"Have A Nice Day!"
(Default message on a public bus)

Have, why not?, instead, a day
of kumquats, instead
hold butter in your mouth
until the daymelt
and the dewy pulse
of reason hurdles slipwise
through the air.

Have a calendar of honeycomb,
fingers pricked
by daylight's sneeze,
have at it!, have whatever
drainpipe song
the rush and surge
of garden leaves can sing.

Have a day bedecked in drops
of kerosene, and nights
lit only by reflecting snow.
Have a wedding. Have a funeral.
Get top marks
on a Rorschach test
from a greasy paper bag.

I wish you this: a hairpin day,
rivers re-liquidized in daylight,
the top rolled down on everything,
and streamers of the vaprous dark
scattered like tyrants
and cockroaches
under a lit, swinging bulb.

Have the cure within your reach,
and choose, instead, tap water.
Make milk from the milkweed,
and an occasion of the mundane,
when applauding a chorus
of baritone frogs,
wear the unnecessary tie.

Have a handstand day, a head-
stand day. Stand upon your limpid heart.
Have a moose day. The kind with horns.
Have a noose day, where the slipknot
slips, a getaway, a fast car
and jump in to it, stuffing fistfuls
of cash on the breeze.

Have it your way, kiddo,
and have it with jam.
Have sticky fingers for the neighbor's
roses, and pollen on your forehead
instead of ash. Have bees in every
bonnet, turn every phrase
impolite. Have any day. Pick one.



Morning Exercise
               "One must imagine Sisyphus happy."
                         —Albert Camus

I boot the laptop and click on the kettle.
Already, small birds are scuffling around.

The domed light of morning makes a theory,
explaining our lives to the iridescent clouds.

I have coffee now, black as a panther, steaming
like rainforest dawn above my chintzy mug.

Now, start typing. At parties, if you're a comedian,
people will tell you to say something funny.

Poet, say something profound. Or better, imply it.
Look up long enough at the pearl of morning,

and down at the dumb birds surviving, look
in places we can't, listen past the tinnitus

of morning news, find detail in dark silhouettes.
The ones we pay the least, we give impossible jobs.

It is easier this way to dismiss them when they fail.
Dismiss me now, and I will go outside. I will stand

in my slippers on the wet lawn, admiring the sprinklers.
It is a scientific fact: if you want to be struck

by lightning, you must stand for awhile in the rain.
Pretend this is rain. Pretend this is sanity.

Pretend for awhile to want nothing more than to peck
the grates of the drain for something tasty,

and a sky overhead that seems like being inside a marble,
and strung on the grass those beads of light for slurping.

And although the sun will not come out for awhile,
and my slippers are taking on water like a capsized boat,

behold me in my terry-cloth robe and goose-flesh legs,
and think of me as smiling, like a poem.



Small Gestures
Forgive me, rose petals, my fingers
could not resist the habit of plucking.

Some would call it childish, and those
who waggle a shaming finger know best.

I do not own my hands, but slip into them
each morning like a pair of work gloves.

I flex to break up the stiffness, and they crackle
like damp embers stirring back to life.

They are all I have, these slender tongs,
to do what my mind instructs in the tactile world.

Sometimes when they mis-type a word,
I wonder what they are trying to tell me.

Maybe they want to ask about the wartime practice
of soldiers shooting off their trigger fingers—

were they more afraid of dying? Or of killing
someone with a gesture as slight and easy

as curling an index finger into a teacup?
Oh, look what we have done to you now,

little flower. Let us sweep the petals quickly,
from one full-fingered hand into the other.