Ruin anyone anywhere. Your penis
could become longer. Access secret credit
histories, best loan rates, amateur wives.
This is what they don’t want you to know.
Levitra. Cialis. Viagra.
Turn your worm into a snake. Make women scream.

Go ahead and scream
at your boss, that penis.
You could invent the next Viagra
working from home! All you need is credit
and we’re here for you, even if everyone you know
thinks you’re a schmuck, even your wife.

With our hot young Russian mail-order wives
you wouldn’t have to understand them when they scream.
That’s about all they’re good for, you know.
Grow hair on your chest, enlarge your penis;
puberty’s over before you credit
it, bub, from here on it’s mortgages and Viagra.

Choke your chicken with both hands! With Viagra
you’ll never hear another complaint from your wife.
We don’t care if you have bad credit,
male pattern baldness, eat too much ice cream.
Write us a check today, pencil or pen is
fine, we already know

where you live. Learn what Wall Street pros know!
What if you’d invested in Viagra
in 1987? A Swiss bank account is open, is
waiting for you to help the wife
of dead dictator Sani Abacha cream
off Nigeria’s oil wealth. She just needs your credit

card number. “Socialism’s discredited,”
she whispers seductively, “Those in the know
take all they can.” But you’re stuck at the screen,
cubicled, dumb with choice. Viagra
or Slim-Fast? Porn or mortgages? Your wife,
if you really had one, would say you think with your penis.

But ask yourself: what if this Viagra, that penis cream,
is your only creditable shot at a meatspace wife?
Don’t press that delete key. We know more than you know.


     published in The New Pantagruel, Issue 2.2 (2005)

He lifts up the chipped stone,
strokes the tousled grass,
its scent never greener than when crushed.
He breathes soft as feathers
on the blue, abandoned egg.

He watches the salmon feed on the glittering flies
and the coarse-furred bear feed on the salmon.
Quicksilver as thought chasing error,
rough as desire blanketing thought.

He shears the glacier like a lamb,
the seas split by a blade of ice.
He lies all day in silken paralysis
in a spider’s web.

He is a dead tree, a frigate
of green moss and mushrooms.
He falls like a tree in the fire,
the crack of a legion of snapped lances
as the blackened pines topple.

He cools like smoke,
plays disappearing games with the wind.

He sucks up the soil hungry as a worm,
as a diver drinking in sweet breath.

Spring shoots up green, the spear points hinting
of an army marching underground.
His voice is red as the hollering tulips.
His voice is white as the crash of ice
on the melting river.

He breaks the sun like bread,
shares the warm pieces around
in his burnt hands.


     published in The New Pantagruel, Issue 2.2 (2005)