Effortlessly, I think, but not well

If I had a string of pearls

I’d like to think I wouldn’t

give it to the wild boar

living under my front porch

But I accept that I might

do a lot of things

and not be forgiven

for most of them

I have given up

trying to be good

I wear no pop of color 

with my ghoulish pantsuit 

I read somewhere that

a body of water

is more conservative

than a land mass

ponds especially

are known for their

retrograde sort

of entrenchment

my fig tree won’t thrive

in soil that is either

too rocky or too prone

to socialist indoctrination

& no I’m still not thirsty

although I find myself

thinking too frequently

about jägerbombs

I’ve taken leave of regret   

I’ve informed my dentist 

That  I would prefer not to  

I will go into the abyss 

with all these cavities singing

Narrative Education

There is one that starts: “it’s universally known that”       

Another one that starts: “They never really liked each other, but there were moments of an almost supernatural empathic connection between them” 

Everybody’s a story with feet until the story ends in amputation.     

Which is to say that if I met a werewolf 

I wouldn’t decline the chance to hear about his childhood    

Nobody has ever asked me  “what’s your story?” 

However I have been asked   “what’s your  

problem?” too many times to count

Once, I got lost in a thousand rooms of chaste teens

singing the national anthem.  I was a scale in predictable 

thirds and they played me on coquettishly bedazzled harps

That’s not so much a story as a premise for one more of a conceit, really  

 or a pun without a point   or a poem   

Pat the Bunny did not hold my attention with 

its narrative intricacies but its tactile pleasures

were considerable I wish more stories felt so soft   

between my fingers 

I wish there was a monster at the end of the book    

and it was half puppy half  my mother having never grown old      

I once tried reading Ulysses to impress a boy

but he turned out    in a whimsical plot twist   

to   favor Mansfield’s  short fiction    

Dead bodies make us more alive      A story taught me that

What do you have to do to get more than your share of moons around here

Some people associate

extreme cold with elegance

I need three extra sweaters

to even think about space

I never ordered a drink

that tastes like the stars

although I did meet a drunk

called Eta Ursae Majoris

Does anyone know

if the music of the spheres

is really better

for slow dancing

If dwarf planets

had their own prom

would it be like

a junior prom for planets

Is the blackness

between the stars

more like ink

or elastic

Is it possible

that the moon

is distantly related

to the moonflower

or that our bodies

from the inside

might be bigger

than galaxies