please excuse me
for smoking

your last cigarette
i know they're
more comfortable


under your pearl snaps

i was going to
put something

an ace of spades or
a baseball card

in between the spokes
of my bicycle

so it could go
click click click

just for that noise
crick crick crick

but the crickets
beat me to it this time

when i was licking the flap
of the envelope
i realized that i didn't
have enough spit left for the stamps

so i asked around
"hey, can i borrow some of your spit?
i need it to mail a letter."
and people all gave me funny looks
they just didn't know

where i was mailing the letter to

the tambourine mannequins
clap their hands again
waiting for a nose to grow

"this whole goddam house stinks of ghosts. i don't mind so much being haunted by a dead ghost, but i resent like hell being haunted by a half-dead one"


-j.d. salinger, zooey glass


i don't know who
i would haunt if i had the opportunity--
probably the widower down the street,
the kind who yells at small children playing
on his sidewalk
because in a twisted sort of way
he has it all figured out

i would play on his sidewalk
and his pilsner shouts
would echo through me
sleeping between the unpainted pickets

tangled up in blue,
bob's brick-oven
corningware-
his own, tempered by glowing
coals punching the sides like
IBM paper reams
stained by espresso

bob's brick-oven
corningware
hung on the shelves
doesn't exercise form over
function, it exercises the bakers'
hands, arthritic they
know not the warmth of a
hardcover spine, no--they
know the warmth of other hands.

the brass doorknobs in my grandmother's house
are humid, etc
they creak like
the floor that's make of
oak
maybe if it were just left
alone
it would rot and corrode--
insisting the smell of her
home--beer, cinnamon, cloves
then lacking all the armoires
and attentive corner cabinets,
it would be just another shit grove
on boyd drive