bound,
Bent-over, broke.

Watched how we spit
and the street sweepers too
threw out a line
for the boys cleaning shoe

Snarked, snaking, sermonizing
Splitting betw'n
Strawberry milkshake-maker
Cheira of gin

Now with his passing
Like a cloud on the sun
Five degree droppin' weather
Feigned yet fecúnd

Moocows are mooing in
Green-greying fields
Rowing 'ways out of city
Bemongst the yields