by Pete Miller

issue 64

Weekends I’m chamomile, currant buns.
But what a come-on:
The sidewalk dude wore a warlock look.
His prognostication: The strobe un-codgers.
But now this beat has me in a walker.
I used to dance
so hard I lost watches. Tonight
the timelessness flexes
wan, white beard chimes,
the grandfather clock’s
pendulumectomy scars.

Widdershins Boogie,
I rattle a bat’s wing,
transmogrify:

Dirtball Dandy. Melted Shape-
Shifter, Haggard Spellcaster; I scatter
such a creeped-outness of navel rings, hell, I don’t
know where the bathrooms are, the bar,
that velvet rope of rumor, how to forge
an emoji for feeling like Hans Christian Andersen
on Dancing with the Stars wondering
when they stopped calling them emoticons,
how to hex off security slithering up,
willow wands to beat me down,
that truly worst curse: my youth 
actually come back, drunk and
in those pants, ass pocket-crescent moons
scrying nothing 
but their own fool shine. And my crying.