Hard Water

Hard water makes my hair lose its natural shine.

Its curls, like tendrils on the vine,

become like straw that crunches as I comb

the kinks out, hurl them out to roam

the granite floor like punctuation

or bored bits of annotation

drifting off my page until,

as doodles, they begin to spill

and pool upon the granite floor

until, like some industrial shore,

my doodles lap my toes like dogs.

Obese, they wheeze like feral hogs,

Gilette spines gleaming--fevered dream

that haunts me even as the gleam

of light inside my pupil pulses,

keeping time with my impulses.

This is what hard water does:

Replaces locks with lifeless fuzz.

Five-Minute Poem

Five-minute poem, your tyranny of time

Demands I make every consecutive line rhyme.

In the snowstorm of composition, tiny ants take a trek—

Flotsam-jetsam rising slowly from my imagination’s wreck.

 

The warmth of the central heating is a muffler on my arm—

Incongruous, mysterious, doing less good than harm—

And yet I tied it myself in my turtleneck sweater

To make the suffocation of paranoid window-shopping better.

 

Leach from my bones every crystal of salt!

Don’t blame me for the taste; it isn’t my fault

That in my serene body, not a salty bone lies;

The soil will be fertile upon my demise.