a sestina that doesn't totally suck!

Chicken

At 10:00 the sky is full of feathers.
A train leaves Chicago at 60 MPH
heading west. In Washington, the President orders
fried chicken for dinner--he's eating late.
A boy sits in an apartment in St. Paul
playing a computer game against the Internet.

The evening sky is as big as the Internet.
The President imagines that the feathers
are still on his chicken. A storm heads for St. Paul,
winds gusting up to 40 MPH.
The boy reacts .14 seconds late
and gets fragged. The conductor orders

an emergency stop in Milwaukee; the President orders
an escalation in the War on Trains. On the Internet,
it never seems to get very late.
At 1:00, the boy respawns, thin feathers
of latency flickering around his online image. His St. Paul
body is oblivious to the hour.

The train has now been stranded for an hour.
In Washington, there's a mixup in the orders,
and the President launches a missile at St. Paul.
Meanwhile, all across the Internet,
a new fetish is springing up: chicks with feathers
instead of genitalia. The boy starts to think it's late

at 3:00, but he doesn't disconnect. Too late,
the President realizes where he's sent his 700 MPH
bird of death. The train starts off again, smooth as feathers,
and the crew brings round trays of free hors d'oeuvres
to placate the passengers. An anonymous Internet
figure, with an IP nowhere near St. Paul,

hacks the Pentagon and redirects the missile from St. Paul
to Washington. It can't change course so late
in flight, and explodes midair. Thank heavens for the Internet.
The train too arrives in St. Paul, over an hour late,
but there. A tired girl gets off and orders
a taxi to the boy's place. He thinks she feels like feathers.

The President orders a preemptive strike against the Internet
at 5:00. It's finally getting late here in St. Paul,
where feathers are falling at 120 MPH.

the poem that won't die or fit anywhere

Frequency

You are flat and hard and distant enough for words to echo off
of. When we say the same thing at the same time the world
becomes our vibrating
champagne glass. We are Tesla's collapsing buildings,
making window frames with our fingers that break when we
want to hold
anything. I am made of cells, discrete and crystalline
and membranes that burst predictably occasionally like solar
flares. They resonate
to words like astrology victims. Hearing you or hearing myself
reflected in you, I become a thrumming million, multiple
like the grass
blades that stretch up to the little sun like tongues.

small song inspired by dinosaur comics

Fugue

I would rather live in a mirror
than on camera. My reflection looks
better than I do. I think the uncanny
valley principle applies to poetry. My
reflection thinks the Heisenberg Uncertainty
principle applies to poetry. I don't know
what that means, but it sounds nice.
My reflection says that he could pluck
your heart from behind your ribs. I hate
it when he brags. My reflection has
a small hole in the back of his head
that I'm not allowed to see. I don't want to.

another section? EE got there first i know.

Magnetospheric Eternally Collapsing Object

like like like like
a mouth a moon a

driftless everclosing
cylinder in negative

perspective a hole
a discontinuity a

star a star a star
an asterisk

i feel vaguely evil for writing this

Sonata

Your waterfall is stained by the window. I can see, walk you
through it, fibrous sunlight. Talking a gerund
down from the ceiling. Are you always like this? Forget

it. Forget about it. Everyone's tossing beer bottles
out car windows these days and got cancer. Of the expletive
and the explosion. Stuffed animals never fight

back. Let's dance candles in the microwave, draw straws.
Not again. Your winterfall, by the water?
Stained. Do me a magic trick, turn these people

into uglier people. Into poets. But I don't
want to! Perfectly shuffle a deck eight times, and
it's starting all over. Same with you (under the moonlight,

the corpulent moonlight). So come over sometime, eat
everything in the house. Some days I want to fill you
with at least a hundred exclamation points. Slap me, silly.

tiny yet inscrutable

A Very Short Poem for Emilie

We are transient and ancient, two words
that look like they should rhyme. But don't.

revision

Harmonics

We are both awake, although you
don't know this. You are putting
your burned CDs in alphabetical order
again, wearing a smile like a witch's

hat. A small white refrigerator
starts humming. A computer has
been humming. They are in tune;
they make a major sixth. This makes

you happy, like waiting for the busy
signal that comes when you hold
the handset to your ear for a few seconds
after the end of a long conversation.

superhero poem

Magnetospheric Eternally Collapsing Object

Darkness allows me to do amazing things.
From my bed I can listen to the silence welling outside your room.
I can take the silence and fashion a small star out of it.
I can glue it to your ceiling while you sleep.
I can add color to the silence and use it as paint.
I can paint a small red flower on the back of my hand.
I can plunge my hands in the sink and watch the water turn red.
I can touch the back of my hand to the back of your neck.
It's like touching an electric fence that hasn't been left on.

a word problem

Margin

Tonight the clouds are low and orange and look like clouds.
The faces of buildings are reflected in the faces of buildings.
I look at my hands and at your hands. I imagine filling
one of your hands with scale models of one of my hands
and then filling in the gaps with smaller models. I see
a dog and I fill the dog with tiny smiling people. I fill
a cloud with buildings. I fill a fire hydrant with candy
hearts. You ask what I'm thinking about and I say
"Nothing." Then I say "Calculus." Then you laugh.