COME, MY NIHILISM, MY BELOVED
“Nihilists!...Fuck me. I mean, say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it’s an ethos.”
–Walter Sobchak, The Big Lebowski
Jackhammer glamour hammers at
my ethos, clamors for my strat-
agem and loves a copycat,
enamored with its grammar’s bride.
Attack!, you may hear lovers cry
as junipers reach for the sky;
let thunder’s mockumentary
explain how honey pricks, my bride.
Come, let it tell the rose to sting
and buzz. The end of interesting—
(is speech like stirring with a string?)—
is sting itself! Let’s bleed, my bride.
Kill me with peace and quiet not
unskilled, my love. It’s nice; the rot-
ten fruit’s insanity forgot
to crown itself with thorny pride.
Crowning the inside of your heart
with laurels, maybe lovers’ art
is erring willingly to part
with all that parts true love, my bride.
Hysterical, unwedded bliss
has boarded up my worldview; this
is no emergency! Let’s kiss
our wingspan’s time goodbye, and ride
Acrostic stanzas, language-free,
into the alphabet of Me.
Invisible as memory:
that’s how you’ll know “what’s real,” my bride.
Fine-toothed but out of season? It
gets better: passion—no dull wit—
fresh out of reason’s sewing kit;
po-faced, showstopper cold, my bride.
Farsighted angst exposes feet
to skimpy earth and hunks of meat.
It’s sweet to waste a wasted sweet;
don’t tell me, love, “At least we tried.”
AT LOS ANGELES INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT
Outside, night released its million
black balloons. Its blue-gray fragments
opened up for planes, then melted
in the winter’s eye and morning’s
pure authority. A woman
stood in line for coffee, fretted
next to me about the passing
time, acutely felt it losing
things. She asked where I was headed.
“Portland. Just for business.” Corgis
scuttled by. The mood was garbled.
Rhinovirus rode the language
Borges used to lasso fire’s
lacerated name. “El Paso,
where my parents live,” she answered.
“After that is Paris.” Smiling,
under vintage cat-eye glasses,
she forgot that time was flowing
into blue-gray nothing. Children
drew a mustache on the window’s
sinking moon. Their mother scolded
them and scrubbed it, but the likeness
of a splattered bug—its crossed-out
flight—survived. The cataclysmic
clematis of dawn was creeping
in the terminal and mental
fanny packs of tourists. Tucking
back some blue-gray hairs, “I’m going
there for school. To be a pastry
chef, my lifelong dream! I never
planned to be a civil servant
my whole life.” The time was stretching
tissue-thin above the biscuits’
smell and steam, which grossed out aging.
(Aging isn’t good at being
free.) “At first it was Employer
Rights. But I imagined baking
macaron! I pitched the Homeless
Veterans Reintegration
Program, but my taste buds fluttered
when a kouign-amann reentered
my awareness, and inertia
broke. The deputy comptroller’s
skin was pâte àchoux!” She giggled.
Overhead, a big announcement
from a little hole: “Now boarding...”
Blue-gray stars above the tower
took the cake for disappearing.
Day lived out its dream and dreamt it
too; its rolling pin and flour.
“First, I have to tell my parents.”
THE QUEEN OF BOHEMIA,
remembering Châteauroux, drinks a
milkshake at McDonald’s on
Ash Avenue. Red shadows
the town, like velvet
gallantry or a shave.
Briefly, a bulb burns
out. Music, the greatest
barfly, guards the queen.
Autumn reveals it all
goes. According to plan,
broilers sizzle and pop
in back. Another satisfied?
Does she taste somewhere
a prince, too far
to grab and small?
Pressure-sensitive and dismal;
is her screen dawn’s
last dance or dismissal?
Someday spills all over
my quiet traitor, weakness.
LOVE AND OTHER LANDMARKS
Screaming like a first impression,
Maddie’s sleeping face in back
tilts in the unknown direction
back, as we drive north to back
up a truth with facts. A skittish
sunrise follows blindly; stalks
us, and blazing, barks a Scottish
Terrier bark from Yucca stalks.
One way or another, the stars always dial
the wrong number; what with a phone less primordial
than ours. Zero’s track record fills up our talks.
What got into the Mojave
as we left? You know it fights
back fake tears in every movie
pilgrimage. Dermatophytes
stow away on Maddie, make me
carry goopy care from Doc’s
office to the fourth. ‘Forsake me,’
emanates from Stockton’s docks.
As it’s hot on the heels of fate in a bucket,
our goldfish is hoping it won’t kick the bucket
like this. Zero’s track record fills up our walks.
Wild lantanas near Lake Shasta
sparkle. Just beyond the bluffs,
Mama Bear admits she has to
play the hand she’s dealt, and bluffs;
that’s the gist of Maddie’s story,
started when she saw the Fox
Racing logo’s migratory
eyeless gaze gazing like Guy Fawkes.
Such a watered-down view gives the soul polydipsia;
“If we drink, do we not pee,” Maddie, over Sia,
asks me. Zero’s track record fills up our socks.
Every condor casts a ghoulish
glance, like pearls before the tooth
fairy, at us, from its goulash
life, until the 45th
parallel. You know, to collate,
er, I mean relocate flocks
people’s lives a bit, like chocolate
challah, baby elk and flocks
of unlimited geese. So when you said, “Let’s move to
Portland,” out of the wainscoted blue, my “I’d love to”
was gone. Zero’s track record fills up our clocks.
TWILIGHT ON THE TUALATIN WETLAND
The dark and quickening hills, just south of here,
Are murmurating in the sky with a chip
On its shoulder. Future shadows outshine what’s here:
Flowers too frost-forced. A soldier hears
Tomorrow’s news report, and those who know
Hypocrisy is normal comb their hair
With muck less holy than the muck is here.
To get ahead, you’ve got to put a lot
Before yourself, but night reneges a lot.
Its bad and broken bravery stood right here
All day. Those vines are barking up the wrong
Tree, and barking knows it’s never wrong.
But all the things we shouldn’t say are wrong
Until they meet their moonlit limits here.
In the wet leaves, a water snake has just wrung
The neck and water out of its truly wrong
Beliefs. Its catalog of chocolate chips,
That human-sounding moon might say. I’m wrong
To knot distinction with the air, but wrong’s
A friend to everyone. The willows know
Some needs are ill-advised; their roots don’t know
The newest brightness hit the jackpot wrong.
To nature’s ruler, this is not a lot
Of inches, but it shines like Camelot.
How can we make our better better? Lots
Of ways: dusk sounds its usual horns. What’s wrong
Invents what’s right beneath a dogwood’s lot
Of white. These tadpoles learn by the pond scum’s light...
To the student whose teachers all hate him (or her):
Good luck! Woodpeckers peck what time allots
By the squirrels making progress. Parking lots
And levity make room for love. This chip
Off the old block thinks poison oak is cheap;
The moss on its stonewall agrees. It’s late,
Minutes are riding ducks in flight to no
Avail. They go too far for time to know.
Muskrats swear they don’t have time to know
This mud; they bathe in vision’s happy lot.
The wetland’s voice is smiling, like it knows
No magic spell dispels what no one knows.
Dusk loves an echo chamber; dusk is wrong:
Love’s an echo chamber. Now you know
The whole amenable world was under no
Illusions when the river’s trial and error
Settled like a tortoise on a hare...
Falcons sacrifice their dreams; they chip
Them into pieces here for better chips.
A subtle fog delays me. Mt. Hood chips
Its promised distance. God’s a place to know,
To know your place and mine, a young pine chips
In. Praise, less earnest than eternal, cheeps
From nests; re-educates the reeds. By lot,
Pine cones chose today to let the chips
Fall where they may. Beneath my feet, a chip-
Munk mourns its lost interior; spiders wrong
And write each other, happy to be wrong.
The gray in the air trembles. When the chips
Are down, this grass has sweet brown eyes. Out here,
A single object’s hard to see and hear
Among the weeds. The city north of here
Is a biography of fallen wrongs.
Portland digs and drinks strange waters. Lots
Of soles have soaked themselves in this, to know
The edge’s rock it grants it can’t un-chip.
____________________
Today’s LittleNip:
Stories may well be lies, but they are good lies that say true things, and which can sometimes pay the rent.
—Neil Gaiman
_____________________
Our thanks to Jake Sheff for visiting the Kitchen today for the first time! Jake is a pediatrician in Oregon and veteran of the US Air Force. He's married with a daughter and a whole lot of pets. Poems of Jake’s are in Radius, The Ekphrastic Review, Crab Orchard Review, The Cossack Review and elsewhere. He won 1st place in the 2017 SFPA speculative poetry contest and a Laureate's Choice prize in the 2019 Maria W. Faust Sonnet Contest. Past poems and short stories have been nominated for the Best of the Net Anthology and the Pushcart Prize. His chapbook is Looting Versailles, from Alabaster Leaves Publishing. Thanks again, Jake, and don’t be a stranger!
_____________________
—Medusa
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