Kill Your Television

Last night Crystal and Amber,
patron saints of poor impulse control,
put a penny on the railroad tracks
of Tom's intolerance of television.

Blame it on the bar;
on tequila; on testosterone;
everyone else in the room had tuned out
Tom's Mind Control Rant Number 107
long before he reached his typical crescendo:
“Elvis Presley used to shoot televisions!”

but Amber interrupted with:
“Put up or shut up!”
and Crystal knew a pawnbroker
whose just-shy-of-nonexistent morals
could be subverted with a comforting lie
and an extra twenty.

Twenty minutes,
six emptied chambers,
two shattered wide-screen wall-mount plasma sets,
one enraged group of patrons
from a random sports bar
(Finley McGuinn's, on Miller Street,) and
one hastily chosen hiding place later,
Tom (alone and terrified
his instigators having wandered away,
no longer bored)
made the latest of many
after-midnight emergency calls
to Emily, an alchemist of ideas
who turns baser impulses to gold.

(Tom could avoid
a full portion of fear in his life
by calling Emily before he acts.)

As always, she first confirmed
that Tom hadn't hurt anyone,
then talked him through
her recipe for invisibility
and all the sensible precautions:

-set your phone to vibrate

-avoid the furtive hunch and darting eyes
of a frightened man, and
walk confidently, erect and relaxed

-vanish into the attenuated nighttime crowd
and ride with the faceless
on trains and busses

-ride to the Outskirts where
used car dealers and cheap hotels rule,
where no one walks
because there are no sidewalks,
and there are no sidewalks
because no one walks-
you'll have to walk

-as you walk, slipping over snowbanks
and through drifts, into each
of the sewer grates you pass
drop one of the six spent shells

-find the tiny local franchise
of the biggest fast-food joint on the planet
and load up, to go

-drop the hardware into your bag
of spent wrappers and napkins
then deep-six the bundle
into the depths (but not the bottom)
of the overflowing trashcan near the restroom

-then into the restroom
to wash the sin from your hands

Emily had plenty more helpful advice
but Tom's phone surrendered to entropy
drained utterly of charge.

He managed to find his way home
without incident, mostly due to the happy fact
that the officers tasked to catch him
had gathered their conflicting descriptions
and retired to the station to sip hot coffee
and process their reports.

Stream of Impropriety

I'm going to take the good karma I've earned
by paying for my sandwich (when I could have
walked away from two counter people
who were too stoned to blink) and spend it
licking the sensitive surfaces of a stranger's flesh.

The stream of impropriety is fed from bedsprings
and the artesian coordinates
of pickup lines and the curves which converge
just under the hip pockets of some hungry stranger.
After a quick baptism, you'll discover
powers of persuasion you've never had before--
with a word, you'll be able
to distract the rivets in this pretty girl's jeans.

To a few dozen people living
in Northern Kentucky,
skinnydipping in Knob Creek
is a perfectly innocent pastime
on a muggy summer day.

She is not
one of those few dozen.

She's shy like a shotgun activist,
and she knows how to coax me to rut;
how to run lust along the edges of my tongue
and up into the base of my brain.

Her implications and innuendoes
touch my mind like a single curl of smoke-
at first barely perceived,
then snapping me to total focus
to find the source of the danger.

And that's it, slithering up my spine--
her fingernail slicing delicately
sending a flare—immediate, then broadening.
A path of voltage tracing every nerve,
marking out where the flash flood of sensation
will rip soon through the riverbed.

Burn

He wears natural fiber clothing
because, while cotton may burn,
nylon melts, sticking to skin.

She loves that about him; that foresight.
He keeps a stainless steel lighter,
always topped with fluid
and always in the right-front pocket of his jeans.
She reaches in often, even when
she feels no urge to burn.
The metallic click of the cover,
the sweet fumes touching her tongue-
these things send a thrill all through her
almost as sharp as when he comes home
smelling of sweat and ground steel and
welding residue.

She knows he's been playing with plasma then-
nothing is hotter than that.

Off Your Meds

Wander through a sunny afternoon off your meds
savoring the signficance of every gesture.
Each glim and glint seems to peak and trough in its pattern;
car radios sing jingles to you then dart away,
distracted by the cycles of the traffic lights;
blind men tap six feet of surrogate senses on the sidewalk
and cellphone solipsists wander, focussed inward,
listening to voices of their own
as invisible and insistent as yours.
Listen to the whisper of studded radials
on dry pavement, or the
sixty-cycle hum of a transformer
stepping down the voltage
to something mere mortals can conjure with--
Remember:
Ohm's Law tells us all that
resistance isn't futile—it's
something you just have to factor in.

Let Go

She's decided to let go
and follow every impulse that sings to her

She has taken on a number of lovers
and fucks one per night
in alphabetical order.

She's detours now through
the old landfill on her way to work,
so she can spend a few minutes each day
flinging liquor bottles at
stacks of cracked windows
to listen to the smashing glass carrillion.

She indulges her texture fetish,
touching everything she can reach,
comparing rough with smooth and supple,
and slack with taut and tingling.

She's picks up every finger-sized object
she finds on the sidewalk
and tucks it into a bowl on her desk.
Someday soon, she figures,
a whisper from a shadow
just behind her thinking mind
will propose a project for her,
and the whole bowlful
will be the key ingredients.

She drops five bucks in someone's hat every Friday
and calls it a cover charge,
even though she doesn't know
exactly what club
she's trying to get into.

Tiny Gods Hiding

The bohemian teenagers of Edgemere,
innocent of nothing but hygiene and regulation,
wear the public faces of tiny gods hiding.
Feed them tequila and they'll smooth your path.

Forty days in the wilderness
of alley canyons and rooftop mesas
flenses the plaque of propriety from their souls
and sets up sofas inside their minds
for godlings to surf, just for a while.

Wily urges take over their voices
and let slip secrets to each other.
Listen to them chatter while they
chain-smoke handrolled cigarettes
and gulp coffee on a sunny stoop.
They'll jumpstart your sense of wonder.

They'll peel away the touch-ups and repairs;
the cloudy lacquer that your mind has applied
to the fresco of your reality
and show the lowest layer,
brushed into the wet plaster of your childhood.

You'll be shocked
at how vivid the colors seem.

Oracle

This week Kira has been dreaming--
dreaming of smoke signals
puffing gray out of
a lake of pale fog;
a ravine half-full of mist;

dreaming of graffiti
scrawled underneath the eaves
of the tower of a subdivided Victorian;

dreaming of the staccato chatter
of a freight train
swaying over a truss bridge
tapping out a prisoner's message
from she-knows-not-which cell.

Now she's listening
and her waking day murmurs to her--
oak trees snapping in
the hostile cold of a February shortcut;
wind off the lake
strumming the guy wires of a phone pole--

a child in a circle of children
whispering corrupted data.