Eau de Tennis
Hey thanks for being here,
I’m starting this conversationally
in an attempt to gain your trust tennis
balls smell like late night adults
only candy stores wherein rind-y
lime taffy, rather the idea of taffy
sublimates into a spacious electric
3D-printed grassland. Will you trust me
enough to go? To know
feelings are nothing like sheep
except to move you nowhere well
you can try counting them. Numbers and
facts
have metallic heft we need. I mean they
are
weaponized. Petroleum,
the dead baby boomer era relative
of recycled plastic is responsible
for what Slovakia tennis beauty
Dominika Cibulkova refers to as heaven
in a can. Of the ethereal sheep herd
their wools slough off tumbleweed
all over the manufactured grasslands
and I have lost count. There is
no fence. Return to the metal facsimile
of knowing facts and numbers and words
like approximately and maybe water
down how risky it is to own an opinion,
participate in expression’s double
jeopardy. Across the ocean
there is a warehouse in Australia
where approximately 13,000 cans
of tennis balls each with its own vertical
trinity are sealed and blessed by Quality
Control Inspector #7 who some of the
balls
call God maybe, some balls want to know
exactly how much petroleum is contained
or what petroleum really is, others wait
for the carriage of the automatic
forehand spitter
so they can fail valiantly to attain
the perfect
thwack, which is their tennis ball
smell.
Which they know to be past way above
the fence magenta and pinprick like
implausible receding day-stars bowing
out
behind the bluest curtains I can hang
for you.
Lifecycle
Thimble mountain frogs, each with a thin black racing
stripe on its back: their lifespan withers at winter.
Their genetic arc is piecewise, elliptical.
At night there’s mist on the river, the sky is low-
low-volume pink fuzz trees shrug closer below the neon dot,
moon. Light begins to fill this sink as a faucet
would sluice a spout onto its metal, slicked invisible.
The alpine in the air edges on anti-gravity.
Red creeps from burnt
sugar, mature salmon, cadmium orange,
pale coral,
alpine stone withers into ancient pumpkins. Rose ion light
finally glugs up the valley. A bouquet of bubbles. Thin
racing stripes
flutter how a colony of black grass scrubs the ocean floor,
wagering to fluid currents their blood,
the fruit of star cores.
Make the End of the World
So Beautiful
As
I took Rock for a walk I thought, lavender
growths
on the clouds fixing the sunset
make
the end of the world so beautiful.
But
that's incorrect. It's not The End
because
nothing ever really ends.
Once
begun an indelible mark exists to exist.
Rock
has to take a shit. He's new here
at
the end of the world, and he's got
some
pre-fight jitters. You've seen pugs
play
poker, but you've never seen a pit
hit
the speed bag. Up on his hind legs, bob
and
weave, float like a butterfly, sting like, ah, shit
you
know the rest. Popping the bottle cap from his Yoo-hoo
before
a gulp, Rock agrees about the clouds, which I know
contain
visually killer smog that yodels in the key
lysergic
acid diethylamide trips over robbing the paint store.
Magenta.
Turquoise. Tangerine. Pewter. Here's a Rorschach
what
do you do with it? Eco-poetics is terrestrial blues music.
Rock
was an amateur pugilist
before
the War. He adds, I only ever went
after
the ones that made me bleed a little. And when
he
went, he left his dog wife, their puppy children. Or maybe
he
kept a lover, doggy style. Who knows anything at all. He forgets
his
chocolate milk when he remembers how to growl.
Rocky
Earl served in the 118th, a shock-drop lieutenant,
storming
Normandy, that saccharine European ballroom
jazz
that passes for American myth in American twilight.
The
city sunset looks like the northern lights live among us,
but
got high, deflated like one of those human balloon
PSAs
D.A.R.E. made that, if you're with, statistically,
mean
you're more likely to do or have done drugs, Rock
did
you know that? All I can think about is
before
the war, and before the war, he says
is
before the ruse. The mythic parameters
we
depend upon for socio-narrative cohesion
so
we don't tear each other apart in the dog eat dog, after all.
But
Rock didn't really say that, instead what he does is
he
looks at me. Kid, I 'aint ever wanted to
see a sunset this bad. So I say,
hope
is like a poisonous gas, it diffuses throughout the air
and
before you know it, every cell of your body
is
fighting what makes the end of the world so beautiful.
