Tim Requires Urging

With the eyes of a sleepwalker, you gamboled through life
red-cheeked and
amazed by the greens, the yellows, and the
dog that may or may not have
been in your bathtub.

Sometimes you looked into the mirror and
you were amazed at what you found there,
turning your face this way
made it look like it
was not your
own.

But no matter, because tender silken threads had been woven
to keep you tentatively linked
to your compatriots,
whom you called whenever you needed
and with your cold phone resting
against your hot cheek
you whiled away the night, twisted upon your futon,
abstracting fake promises under
the fluorescent lights
as opera echoed in your ribcage and rattled your teeth.

Behind those teeth rested a wad that you chewed
and
chewed until it tasted like rust and old glass
and
you let the juice drip out of your mouth
and
onto the nearest friend.

But now these are merely the memories and shadows of antics you once embraced and you rarely call your friend to muse about the world, the future, and the merits of peeing on the wall.
Feeling the loss,
ravel up your threads around a spool,
let yourself be stretched to another coast,
where lobsters roam
and click their little pinchers at your red, red, cheeks-

where you might again open your eyes wide
and look out of the corners,
where you might dance
and flip your black
thatched hair
and float upon the smoke, in the nebulous night, with your friends,

leaving cigarette boxes filled with drunken
starlight in your
wake.

Inviting Asad to a Party

We live in an age that is not your age -

you feel separate and misunderstood.

Wandering haplessly, planning revolutions -

pipe dream distractions leaking
from your pores.

Often blamed and often mistreated,

you feel like a boil on the cheekbone of society.
If only, instead of trying to
lance you with their arbitrary judgements -
to poke you with their sterilized
needles of oppression
and doubt -

if only these seditious irrelevancies
would let you be, let you do as you
want, let you
snap your pictures and your fingers and curl your toes
in a nest of yarn.

So loose yourself from the shackles
of what is "right",

what is "responsible", "respected",

"considerate".

Make your own clothesline and hang on it clothes of your own design.

No duds of any era can swing with you,
run those checkered sneakers under the heel of your red red car,
wrap your scarf around your neck,
and cross the road with your
ipod in hand,
held high because it is from the heavens that you seek
your divine
inspiration and
a static-free
experience.


And when you are done with the lion, the witch, AND the wardrobe,

pack your life into the trunk of a new maroon sedan

with softer seats and a more voluptuous figure,
slink across the bridge from Brooklyn
to the diamond-soled streets of
Manhattan isle,
pick up your friends with a large magnet,
and let their dueling polarities
amuse you as
you speed due East, towards the foreign hills and plains of Massachusetts.

There,
welcome your subject back
from his travels,
imbibe vigorously,
fill your face with smoke like a glass of fire,
and then soporifically expound
on the merits of
our times.

So it begs the question

Do we feel them like a skin beneath our skin, clotting our eyes
and curling our fingers and toes,

the quilted rice fields of hat-flecked green,

a curl of oil in a puddle
shining with the mottled colors
of a mood ring - snaking
like smoke
from the corners of your mouth - from between your teeth -
both in and out your nose,

an empty parking space,

the bruise on the palid underbelly
of my arm - a slow soft seepage of purple with
a halo of mucus yellow,

dying flies buzzing lazily as they struggle against
a frozen window pane until
she sucks them up into the gut of her vacuum cleaner

to die twitching in the dark?