After the shirts and mud-stewed shoes became goal posts,
we agreed that the four borders of our soccer field would be as follows:
1) the lake, with an inverse stadium of cheering fishes
happy to carry us on victory laps with fin tips and splashing fanfare
or swallow the soccer ball whole like a lapping papparazo.
2) the cabins, shielded by the invisible, invincible force field
of Grandma's Napping.
3) the neighbor's underbrush, where bare feet went to pick up trouble
like old beer bottles, or a corner kick from the biggest cousin.
4) the future, which at the time barely stretched to sloppy joes at supper
and which would only seem like a dumb idea later,
after we all spent twenty years tromping around in it,
looking for the end of a soccer game.

The first sensation I experience in the process of waking up is the sharp intrusion of the alarm noise into my unconscious mind.  I use a cell phone alarm with a garish, 8-bit jingle as the alert, and it often casts a frightening presence into the center of my dreams, like suffering sudden home invasion by an entire circus.  I sleep in a water bed, and in the middle of this sonic panic parade, I paw and paddle up to the phone to temporarily silence it.  Then comes the Snoozing Period, during which I hold the phone in one hand against my forehead.  I don’t know why I do this– headbutting has failed to solve most of my problems.  I can’t actually retreat back to full sleep at this point, but I often try in the five minute intervals before the circus rounds the corner again.  Two snoozes, and I row out of bed, past my significant other, who is still asleep.  Her lifetime admission to my 8-bit high-volume alarm bonanza barely rocks her boat at this point.  This cycle takes 15-20 minutes, and in recent months occurs at 10:15 A.M., though the same heroic extraction from sleep occurs in a similar way at 6 A.M. and 2 P.M..  Onto a shower, during which I try to bottle and name any migratory dreams.  To pick up the razor is to fully wake up.  I think it’s the permanent menace of a blade against my neck that makes me step across the last steamy line into alertness.  For me, my shave is memento mori and grooming action rolled into one– on account of both mortality and society, I need to look sharp.

The Birth Day of Nicolas Connizzo was last sighted off the Oregon coast, cruising over the Pacific Ocean at terrific speeds.  Famous diurnalist Humphrey Spattock notes, “the day is most likely headed to its traditional nesting grounds at the International Date Line, where it will copulate and then expire.  We can expect its offspring to make a flight about one year from now.”

When unspeakable words boiled
beneath his tongue,
he flattened the chewing gum lumps
spackled to the undersides of our café table.

His hands moved like an avenging flood
forced above ground by some holy,
unbearable pressure in the earth’s dark gut.

While the skies between our ears were stirred
by a gossiping pantheon of coffee steam,
the remnants left by the tongues of men
were pressed low with his sad and steady force,
the desperate act of a repressed god
reduced to vengeance through geology.

As all had become silence and flatness
in earth and ear, his shoulders slumped,
the coffee mugs became lukewarm caldera
in accordance with natural law,
the proper tips were calculated,
and a dead yahweh sloshed in his stomach.

In your freshman fro,
I saw an uncomfortable halo
hover, for a while,
over your brow and between
hair follicles, before
gradually losing spin
in a tightening nimbus
of eyelids, forehead,
and voided celestial warranties.

In the school courtyard,
St. Gonzaga weeps for the sandwiches
left at his stone toes by students
praying to pass tests, to lose weight,
to score.  St. Gonzaga is not hungry today,
thanks,
he had marble for breakfast
two dozen years ago.
St. Aloysius Gonzaga sees wetly
the sandwiches corrupt
in their plastic bellies
without grace or nourishment
for these children who are hungrier
than they know.  Finally, at the last
bell, he cries for the custodians
who must wash his feet
monthly with bleach and communion wine.

To my embarassingly significant joy, I’ve gotten to hear the impressive D.J. Brewer read at both the Chatham book launch and at a separate launch event for Are You Free, the chapbook by him, Carolyne Whelan, and Kellee Maize.  Brewer also runs the Steel City (Poetry) Slam at theShadow Lounge (9 p.m. every third Tuesday of the month).  On D.J.’s invite, I’ve attended the slam competition for the last few months, with lead-dense literary poetry soaking up flop sweat in my coat pockets, while an extremely wide range of spoken word performers graced and/or cursed the stage.  I finally scrounged together the courage and ramblitude necessary to write and then speak a piece last week.   I scored so far into dead last that I approached the undead.  My drink needed a chaser of brains. I nervously eyed the toothpicks for potential stakes.  Much support from the other poets gave me hope of rejoining the living, and one of the finalists kindlybought a copy of my book, which went to cover the cost of the exorcism.  In any case, below is my corpse-fresh first attempt at a slam poem outside of academia.  I’m so far out of my element here that I need an extended zombie metaphor to explain the quality gap, if that’s any sort of warning.

Poltergeist Pittsburgh

The clouds are a pack of wet rats,
bedraggled and swimming upstream
from the sky’s sucking whirlpool
that they’ve made.
Pittsburgh is a sinking ghost ship.

And now, the weather report.
For Allegheny County, we predict
a high blood pressure front moving in
from the north.  After moving in,
the high blood pressure front is expected
to hang around for years,
and to pick up girls over 21,
or winds over 25 miles per hour
in bars and coffee shops around town.

There is a 70% chance of participation
in illicit activities.
There is a 90% chance of horrible
poetry from yours truly in the middle of the night.
There is a 100% chance of lightning and nicotine-yellow rain
pissing down from giant, imaginary sky rats

onto towers made from iron tortured into steel
onto pavement made from the crushed
bodies of baby mountains
and onto automobiles running on the bile
of prehistoric rainforests and the blood
of pre-museum dinosaurs.

I repeat, there is a 100% chance of
recently-flattened pigeons riding
the oil-sweet rain runoff
from the middle of the road
to the gutter drains like
some murdered pirate
washing ashore.

Pittsburgh is a sinking ghost ship tonight
and we are stowaways onboard.
We are hiding in the rotting planks
and crouching in the corners of opened bar doors.
We are writing on the bedsheets
the spooks have left behind.  We are spitting
through the scurvy on our lips,
we are singing while we’re drowning,
we are packing gunpowder in our hearts
and aiming our cannons at the clouds.

Thomas draws out dotted-line
shapes on his skin, under
his button-up shirt, during
the bathroom break took around
ten, when A.J. and Daniel go outside
to smoke, Thomas ducks into the
dead-lemon john, and he
charts out worm holes.  His shirt
open, Thomas makes topographies
of rot for when they put him
down.  “Burrow Here,” with arrows,
helpful dashed circles with
demarcations for ribs, tough sternum,
“Clear Sailing” on his stomach.
Civil, engineer for his future, Thomas smudges,
buttons down shirt, returns to work.

Our mailman has gained weight
since he taught those pigeons:
to sort the parcels,
to drive the truck,
to hop in the microwave
after teaching their young.

It is dawn in Spokane, Washington, and the wheat fields are burning.  The smell of charred chaff rides the sunrise into town alongside the pickup trucks.

A man comes into a caboose diner and orders two breakfast plates, one for his friend, “who’s on his way.”  The food comes, and he eats rapidly, hunching through a waffle and the whole wheat toast.  One cup of water in, he goes to the restroom.  When he comes back, he furtively sits down on the other side of the booth and starts in on this plate.

The sun is unpacking its baggage in the parking lot, and the man can see the asphalt begin to wave.   The urge to wave back is resisted.  The oatmeal suffers a sudden plague of brown sugar, and succumbs.  Half a cloud of eggs evaporate before he heads back to the bathroom.  When the man returns, over-casually, it is to the original side.  The caboose is just shy of busy, slowly shifting weight from the kitchen to the booths by way of baked grains and flexing tongues.  Nobody reacts to the man’s switch, so he resumes eating, at a more measured pace. Now, as the window glass warms, an amiable glow has filled him.  Now, quite often, his posture stirs, and he looks up expectantly toward the restroom.

This man, halfway through a morning meal with a good friend, is pleasantly awaiting  his return from the toilet, so their conversation may go on.  This man, puttering through the last of two syrup-showered waffles, is not alone.  This man, awake before the first field began its controlled holocaust, is not himself burning.