Buttercup

There you go in the yellow light of an ancient city looking
Like the future. Meanwhile, a cavernous pink glow’s siren

Song remains unheeded. If you’re not gently epilating
The other’s asshole, what is even the point? That is the kind

Of intimacy I am looking for! Instead,
I’m stuck sucking on breadcrumbs, knowing that nothing

About this diet is sustainable; each crumb leading exactly
Back to: not one songbird has ever alighted, beatific,

On my shoulder. O, Fassbinder himself couldn’t make this
Backyard look poetic. As it is, it is just an unrepentant reminder

That some things cannot be made to be more beautiful.
When you ask me about the look of love, I say I wouldn’t know it.

It was a poet who first remarked upon the resemblance
Between the ranunculus and the anus.

Clutch

Honey, I said gallantly, you’re off the hook
The doll’s perfume had base notes of canned peaches
Someone over yonder pumped the breaks
I began to feel unglued
Kinstugi, overused metaphors, etc
How the geraniums are harboring assassins
An embroidered pocketbook, a knockoff Chanel enamel bangle
What can’t be purchased with plastic can be afforded
With a proportionate donation of one’s Inner Resources
Easily extradited, flammable, the lack not immediately noticeable
But later, on some scenic afternoon among palm fronds
A gnawing at the solar plexus, the realization that it had
Never once, in all your days on earth, occurred to you to touch your tongue to a battery
The pill’s half-life assiduously rolling up the red carpet
This loneliness sticking to you like a birthmark
Honey, I said, honey
But no one was there, just the tiger’s
Outstretched claw.

Harpoon

All I taste is the lemonade, the cobalt sky
Dappled with sunburn. Elsewhere, a squall.
Is it the acknowledging of it, or the lack
That makes it gauche?
The etiquette book having been lost somewhere
Along the turnpike. A preference for Campari
Over Aperol. Ennui being meted out like
Advil. The futility of waiting
For the anvil to fall on the Roadrunner.
The bitterness beginning to cascade like watercolor
& the Internet’s current fascination with the way
Tom Cruise eats popcorn, just a distraction.
A way of saying occasionally the crimson bleeds
Into the cadmium, creating sunrise.