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THESE BE THE LINES
Forget-me-not is my flower
that splits the rocks, or should I say rather —
and as I said to my ex-girlfriend (frequently),
yes maybe even
a little too frequently —
You’re the looks, I’m the talent.
So I collapse the verse, rhyme not found,
enjamb the lines and do a motherfucking handstand.
_____
But now we loll around here, downtown,
surrounded by ex-movie-queens and used
game machines, discarded scraps of Sassy magazine:
ironic references galore, and who among us
is poor at heart, or without sin to cast that first rock —
and all is so much flotsam and jetsam,
and curds and whey, and maybe (shall we?)
find another way to be.
For the future looks like a garage sale
run by the very worst of neighbors, you know the one —
rotting teeth, perma-whiskey smell,
greasy hands, sunken eyes, and belt undone…
And he is us, and we are him.
_____
And the world is an ink smudge,
a phone number erased, but underneath the smear,
you can read the digits, still always there.
Never fully legible, but we can never
finally be, unless we mark down the message —
area code seven four three.
So, I’ll leave this for you,
in the gas station urinal
for future lovers to see.
And so, my motto —
I something something,
I rise like air,
I drown women with letters,
and stroke cats with flair.
DON'T LET CATS EAT YOU
when you are dead & lie (maybe in bed),
your cat will feast upon your eyes.
this is true. it’s been studied,
and they won’t want to, but
there you’ll lie, dead & dead,
all that you said & all that you were
about to elide into some toxic dew of death.
& they’re hungry, and no food in
their (your) favorite bowl,
the chipped one with rabbits
on it. and so they’ll wait a while
until the hunger grows too great
and then they’ll sup upon your eyes.
the softest, the easiest the most vital
thing to reach. and so greatness fades to nothing
& love, and as in any relationship
in time we strike upon the softest the
most vital, the most important
lovely thing & eat it for ourselves.
YOU KNOW THIS SONG ALREADY
you don’t want to be the town drunk, tom. not in new york city. — dorothy parker to her husband
That feeling when you
wake up in the seismic dark
and need to ask some tough questions,
and here’s a start, Who, what, when,
where, why, and especially who?
And then (nudging that elbow next to yours)
all clicks back, and once and again
the world is solid — horrible-solid, but
solid, nonetheless.
_____
“All stories are mystery stories,”
my first professor told me,
but what we have here is not
a who-dunnit, but a tragi-comedy,
worst and rarest
of genres, and you (I)
are Joseph K.,
sadly traduced one day,
without doing anything
particularly wrong.
_____
Sheets unfurled, woozy tang
of gunmetal and nicotine gum
(chewed, left in your mouth),
and now it’s time to get away
from that non-non-non
stranger next to you,
so pants on.
And we stumble into the awful.
And before us lies
the only inevitable,
with a dash of the incredible,
and a hint of the — hold it, barf —
the irredeemable. There now,
feel better? With behind you
a trail of vomit in the snow
as a reverse love-letter.
Oliver Miller has an MFA in fiction from Sarah Lawrence College and has published two books -- One Last Xanax and Drinking and Driving (both by Thought Catalog Press). This is his first published poetry. In addition to writing things, he also lived in Eastern Europe, was a drunk for a while, and was (very briefly) homeless. You know -- standard artsy shit like that. He's the shy guy sitting in the back of the bar, except he's not actually so shy. Feel free to hit him up on Instagram.