TELL-ALL

Your pottery is dreadful 
and we’re out of ice

You’re right, mother, it’s difficult 
to find a good baked potato these days

It’s all apples and oranges 
and that’s the problem

The religious undertaste
The alkaline superstitions

I took a train to the ocean 
and bought a glass uzi filled with rum

I said nyet nyet to a mother and daughter 
slapping each other in Little Odessa

I took a photograph on the boardwalk at night
of pretty boys stacked in a pyramid 

It looked like a tower of body bags
I didn’t change the world

My dog walker committed suicide
when the sky was all pink with snow

The gravity of nothing sowed but 
the siloed warheads hidden in wheat fields

The rectangles of livestock,
their eyes filled with hold music   

The American songbook
needs more minor chords

I’ve no intention of dying in this bed tonight
listening to a freight train in two towns at once

I dreamt of poets locked in the brig,
of calculated ivy over the police academy 

Dreamt of mirages of success
between adjacent death valleys

I should be riding more bikes,
shredding my parking tickets 

Parties are for making up lost time
Parties are about the exchange of information

Once upon a time, once upon a time
we enjoyed each other’s company

Practicing hypothetical freedoms
with redacted satisfaction

Be careful what you ask for 
because it’s information that hurts

I know I look like a self-taught surgeon 
I know these sunglasses have been in the toilet

I’ve bent white lies into silken flowers
I’ve fallen asleep at the wheel 

I’ve smelt the cauldron’s funk
saying ugly things to the bad moon

There are no good ideas
that aren’t worth deconsecrating

My prom date is now a cop living in Staten Island 
I can’t unsee a face in stone

I’ve seen a white cat out in the early morning fog
like the beginning of a Russian ballet

I’ve spilled my guts like rolling thunder,
my guts like retail packaging on colonial floors

Spilled with a thud in the wooden hearts of pilgrims,
their thoughts that came transcribed on rolled up parchment 

With many mortifications 
and naysayer predilections to come

Please stop asking me to suspend my reality for a sec
Please stop asking me about marketability 

You come with all these questions now
where were you yesterday

It’s time darlin’
It’s time for the holiday lights to come down

In the future everyone will 
get canceled for fifteen minutes 

The sleeping dogs my Chekhov’s gun
The scorched earth my rosebud

Eric Amling is the author of From the Author's Private Collection (Birds,LLC 2015) and an editor at After Hours Editions.