“MOST DAYS I FEEL LIKE PNIN” and “THE DICTAPHONE CAN’T HEAR YOU NODDING”

MOST DAYS I FEEL LIKE PNIN

I’d be remiss if i didn’t  
share that it’s very difficult to leave  
even more-difficult to not blame  
yourself for the rest of your life, your  
nose was bleeding while we were playing  
the fog rolled in, if clarity is a napkin, thrice I  
was a goner—blabbering into the ether, your nose is bleeding again this time at the way station where the fabric lady storefront  
Owner called us squatters because we squat all smiley eyed in her Swiss cheese doorway four out of five weekdays—a patina of underpay  
Evening adding itself up into a divvied out swirl of monthly sleepers, circle-like phantasm, again I was a  goner of hormone glands overlaid on a playboy type photograph, hanging left of center in the childhood  parlor room of Nabokov’s friends, I was prettied next to a compilation of photos of your dad, as a kid with a balloon, yo-yo-ing was ball, and everybody’s mother  
was the kind of person who liked to walk around the house reciting Merriam Webster, wow I thought no 
one was kidding  
Clarity can be the perfect napkin  
Alas her skates are too tight  
alas the last time I felt  
compelled to bare my soul  
was in 2003, after college I didn’t get  
a good job, because I didn’t pass for  
white, or charismatic like you  
you had an asset, let’s call it  
a “spirit of exposure”  
for what it takes to go very far  
Further is our anguish full of halfwit  
desires upstream to morrows flotilla  
all of which piloted by certified fools  
none of us knew better than to rely on  
the other, side note there is no path to dignity  
she wanted to become a writer so she became  
one, you ended up doing an end around the  
continent, food noise leftovers from off an  
endangered iguana, it’ll take stockpiles to build  
a verbal repertoire you frenzied exclaim faith is  
what it takes to grow an arsenal to rely on in the  
future, BUT now escalations are my daily first thoughts  
no longer do I feel shame for picking up books  
I don’t intend to buy, you know how much I love to go places and touch stuff, LIKE everything we wish we were but still aren’t 

THE DICTAPHONE CAN'T HEAR YOU NODDING

A head of Jesus framed  
in a squatter’s shack. You  
stood there brooding  
with the radio off.  
Wildflowers wilting in the yard  
and supper burnt again. No  
cleaver to break the neck  
on that squawking bird,  
I turned to violence—  

a hardwood board nicked  
with cuts while a game  
of chess continued on  
in some back room late  
into the night. You say forty  
prayers—storm-torn nests  
exposed in branches that reach  
for winter.  

What remains  
for me? Forty games  
with the same opponent  
who will not let me leave  
that crooked kitchen table  
where we sit till I admit  
the mosquito egg  
gender of defeat  

and people having been  
putting their mouths  
on us, since we first met,  
I’ve claimed to have  
invented many things  
including plastic, etc.  

sometimes you need  
the binoculars to locate  
a bird you will eventually  
see in person.