There are many more cities like this one where skeletons grow from sand
Cinder houses fill up the netherworlds between texts ur friend sends
Before they manage to kick out the imported workers from their slums
And get that sexy slim coat of paint on like a radio jingle once was once
My hair falls out in clumps I’ll never turn back with no drain big enough
To clog sand and the blue. And my sick sticking to this world for a while
Longer as long as my hunger, my style is spice like Thyme and plain pepper
Grounded or not between my teeth much more than just a tongue trigger
Some salt and a medium French onion. The desert has artificial about it.
Living there is like the future looking down both sides of her nostrils.
It’s from there you’ll see everything you ever wanted. From the nostril.
Of course language trips us up. Take Think Big! for example.
Does it mean big like big truck or big like Believe in
yourself!
? These different meanings must be related in a space something
The size of Texas our connections run rampant toward thine time
in mine mark
from the nostril you’ll see everything you ever wanted is here, they say
There is little that grows green yet lord knows I keep rising. I have
enough bread
Each day I look between urns at this woman now pregnant. Between us, a
child.
The mealworms are somewhere ahead with my routine, challenge and break
Routine, challenge breaking routine I recall that Thai papaya fallen on
the floor
Maggots got to before foul in the bin. At first its insides were little
purity puffs
On the marble floor like packing materials sprung from a box: new flat.
Once the maggots really did their dance they looked more like those new
pills
Put out by Pfizer just then, lying in a hospital bed you mine secrets like
diamonds:
There once was a man with a pace-maker; who’s insurance to
travel
Was too much; he got holes in his face from acne all over the
place;
So he started smiling more to cover it up….better than make-up
streaks
When you were crying in the bathroom, she said, I wanted to come in
(It’s from the bathroom you’ll get everything you ever wanted, I thought.)
And lick up all your tears streaming ‘cross your pores like pouring rain on
a car window
with tiny eye-lash wind-shield wipers wanting more like everyone until
they don’t
want more of nothing can be better than neither my roar nor more words.
Thomas Brian Osatchoff's poetry has appeared in Whiskey Island Review This is his first appearance Gnome.