Rejection Cherry

Some good moments, and the sonic level of your vision

peaked for me somewhere around line 6.

Regretted and hoped and thanked, now tow away

that nostalgia boomerang of penmanship. Hum along

the kind of SASE song that sailors sing, bottles traveling

between here and alee, encrypted grocery lists

for the gods of the sea. You can echo distance between

red herring ring tones and trawl for your baby all night long.

Voicemail missives like flotsam nod their heads hello.

Does it feel cheap, the first time, not quite the historic

hotel sex you dreamed of, faded wallpaper and everything?

The vague frisson, Cecily, that there might have been better

ways to learn a similar lesson? One thing is for certain:

the desk clerk of your heart seems to be sleeping it off

somewhere. He mumbles about cardamom sweaters and

disposable thumbs, my dear.

Yours are not exactly dog-eared, but creased like dry-cleaner

hemlines, catch you sniffing traces of and tamperings with

the pleated question marks hanging about the words. It does

indeed seem a dying language ago.

The scythe cuts of smaller slips of paper, leaves of graphs.

The thresher of letterhead typescript disinviting her best friend

to the party. Personal mailers rub the subatomic particles and

participles from last month’s newspapers. The new regimen now

offers exclamation points for everyone! The full-on universe

extremely awaits you with her firecracker hands.

And did you fully render your Milky Way to a scene? Did you

set it beside itself, find its hard core? Its punk rock, its total

Kerblang?! Can I tell you, Rupert, about the field of asterisks

lining the shoplifter-deep pockets of the sky!f the sky!

For that is how I once received encouragement from the

singular result of a handheld pen. The things that can only happen

once are single filing outside you, in the cold. They have been

milling about and since a longish time ago. No time to revise and

resubmit for them, and now you with no time to consider

the surefire consequences of letting some come in.

bio          printable