POEMS ABOUT CONCENTRATION FOR PEOPLE WHO CAN’T CONCENTRATE

Imagine an opossum in headlights.
Loop that image.
Now imagine watching the loop.

You’re at your desk.
You can’t concentrate.
Imagine if not concentrating
was concentrating.

That time you took drugs
and thought a piece of tin foil stapled to the wall
was a fish tank. But why
was there a piece of tin foil stapled to the wall?

Two people, naked, in a gondola
suspended over Mt. Blanc.
Lightning strikes the tower, shorting the wires.
Wind and snow shake the gondola.
The two people are you
and your infant daughter.

You’re trying to think about your child
but you keep thinking about yourself.
Imagine you’re the child.

Imagine you’re a gondola in a blizzard.
Imagine the blizzard is inside the gondola.
Let go of the wire.

To the Diminutive Lesbian Who Slept in My Bed Last Night

after the Samely-Titled Craig’s List Posting on January 1, 2010

The frost of darkness erased by the hand
of sunlight rubbing on my lidded eyes—
you are gone, Diminutive Lesbian
and you’ve left your tiny vest behind,
whose pockets from many bottle caps expand
as if to count the drunken reasons why
I’m calling you out on connections, missed—
We didn’t get to sleep with that girl whose lips
we both tasted in the bar’s less sober light
and who should also, like you, now be lying
naked on my bed, unable to resist,
but whatever, you blew it, come get your vest.