Never Trump.
Just released at the New Orleans Poetry Festival: Ghazals 1-59 and Other Poems by Sheila E. Murphy and Michelle Greenblatt and brain : storm by Michelle Greenblatt!
You, volunteer:
You know the difference
Between cause and effect:
The people on the street
Are too stupid to have homes
Too filthy to wash
I know that if I cut him off permanently he’d just get it somewhere else and do it in private, alone and somehow that feels crueler to me than my being the supplier if that makes any sense, and I know the Hutts still wanna run me out of business but I pay em protection money every month and it’s stupid but there’s people like Ben who need a place like mine
They said maybe our relationship could have lasted
if I had been a better cook.
And I thought to myself and then said
out loud
I would have been sane longer
had he had a mechanical cock.
Nonsaleable Nathan’s hot dog buns
Nonsaleable Nestea sweet tea
Nonsaleable Nestea unsweet tea
Nonsaleable popcorn seed
Nonsaleable pretzel salt
Nonsaleable salt packets
I was the rabbit in that play, once, not that long ago. Since then I have travelled and crossed paths with these characters, in a dotted line from Baton Rouge, Louisiana to Coney Island, New York where I am currently writing these words in the poison gasses of my computer screen. If I were to borrow the Prince’s telescope I might still be able to see our paths entangled.
His language compartmentalized into
words, “drink, eat, death, monster…”
He laughed, quenched his thirsty throat
swigging unfairness into his gut
It's all gravy, for real here
in the wee hours where
dark dolls flourish and
madmen drool eating their own poems.
Glenda determined that the cut wasn’t too severe, and treated it with a Band-Aid. Glenda then applied more Band-Aids to the student’s head, hoping to heal any emotional wounds as well. Soon his skull was covered with Band-Aids, and he found it hard to breathe. Glenda removed a few bandages around the student’s nose so that he could inhale.
Belief entered into as if
it were the back seat
of a taxi. “Just drive”
she said, & used her glasses
to push the hair back
To be healthy, too, reading booklike things and the feel of fishnet stockings and the swirl of a martini or two and a dirty smoke to boot. Dancing. Dancing for sure and plenty of drinks for two.
I concluded that this 48-year throwback was rife with free form: some events would be the same, some not.
Who were the forgotten first to be kind or to recognize
mindfulness in eyes? When forests guarded the fine-tune
fingertip touch, they promoted overflow communications
between disparate species with mint conditions operating
in the back-roar, in breath without trying, in the classical
days before medical birth.
