Consequently, the next generation does not
get your jokes.

The next generation has brighter shoes than you,
and the next generation has a softer face than you (acceptable), but the next generation’s hair really does
just dry that way.

The next generation is being prescribed different mood-altering drugs.
The next generation is being diagnosed with similar mood-altering diseases (new letters).
The next generation wants to share their opinions on the world
vis-à-vis music
by way of this bathroom stall chalkboard wall.

The next generation is fully familiar with high fructose corn syrup and soybean subsidies
The next generation has never used a tanning booth
The next generation has always been on birth control
The next generation is sensitive to the plight of the diminishing honey bee, the
next generation says “like” far too often, the next generation is unfamiliar
with the Seattle sound, the next generation
is pretty independent, so.

The next generation would like cheaper gas.
The next generation is open to your religion.
The next generation is sexting you now.

The next generation is dreaming of farm shares, the next generation takes good care of their dogs,
the next generation thinks that’s art? The next generation is
post-blog post-FTP post-artificial-intelligence post-Ikea post-sarcasm pre-next-amazing-thing

The next generation doesn’t know what to do with their lives, the next generation
is cool with that, the next generation is shrugging this worldly economy,
like enlightened Atlases,
sweetly off their shoulders
the next generation wouldn’t mind a fulfilling job

the next generation is buying organic salmon with their food stamps
and inviting you to their potlucks

the next generation is keenly aware of their unoriginality
the next generation is becoming disenchanted with fame

The next generation
just
wants
to know

How to Write a Decent Cover Letter:

How, in our inbox flash floods of words, doc after attached doc after attached doc
to have one’s name remembered, for a time?

(And the next generation is never growing old)

I.
Flying upwards into space or
pitching downwards, it’s all the same

Midway each dream the doors open:
Everything stops.

Suddenly the decision must be made: do I get out? Step freely
into nothingness?

Or remain, blind to the rushing air
the elevator / my protector
and casket?

I know, right.

The subconscious is sophomoric
in its metaphor.

II.
Before I left you I thought it was impossible.

I’d heard
that if you slept through some fatal, nonexistent accident
you’d simply never awaken –

Just die like that,
however you’d
inadvertently imagined.

Always wake up before you land. Always.
Or else.

Well.

Each night, my life ends in elevators
The body contracting
bones splintering,
goring some regal floor / ceiling
(depending on direction of force)

Lungs jammed between lips, liver lapping spleen, everything thick, wet
tonguey and lolling, skin bursting
a fractal of fractures, my
china plate ribs

And I wake up calmly, without a start, I am splayed like a starfish in our old sheets

heart all exposed.

III.
It is a dark wood, simply engraved
the buttons crackling white

And I press 8, because 8 was where I wanted to go but as soon as the doors chime shut,
I have a sinking feeling about the whole thing, and

sure enough we begin plummeting
down deep into the earth
the elevator and I

until

there is no earth left at all:
mantles, cores,
everything shredded around the edges, obliterated

Ladies and gentlemen we are approaching maximum height, in fact we are
now entering the thermosphere,
now entering the exosphere, oh heavens
we are
completely outtasphere, ha ha

darkness, and infinity
my elevator and I.

IV.
The other night I didn’t dream about anything.
The other night I was sleeping under the Milky Way

This was Rockport, Maine:

Insects rubbed their arthritic legs
in the tall fading grass
And across the way, a giant wooly dog slowly kicked a curved paw behind his giant wooly ear,
his faded collar swinging,
ringing
sweetly into the night

Somewhere, in all of this space
I lay sleeping

A satellite soared
brightly overhead.

These large green lawns spilling into curbs, winding roads
the flatness of it all
strip malls, Kohl’s, DSW
mailboxes at the end of each driveway
some with a little painted bird

Sweet mother of God I am 26 years old and
Hairphernalia is still here!
Best Cleaners still here
Ax Man Surplus and Eric The Bike Maaaaan and
Beek’s pizza –

We’d wander here when school got out and
maybe even order something, if we were feeling rich, I’d
play with my hair
like I’d seen girls do in the movies.

I stood outside that Elks Lodge the night I dyed
my hair platinum, he would see me
standing there, grinning love in a Penzoil boy’s t-shirt

and it was over, he didn’t like blondes.

The swamp where we used to play
and the woods where we built our treehouse, dragged
the slab of concrete for a table has been
paved over, now

Houses with roofs bigger than ours
stuck into new lawns like
mailboxes

and the neon pink house with brown trim has been
repainted:

a more agreeable beige.

Across from the unpink house the road to Johanna’s
has a new wooden fence, which at first makes me suspect
I never knew her at all,
she never existed

and then I get lost trying to find my first job at the two dollar theater, but when
I turn the corner and it’s there! I cry
oh
I miss you

we are betrayers! how could we
have left this place

I.
After the swans had surrounded us
we headed home

Grabbed bicycles and adjusted helmet straps and
got back on the trail,

to land, smack dab eventually
in our kitchen

As if all of this had been nothing out of the ordinary.

I said,
“Did you put the cheese in the fridge.”

I said,
“We’ll wash those later.”

Plastic plates clattered in the sink.
I washed the sunscreen off my face, brushed
sand and grass off bare legs.

Darling did you see the swans?

II.
I had never been so close to one
ever in my life

Let alone twenty of them.

A whiteness of swans
says the online encyclopedia (citation needed)

an exultation of skylarks, a doading of sheldrakes, a
phalanx
of storks

(We are running out of words,
and these entries are proof

Someday we will discover a very small insect
and have to call it shark.)

III.
When we first came upon them I was enchanted –
A whole whiteness of them!

Gilding the glassy surface of Spy Pond
these pale ballerinas with treble clef necks
snowy and copper-mouthed

I sat down on that rock to watch
and at that moment I would have said yes to anything

I thought they were a sign
A message to me, personally:

Why do you keep forgetting

Why don’t you leave the house

The swans glided toward us, the whole whiteness of them. Ducks and geese made room. I was replete

with a million yes-es

oh, anyone could have asked.

IV.
Have you ever seen a swan out of water?

Well.

As it takes its few wobbly steps
onto land
it straightens its treble clef neck, pulls its terrible head up high

and effectively becomes
an albino snake
wriggling in the breeze.

They stand there squonking, the whole whiteness of them
quivering in sandmuck
on tiny orange peel legs

They gorge themselves on
lake weeds, sharp and green
covered in mud and smelling of rot

What is this thing, you ask
how did this happen.

Squonk squonk squonk! the swans reply.

Swans are
a thickness, an overjuiced bicep, all bulging, black eyes like angry ink spills
peering into your own, bill gaping

as if this were their dying wish,

as if this is all they had to say to you
get the fuck out

V.
A hernia of swans, I suggest. An apocalypse.

You rinse the wine glasses and leave them to dry on the counter.
We change into pajama pants
and glance through stacks of DVDs

Outside, their wings are beating.

They glide
back into the lake.

vowels and consonants conveniently aligned
just so:

Creating the illusion of babble. Muted. An artifice
of conversation.

Watermelon, watermelon.
Watermelon? Watermelonwatermelon!

The tongue curls, the lips purse. Oh?

Watermelon.

We would take each others’ hands and waltz on stage

All mustard polyester and
Character shoes

And if we did our job right you
wouldn’t even notice us

We were set pieces with beating hearts, sweaty palms –

The maroon-red nail polish called “Vixen” I would
remove and re-apply to each toe each week, dollops of thick, coagulating blood

while the
stereo played, (Big bang baby it’s a crashcrashcrash)

Or the haircut he got the week before which
kind of made him look like Eddie Vedder, maybe, all tumbled curls like that and
Her wisdom teeth removed, the swelling in her cheeks just beginning
to subside. It still hurtsth, she’d say.

Watermelon? I’d reply.

Sometimes we would stand behind the curtain before our cue and take deep, calming breaths
through the nose, or else we might faint/hyperventilate:

Peeking through bright slits to watch the
audience monster shifting colossally in its seats,
a heaving, rustling, crunching, sighing
just beyond the brink –

inhale inhale
inhale here
we
go

And everything is lights.

Silence, but for our feet,
shuffling gently on painted floors.

Caked with makeup we would swirl as slender ghosts
just bodies, bodies in the background, now:

Watermelonwatermelonwatermelon.

Water!

What is that you say?

Melon! Watermelon!

Watermelon?

Feigning surprise, disappointment, laughter, humanity –
dancing soundlessly on the sidelines.

I’ll wander to the 88 bus stop
like a drunkard

scattering footprints like rose petals, running my fingers
along your chainlink fence.

I am envisioning diving into your perennials.
I am laying face-down in your lawn.

I’d like to throw
my face
into the divine leafy bosom of your shrubbery

and go “tthhhppppptttth!”

You Are For Hula Hooping

And For Experimenting With New Cameras, the
glossy boxes full of shaped glass that arrived in your mailbox today, carefully cushioned in packaged air you are for

Your Garden,
a chainlink fenced in square which, before you was weeds, wildflowers, dry
dirt and now look just look! you are for

Water Fountains In Parks
Credit Ratings and The Machines Who Keep Track Of Your Credit Ratings,
Supermarkets and The Machines Who Keep Track Of Supermarkets

Honeydew Melons and Unskinned Rabbits and That Goat Cheese
Which Traveled By Plane, Train Automobile All The Way From France
Just For You
To Spread It On A Cracker, Today

You Are For
Quitting Jobs Sometimes, Oversleeping Sometimes, Forgetting To
Feed The Fish Sometimes

You Are For Traffic Signs and the way they’d point us –

Left, right, up, down, the mandala of
the rotary late night last summer

When I’d forgotten how to ride a bicycle
but you adjusted my helmet
and we went out the door.

Knitting

When are you coming back to stand in front of the window?
(I heard you whistling last night. Cars pass me by all day,

waves circling the enormous globe.)
So much is left out, I’m knitting a pattern without

stitches, without needles, only long fingerbones
to carry yarn. There was something buried

the night I left Eau Claire for good, and I never knew
how it would grow. Now your childhood friends

are my students, I walk past houses you lived in
without my knowledge and your scent trails

from abandoned bakeries. Whole warehouses
have been invented to catalogue want like this.

I go on knitting night and day because I don’t know
any other thing. All unknits by darkness

into twine birds use piece by piece. What secret
name can I tell you? What adventure are you on tonight?

There is forgetting in the density of raw new wool,
yarn shop one block from your apartment,

the cheap scarf — you don’t value things
because you never make them. Moon over the whitening world

sharpens spindle, windowframe. The sash
is pulled, seam is set: without material, there is no map.

I’ve been trying to discern lately what makes a lovable poem to me, versus what actively irks me. I think the latter is mostly about ego. I have written your bad poetry, I think, and it took me five minutes with a Thesaurus. I don’t like thinking about those careless times. I know my tricks, and I hate to see you using them. Like most prejudices, apparently, it involves accusing you of being just like me.

Lovable, though, I don’t know. Your poem is something I’ll read in the middle of a fight. I will sneak it into malls and bus stops and it will make these places seem lovely, significant, normal, thank god.

Something weighty, something made of
nice things, beautiful things, which united together create a
single thing, that

say, if you had children, at some point
would be such a decent thing
they couldn’t help but want to
inherit, this thing:

The unblinking smooth,
crystal face.

Soft wheat-in-sunlight gold
karats.

And with a matte finish that says

This watch-wearer’s no magpie, no show-off, no all
you’ve ever wanted
was this:

Something well-made.

The clasp that folds under and makes
a reassuring click that can’t be heard,
but felt in the wrist

nothing bending, nothing jammed, nothing you can ever foresee prying at
with the edge of a dirty fingernail, nothing implying

your fingernails could ever be dirty,
could need
tending to –

A second hand that will not wobble, never shakes
each second a smooth transition
to the next,
nothing abrupt,
alarming

Nothing to see here.

A dial that pulls out just so
to set the time
so that, at least twice a year
(more often if you fly long distances)
you are allowed just this moment
of perfection:

Your thumb and forefinger pressed against small,
rounded edges
providing ample traction without discomfort
a gliding, a whir

and now you are suspended, in complete control, time has stopped –
this time is up to you.

Spring forward.
Fall back.

All you’ve ever asked for
was for a thing that would last,
a thing accountable for something, for once, a thing you could count on

Measuring the minutes of your shit life (tick tick tick)

Just one click
separates you.