Certain Things People Do

I understand that people

murder each other and

lift weights obsessively,

tanning and whatnot.

O, I don’t know what else they do.

A lot.

Some people pose for photographs

holding giant wreaths and

other people sit in chairs

that are far too small for their

long, thin bodies.

Certain people have to make

important phone calls

and others curl their lips in funny ways.

I’m the sort of person

who gets depressed and then

feels like a little valve somewhere

is leaking.  It’s complicated.

I keep thinking of things.

I keep thinking of them.

Perhaps sometime you will have

to use the phrase “extra frames”

or “may worsen with.”

Our Moral Responsibility

I’m trying to balance my sense of who I am

with my sense of the dead bat my son and I found in the front yard

today.  And then, we found another dead bat on the road

just down from our house!  Are you kidding me?

I can’t remember the last time I found a dead bat.

It’s like Dead Bats Everywhere Day.

Still, there’s my job and the college students who seem

to be filling the town, and the two guys who were

crushing cans by the trash cans.

My son was, like, “What are those guys doing?”

and, like, “They looked like they were crushing cans.”

Dude, you think you are comprehending

the moment, instead you hear words from war experts

that make really tragic sense.

The Bad Times

It’s horrible to be a human sometimes.

I don’t even like writing about it.

I wouldn’t say anything at all but I don’t know what else to do.

Maybe I should no nothing.

Nothing seems to be the most common condition.

Instead, the things in my head hurt.

What about your head?

Not that it matters.  Yet,

it really matters.

Especially in this world there is disappointment.

I think of things and then I keep thinking.

You are, like, fixing a belt on a small motor.

It just keeps going off.

What I Say Sometimes But Then Stop Myself

I’m not planning on being

a person forever.

But for now, my daughter sleeps upstairs

and my memories of early 80’s punk rock

are clarified by a recent documentary.

This is sorta haunting my skull

in a grating fashion.

In another way, I find the time I spend

doing something that doesn’t make sense is really

something.

Seriously, can you imagine dementia?

I am a person jumping from roof to roof.

The Ways in Which You Want to Get Away

I don’t know what you might say that would be better than this.

My point is that you can’t be a new book of matches forever.

Eventually, your tips will speckle with speckling.

Eventually, you will look old, like a deer head hanging on a wall.

Even if you can still start a fire, the phone number written on your cover

will give you away, big time.

You’ll see the past hugging the back of your leg and you’ll want to shake free,

as if in a funky dance, or like a large insect in your shirt.

How Today Becomes a Creepy Spider

You have hopes, maybe.

Maybe, you have financial problems

or thoughts like lasers.  Scattered thoughts

like scattered lasers.  You may imagine

a laser shooting through a prism.

You imagine the prism jiggling.

Prism Jiggling.  There’s a band name.

Their first record,

Thoughts Like Lasers, Lasers Like BB’s on a Tiled Floor,

Rocks.

After a while, you cut your hair.

Then, you notice bits of hair in the bathwater.

It is now beginning.

In the background the TV says

“puberty isn’t for kids anymore.”

Trying to Reach a Conclusion About Something

If you feel that things are ending it is possible

they are just beginning.  It is a fog horn

you hear in the distance.

You wait by the telephone, looking over

the harbor.  All night long you keep

dreaming this song that begins

with an E chord but ends tweezing your

eardrums from your ear holes.

You wonder what sort of doctor

is alive down here.

You can see images of people who have

embarrassed you and drift into the sea.

The floating takes the place

of a brainwave and the combination

is safe.  I don’t know about you

but I can’t stand losing.

My whole life I’ve been a dick about it.

Now It’s Late and I’m Waiting

In the world there is instability and loose nuclear weapons.

In Muncie, Indiana at the Delaware County Fairgrounds, people race stock cares.

My parents are in town and that’s basically lovely.

I have a fear lizard that is imitating my tongue in the region that it attaches to the back

of my mouth.

There seems like there is a more efficient way of saying all of this, but I can’t think of what it is.

There was a bomb scare in the parking lot.

But everyone is okay, baby.

Trying to Identify the Thing Without Writing a Poem About It

There is a thing called Sunday evening.

There are many evenings

and in some of these evenings you attach

the day of the week.

There is a dark vibrating medallion of beef in my chest.

It flexes.  It flexes more.  It’s flexy!

Beneath its low girly voice is a hum.

O Jesus, you say, you get ready.

You are tired of jokes

and of expanding important ideas.

This is all Jell-O.

All Jell-O.

It is all Jell-O, even New York City and

headphones on headphones

on people at the Y.

Even active women in sensible shoes.

The inevitable has a good

name for itself.

Despite medication, the symptoms

persist.

And in the early moments of the new moment,

forced to consider poetry, handbags,

new illusions, selfish obstacles, you become

stuck on the pin

of pierced life, wiggling impaled, like, uh,

blah blah Blahfrock, whatnot, pick

your history, whatever.  Like, very

much so whatever.

In this shrunken head, I am

considering using a metaphor.

In the boogie bag sack, I’m

carrying a sort of useful handbook.

Every day of my life I have waited

to say this and am now

a bit disappointed.

I thought of something

called conclusion, or

at least, 70% off.

Instead, I am sitting on the bench.

The bench is a regular bench in the mall.

It doesn’t matter if it’s true.

The top button of my shirt is

called envy.

My throat isn’t worth spending the energy necessary

to describe it.

Reading the newspaper doesn’t make me a rat, but

it does sorta cause me to sniff.

There is always the first day of school.

Max talks about kindergarten

which he’ll go to

next to he’ll go.

Anticipation is the only candle

I burn when I burn shit.

Even using words like burn, is just

fucking stupid.

I love my family, but I resent the time I spent

in church as a kid.

That whole time, in a dream world,

the real world was planting me

in front of this computer.  All this

about vegetation

alone makes me puke.

But I don’t puke.

I just tell you I do and

then tell you I don’t.

                     copyright 2008 Peter Davis                                                    Barnwood Home