Monday, February 29, 2016

Why do I think of you right now?
Because you are a shade of me?
Are the strange differences I see
Just hidden inner parts of me?

Should I bother you with my thoughts?
In the process, reveal my tells?
Or should I plumb my own unknowns,
And, in that way, molest myself?

If there's a side of you, you find
That's anything like me, at all,
I wonder if you'll wonder too,
Or if you'll go ahead and call?

But as for me I'm going to err
On caution's side, for so I must.
But I swear, I'll think of you,
And maybe you will think of us?

-jenn

Thursday, February 25, 2016

While you orbited me 12,000 times,
And loved me north
And hated me south
And scolded me with words
That never made it through my atmosphere
And pursed your lips
And scratched your head
And busied yourself
In weightless gravity
With hopeless tasks that
The flight plan suggested,
I've been standing
Right here,
With my feet planted firmly,
While this earth turns
And flies and wobbles
And takes me
Where I long to be.

-jenn

Monday, February 22, 2016

I have perfect tits!
I have perfect tits!
Oh, have you not heard ?
Did you not know?
The true cause of breast cancer has been determined:
It's guilt and shame.
And covering the parts of us that make us goddesses!
It's being stingy with our nipples
And shy with the eggs in our beer.

The ounce of prevention is
Unhooking the clasp,
Letting them out of their stalls
Like yearlings,
And a confession of faith, everyday:
I have perfect tits!
I have perfect tits!

-jenn
It's too late.
The Pharoah's here.
The other eligible debutantes prepared,
While I stood staring out the window at the sun.
I'd heard a story about his previous wife.
How she'd been exiled because
She wouldn't get up out of bed
In media nocte
To make his drunk ass a sandwich.

And so I didn't bother to put a curl in my hair,
Or to apply the stylish mascara.
Now the assistants have come
And ushered me away from my thoughts,
Put me here at the end of the line,
Rolled their eyes at my lack of ambition,
And left me to my fate.

But here he comes,
And something about me
Has captured his heart's attention.
He takes my left hand with his right
And lifts it up,
And pulls me from the lineup.
He must have a knack for picking
Persimmons off the apple tree.

-jenn






I'm wistful for you today.
I get that way for you,
You know?
Especially when the moon is full
And lingers at my door.
But I have come to know,
I can read the signs,
The mysterious language of love
That beguiles so many
Is not an alien tongue to me,
For I am become as a man
Who sees through clothing.
Women don't normally do that, you know?
But I can read your body like Mayan hieroglyphs,
And I know all three meanings of each cartouche,
And I understand how those meanings,
Tho seemingly unrelated,
Connect together to form
An uber idea,
A good one too.
So stay with me here, giant super moon,
Until the other stars have wandered.
Hang with me here in the balance
Between night and day,
Dusk and dawn.
And when we are alone,
I will turn and show my full self to you,
And we will see what happens then.

-jenn

Sunday, February 21, 2016

I don't care if someone else gets your time and money.
I don't care who the calls you take
All day on your telephone are from.
But when you close your eyes at night
And sleep and subconscious overtake you,
I want to be the one who meets you there alone.

I want to be the girl you dream about.
I want to be the one you reach for in your dreams.
I want to be the mythical piece of you that's missing.
I want to be the woman of your dreams.

In the morning when the light is magic,
And nothing is ever exactly what it seems,
While you're warm and nestled in your covers,
Close your eyes again for one more dream .

-jenn

Saturday, February 20, 2016

I'm not contributing any more
To the billion dollar industries' secret lore.
Their magic words, "New and improved,"
Have proved to be untrue.

And while Ellen Degeneres promotes makeup
That won't come to rest
In lines and pronounce wrinkles,
I've seen her behind the scenes.
And so, I want to say,
"Hey Ellen, how 'bout just going
Without your makeup?"

Will no one pay you to advertise for that?

-jenn

Friday, February 19, 2016

When she found out she was dying,
She left him.
He asked an obvious why.
"It might be alright to live this way," she said,
"But it ain't no way to die."

She wondered if death was like other things,
If practice made perfect and such.
She'd practiced dying a little each day,
But nobody'd noticed much.

She held her breath as long as she could.
Her body forced her to breathe.
But the next day she fell asleep holding it
And woke in the depths of a dream.

Dying is holy.
It ain't like living.
It can't be maligned or defamed.
You can live cheap or wrong or a lie,
But you can't die that way.

-jenn






Tuesday, February 16, 2016

I started to mail you some money, Babe,
To buy you a ticket to come,
But when I bought the stamp
And the envelope,
I only had a dollar and one,
But at least I got the stamp and the envelope,
And maybe by weekend next,
I'll have some money to send you, Babe,
Up until then we can text.

You know I love you.
You know I do.
You know I miss you.
What else could I do?
But maybe tomorrow,
Tomorrow, Babe,
I'll have some money to send.
Yeah maybe tomorrow,
Tomorrow. Babe, but
We can text until then.

I've got the stamp and the envelope,
Some money tucked inside my shoe,
But after lunch at the observatory,
I've just got a dollar two.
Maybe you could call me tomorrow, Babe?
Or the day after next?
I'd love to hear your voice, Babe,
But up until then we could text.

-jenn

Sunday, February 14, 2016

Dirt Farmer

He holds a chunk of meteorite
He found while he was plowing.
So foreign, this piece of vitrified rock
That burned through the atmosphere.
It got too close to the net of attraction.
The gravity of earth pulled it through,
Ablaze as it was falling,
And people must've wished on it,
Mistaking it for a star.

It's heavy, weighty for it's size.
It's face is smooth, metallic,
Beautiful, just like hers
In the shining light of day.
She too, exhibits a trace of alien,
Legal or illegal, he's not sure,
And it doesn't matter
For the family name forbids
Him to get too close and fall
Into her orbit or her into his.
He flings the rock away.

But if he had only known!
That 'rock' was worth over six hundred thousand,
More than enough to have purchased his freedom
From the family farm and the family name.
He could've wished on that fallen star, himself,
And maybe even gotten three wishes out of it.
Instead, he'll settle to be out standing in his field.

-jenn

If you don't share your dreams at night,
They disappear like star-crossed love in the sunlight.
But what happens if you don't share love ?

Like sugar, unburned as energy,
It turns to gobby fat,
And deposits itself squarely on the posterior.
Now, we certainly don't want that,
So ya darn well better share.

-jenn

Friday, February 12, 2016

Chocolate Waltz

I admit hurry back warnings tempt me.
Let me check the back wrapper and see
The ingredient list
Of candy kisses,
The carbs and the calories.

If the wrapper is brown like milk chocolate,
And the writing gets wrinkled, I'll see,
If the numbers get smudged,
I could risk eating fudge,
If you 'll have a little with me.

I know you're not good for me, Baby.
And how could I be good for you?
But sometimes it's sweet
To eat just to eat,
And to do things
Just 'cause we want to.

-jenn

Wednesday, February 10, 2016

Where do the deer go
When it's cold?
I've seen wallows in the wood,
But I haven't seen the deer.
Where do you go
When you're cold?
I have a place for you.
You could come and find
The warm hollow of my thigh,
But I haven't seen you.

-jenn

Thursday, February 4, 2016

The truck stop bathroom
Has pictures of Marilyn on the front door.
A subliminal message that says,
"Welcome to the crapper.
Now, have some class.
What would Ms. Monroe do, after all?"

The pictures also try to suggest
That those who have come into this place
All have MovieStar poo,
(Which doesn't stink)
And, therefore, you, with your common ass,
Don't have to worry about who came before.
There's no need to squat over the toilet seat and spray urine like a cat.
You can sit right down on it as God intended,
Because your dirty behind is probably the filthiest thing it has seen in a while.

All this in hopes that the light switch,
That sits demurely by the mirror,
With the sign that says,
"Flip if this bathroom needs attendance,"
Doesn't get flipped quite as often.

It's a wonderful idea.
I wonder whose picture is in the front of the men's room door?

-jenn

The last kind gesture I did before I died
Was to start the load in the washing machine.
I filled a scoop of Oxyclean
And dialed the setting to warm.

I hope someone knows they're in there,
And knows the clothes are clean.
I hope they don't forget and let them sour.
Maybe someone could take them out
And put them in the dryer.
But as for me,
I'm gone.

-jenn
Back in the Golden age,
The mound in town
Was the ziggurat,
Great pyramid structures
Ornate and built to last.
Some are standing still,
Since 6000 BCE,
The home of the gods,
The place of the bond between heaven and earth.
But now,
In this age of bronze mingled with clay,
The mound in town
Is the dumpground.

-jenn

Tuesday, February 2, 2016

My earliest memory is of the sun
Shining in my eye,
And it was bright,
So blinding bright to me.
And as I lay helpless,
Unable to speak or roll,
I didn't understand
Why sometimes the sun was there,
And sometimes it was not.

And if this life is chrysalis,
And one day I shall fly,
I hope the first thing that I see
Will be the sun of the afterlife,
Shining, blinding me
With goodness and light,
The love of a brand new day.

And I hope that I will know
Where the brilliance shines from,
And know that no matter how life might move,
I can always turn my head
To see whatever I want.
I want to see you.

-jenn

Regrets

With food, I mostly wish I didn't eat it,
With situations, I mostly wish I'd tried.
I usually I wish I'd said something,
Or I wish I'd said something else.
There are a few people I wish I'd never met.

But mostly, there's love,
And the mystery of knowing
What someone else is really like,
What they really think,
What they wish they'd said,

And the regret of not knowing
The people you love better,
And not letting them know you.

-jenn

Monday, February 1, 2016

He likes to sleep with the tv on.
She likes to sleep with it off.
And so, voila, there you have it--
Irreconcilable differences.

He could come in and visit her,
Or she could go and visit him,
But what's the point?
They've contributed their 2.2 children.
What more does society want?

And of course the children have the gene!
It must be the dominant,
For they go to sleep in their little beds
With their tv's all on.

She shakes her head and tells herself
That though her gene is recessive,
It would prove fittest in the survival,
In case of cataclysm,

If there was no more electricity,
No more sport scores scrolling,
No more canned laughter,
To insult the intelligence of humanity
And dull them off to sleep.

-jenn

Triple Negative

There's no use in crying over spilt milk,
But cussin,
Now that does some good,
Because accidents hanker
To verbal aggression,
And dawgs tend to stay outta the kitchen
When you're callin em what they are.

I once heard a tv preacher say,
"You can be pitiful or you can be powerful,
But you can't be both."
But I think that spilt milk is a sign,
An omen for modern day haruspex,
And it says, "Power is pitiful,
So do whatever you want,
And say whatever you need to hear,
Because might not nobody else say it for you, nohow!

-jenn