Pain Threshold

Crank up 100 gecs.
Keep driving down the road.

Pretend this twist’s not yours.
Who owns it, you don’t know.

Pretend it doesn’t hurt,
And when that doesn’t work

(It won’t), chant and bellow
Like an ancient drunkard

Taoist poet who knows
Nothing much worth noting,

Except how to pretend
Nonsense births immortals.

Even More Delightful Word Still

The master of amassing massive,

Convoluted sentences as plinths

Of marble paragraphs supporting

Charming little busts of fine persons

Who never drew breath except as such,

Thought the word, story, was delightful.

It’s like looking through a telescope,

Through a spyglass, wrongly, the great fires

Of tale-telling nights miniaturized,

So that the most supreme deity

Of human mind and society,

Story, appears porcelain-doll like, small,

Diminishing, far from his great lens

Of perfectly polished sentences.

Or maybe James was making a point,

Determined to fix story in place

So that the small features of persons

Could stabilize in the reader’s eyes.

The Weasel Eye

He had always thought his eye—
Hazel iris, blue sclera,
Carpet-bagging possum lids—

Awkwardly intrusive, like
Someone with no social skills,
Self-invited late-comer

To lively conversations,
Bringing the fun to a halt
With poorly told anecdotes,

Blundering shaggy-dog jokes,
And needless explanations.
Wherever his eye popped up,

He tried to whack it himself,
But it just blinked and rolled back.