Shelley’s famous
diss shows
Ozymandias hapless
as dust
his ruckus
past his
bust bust
headless heedless
sans hands
sand’s face
he’s ghost
he’s toast
he’s
us
“Unlike some poets,” my friend tells me,
“you don’t barf on the page.”
Sweet of her to say so, sweet that she
might think to disengage
me from the lax ill-mannered hordes
with their prolific barf,
those for whom every word’s
a kind of holy Arf.
But while it’s true my notebook
may betray a penchant for the proper
gussied forms over which I futz,
I do sometimes spit up a speck,
an eyedropper
of my guts.
is currently appearing as a regular in the movie of his life, where his character
can be found doodling away his brief time staring out of café windows, dabbing
up the seeds that have fallen from an everything bagel, and mentally thumbing over
his poems that have appeared widely in journals such as Agni, Atlanta Review,
Barrow Street, Nimrod, Passages North, Poetry East, Rhino, River Styx, and
Serving House Journal. His book, Buyer’s Remorse (Cherry
Grove Collections), is due out at the end of 2013.
www.roymash.com