Emotional Support Peacock

Emotional Support Peacock

Why am I freaking out? Let me count the ways.

There’s great disorientation in the sit room.

Syrian civil war is slipping savagely.

A starling murmuration is also startling.

Burstulence – spray of noise.

…

It’s sodium lauryl sulfate for the soul.

I’m floating, burbling, so is everything.

Thought knots, unknots.

…

I’ll be a slogan-eating orchid monster.

I’ll be a gyroscope, plurabelle, maledicta

or a quince blossom on the road to nowhere.

…

There’s a bald spot in your poetics.

You’ve rubbed it raw with all your fretting.

You hurl out the banner: “I’m so compassionate.”

What are you fixing? We are grime havens.

Poser simplicity – a blind stem…a bled sun.

…

A bright puppy feels something happening to grammar:

about to be able to have a bit more abandon:

an adamant flippancy.

…

I don’t see probosces; I look only vaguely medieval.

…

Madeline Gins and a popsicle.

Lady Gaga’s little white breast.

Fat braid of Louisa May Alcott.

Marie Antoinette’s cherub mouth.

Exene’s hunch.

Carolee in ram’s horns.

No ideas but in white kittens.

…

Melania is a fox cat – perfectly contoured cheek

against the white airplane.

Democracy eggshell – some days I wake up

so inflammed.

…

The internet makes me want to break things.

This stainy morass, screwed and undone.

Doubt balloons. Jolly depressive. Salubrious lunge.

…

Not sure what to do with this WARLOCK FETISH.

Though I hardly desire even desire.

And friendship – it is crumbling shale.

It is riddled with poignards

All those erstwhile little Maoist “friends.”

Though romantic Marxism’s turned lucrative

in this Age of Ideology.

…

MySpace Druid, mishandled pussy,

obscenity harp mob,

glittered mesh conjunctions,

reflexive sorrel palatals.

…

My failure is spectacular! A white phoenix

with a rhinestone tail! Failure!

A neglectorino ballet! A kind of shiny

golden dreidl in the hasbeen of my mind.

…

I failed at righteous argument, at poetry of

place, at poetry of witness, at poetry of identity,

at poetry of mordant critique. I can’t swim.

I can’t play cello. I can’t drive.

But I feel a little bad about feeling bad –

though it’s not as annoying as thinking

oneself “important,” or “sexual,” or “radical.”

…

Bare branches in hard morning light

move in a frigid breeze – fucking hilarious!

“Sexual freedom” is a total oxymoron.

I put something free into a shopping cart.

There’s a perfect almond in the ruin.

Just trying to make a little monkey.

Allopansy. Mellicious. Flagrabillious.

Get all this and more.

…

Green tufts amongst red brick –

the pubic hair of the refulgent earth.

Woke up with palpitations again.

Doubt balloons. Don’t make me sit in a chair.

Nuclear posture – streaming the lacunae.

…

My kitsune ears didn’t come on time.

I never get a minute. I just don’t feel

like Louis Armstrong, purr, hiccup,

fascism always lurks in the shade

of our desperations.

…

To always be this small, and this comedic.

…

Trump won because poetry is so bad.

I’m so bored with this glittering wail.

Oops, I mean “whale.” I don’t trust poems

with linearly numbered sections ONE BIT.

Please, please make your language more

scrumptious. Do sighs matter? Are power chords

the belles of infinity? So boring, preachy, such

crap, please stop, stop with that weird “you.”

…

OMG, camellias’ waxiness! Stop your toneless

recitation, you are killlling me. I fade, I disappear,

the plaint of sleep curling over me – it’s hush and fur.

All the academic cuckoos and their “shaman balalaikas,”

their sardonic nicety organs and machine lynxes.

…

Rubenesque marmosets stroke my forehead lovingly.

A turtledove’s babyish truculence and the damp swallows

of cyclone squeals. Here among the burp jubilees.

Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about.

This is all about me, yes, but also about the pornstache oligarchs,

the weird white bell sleeves, the 70s women on John Berger

talking about how men interact with the world

as forceful presences.

…

Nemo climbs on me,

I’m in a purple robe; he doesn’t care that I’m

a failure. Cats understand true value. He won’t

last long and then I’ll have nothing but my little

fantasy world inside the actual world that is on the brink.

I keep thinking, “If I had only…If I had only…”

…

I still think my poetry is the most beautiful: licked

allspice, green martini ostrich caravan, unemotional

saffrons, night rosebushes, sperm clefs, laxity ohms –

filled with baleen inevitability, impassable nuzzlings,

moist embroideries! Why won’t someone give me money?

…

A wombat pulls out her pocket watch, “just look at the time.”

I’m in terrible pain. Where’s my splendid trajectory?

This isn’t a melancholy poem about having to work.

It doesn’t have bodily fluids in it.

It’s not about my identity at all.

It doesn’t espouse anything at all.

All it does is move.

…

Sometimes I just want to be that “inside person”

as in “oku-san” – not so much “wife” as the person

inside the house, taking care of the house, making the

house into art. But I’m a green-haired clown

with a light up face. This world won’t validate me –

kachunk – like a library date due stamp.

I could listen to that sound all day.

…

I really do feel super lost.

I can’t figure things out.

I wake in the middle of the night to eat

inflammatory foods. It’s agony.

At least I have food. The social contract –

has it expired? Was it even valid?

…

Derision strainer arachnids.

Dank bobcats.

Stupefied tsars.

Roach drunks.

Rubbery kookaburras.

The careless daintiness of cosmology milkmaids.

What’s next?