Three Poems

Mew zee um

The way she stood looking at the picture. This stranger.
Suggested she wanted to be inside the picture.
The way I stood looking at the stranger. Suggested
I wanted to be inside her. Not the way you think
or only the way you think. But in her brain
inside the picture, a brain aware of being stared at
by herself being stared at by me. It’s so simple: entire
lives go by day after day, an inch or arm’s reach away.
One approach is to let them, another is to lash
ourselves together like boats or what else
gets lashed together? I don’t know, I should have majored
in lashing together at school. Instead I took classes
on Carl Jung and patrilineal and matrilineal societies
and ran naked in the rain around Northeast Grand Rapids
with a woman equally though differently naked.
Some people like to run around in the rain
with the same naked, I like to run around in the rain
with different naked, but I’d really like to know
if the artist felt the stranger staring at her picture.
And you? What matters to you? You who are staring at me
thinking of you. Slip me a note. Dance me a dance.
Say something in Spanish to a wind that will say something
in wind to me. Now that we’re all friends. Now that the time
has come to leave.

Why smoking should be allowed in bars

Smoke goes spelunking in lover’s lungs,
smoke has sex in the air in front of us all
in the bar, smoke settles in shot glasses
and brain crevices and some escapes
onto Woodward and floats downtown,
crosses the river and heads into Windsor
and the lives of Canadians, I’m one of those people
who got off on the wrong foot with creation,
it’s hard to imagine a Canadian saying that, or smoke
playing poker and doing anything
but bluffing, I’ve never had to go to a mechanic
and say my car or my life is breaking down
because it’s too elegant, that’s the kind of problem
smoke would have, and I wouldn’t listen,
not one bit, feeling, I hate to admit this, happy
to see smoke brought to its knees.

Home improvement with cheerleading

There’s a door I know, cream, a pre-hung, it should be blue
like the other door a few feet away is blue
like an ocean I dated once. In simple aesthetic terms,
egress should match, egrets should fly,
they’re horrible paper weights. I have the paint, the brush,
the weather is fine, I have no superstitions
about painting in my green underwear. It seems
like a brand of force though, like someone saying,
You never use the word pussy to make you use
the word pussy in your reply, which might be
I hate the word pussy or I use the word pussy all the time.
Do you want me to paint you, I want to ask the door,
really ask the door, like I really want to ask my wife’s pussy,
Do you feel like a door, and if you do, would you feel judged
if suddenly I painted you blue? I hate the word pussy
only slightly less than cunt, it’s such an explosion
in the mouth, cunt, a sound nothing like
what it’s a sound for, I’d call my wife’s pussy
The Velveteen Rabbit if I’d read the book
people love, adore is not a strong enough word,
it’s the right word for the job. Pussy
is not, you’re fired, pussy. You should see this blue,
you should walk through this blue to whatever hides
on the other side of this blue, saying lovely lovely blue
as you do so if you want, I find it strange
how often I’m talking directly to you
by the end of poems, doors that they are, cunts
if you prefer to call them that, I’d cringe
but mostly be happy that you’re here, remember,
we were all together, we were unified in our outlook,
we were all on the way to having Velveteen Rabbits
in the womb, then something happened to half of us,
something big or not so big, but not so divisive
we can’t all say Go Team and mean it.