How to Make a Bomb In the Kitchen of Your Mother

the factoids that one overhears on the lash:

I am afraid to eat sandwiches I have made myself

because they always have blood in them

and the tips of my fingers

if you can’t stop sneezing

you’ve got sex on the brain

stand still in the park on a sunny day

and footballs will think it safe to approach

to eat from your hand

to be taught some manners with a shoe or fist

if you were to place a jar in front of me

containing the eyes of every girl who ever played hopscotch

I could pick out the ones belonging to Madeleine McCann

did you know that ninety percent of people

eat bugs; scorpions, beetles

and other assorted non-empirical shit

such as how best to save a wedding

gate-crashed by hand grenades

how forever misaligned feng shui

awaits a homecoming amputee

a corpse wagon is no less grotesque

in the wake of a thurible’s incense

how those less likely to perish

acknowledge their tragic flaws –

I tend to break at the pool table

when it boils down to the blackball

how as a foreigner in a foreign place

you spend hours at hand dryers

playing their heat to your face

evoking thy homeland’s breeze

how they weren’t trees we climbed in youth

but totems to eldritch deities

how bombs gestate on kitchen stoves

in accordance with traditional recipes…

– sometimes they underestimate

just how potty-trained we are

may I take this opportunity to remind you of

Maxine Carr, Jon Venables, Karen Matthews,

Ashley Cole, Carmen Sandiego –

they are still out there

breathing

so what are you waiting for?