love sonnet to aliens
the known universe is self-referential: it has no choice.
unknown universes can see us and smell us
we hope that they have a sense of humor about it.
I want to learn at the knee and suck at the tit
of a totally unknown universe composed of wit.
when I smell a rusted clamp or a newly greased vice
or a warm horse with a rising yen for a mare
I think I’m closing in on a universe alien and near.
I hope it thinks me tragic and funny on the cusp
of the back-kick the warm horse owes his honey.
what seems self-referential is just aliens going to dinner
to watch aliens. cylons with nylons draw lots
for this perfumer-in-training wearing his boy hots at eighty.
Putin statue project
working class you don’t exist any more.
stalin saw to it that you died on your shovels
after digging graves for poets who committed suicide.
their mothers wrote diaries with piss in snow
while felling trees without gloves at twenty below
zero and some of them lived. that was long ago.
now take your nostalgia to the mall. but don’t relax.
there is something about russia. i loved my russian
teacher’s miniskirt a soft shovel for boy-lust.
she liked to gamble for hurt and display the red meat
of a recklessness that hit my number without fail.
Putin your predecessors did much so you can now nuke for kicks.
so what if next morning you’ll be sober and we’ll be dead?
viva termites! your statue’ll be taller than stalin’s marble head.
