MISSING

Time is too fat for the Olympics
so a blowtorch lights my way 
while Social Media onslaught
pumps toxins thru my speech bubble ellipses.

My mother tells me that she is always
depressed on Sundays. I didn’t grow up 
with a Father, so my emotional problems 
are like bizarre exit music on albums. 

Warning: The recent propagandists for 
Poetry would disappear if theater 
reversed its scientism & came of age 
like a French proverb dug out of a book

that announces the coming of the 
Age of Unfairness. I sacrificed myself 
on top of the Georgia Guidestones: 
that bloody-looking spot isn't blood. 

It’s a post-Romantic vomit spot. 
This is as morose as I’m going to get 
because I’m not trying to rectify 
telephoning you every half-hour

for contending with my own introverdness, 
& will this severe drought peel itself off 
like waxy skin & sling sodas at these
summertime blues? Oh, this muddy water 

I’m in. I’m in the art-for-the-artist crowd, 
tracking down precincts, spying in a 
see-through door; I’m a drawn curtain 
that you paint while you multiply yourself 

justifactorily to subsequently become 
as aloof as everyone else with disorders. 
We’re all borderlines. On the verge 
of something. Layers of this. Layers of that. 

Numbers not quite numbers that appear 
in other forms; their rivals’ squelching, 
too pleased to believe how one’s sins will play 
catch-up. The butterflies are gone; you’re 

no longer enthusiastic about my existence
& are you still attracted to the same sex? 
I watched as you eyed attractive women
the way that I stared at the lizard crawling up 

& down your parents’ curtains in the 
living room while we watched The Count 
of Monte Cristo. Am I still irritating, or
have I become merely semi-annoying? 

My attraction is like a scientific invention 
gone wrong; my sexiness is sagging shallowly
in your Physiognomy Treatise. Oh well, 
I’ll just become a seer, banging these 

same ol’ drums with the hands of Orlac. 
Have you ever noticed that there’s something about
Yesterday that’s always unique to today’s calling?
I want to be told the truth, harshly, confronted

to the face like the Apostle Paul to Peter. 
I come with a rod or a magic wand (two sides of). 
Can you grasp the fact that my
skinny-dipping skin is like hopscotch 

in the rain: the chalk-lines are invisible, like 
your sassy silence, dystopic like a ripped flag
clutched by the hands of a dead General’s daughter.