Boss Of The Nethers

The cupped cervix sat
on the coffee table.
We tried not to stare,
like our pupils would get fried by its brightness.

Perhaps my ex-wife left it as a reminder of the time
when human beings had hips, back when we had bodies.

Yes, that was fun-a cupcake of breeze disintegrating
on our cheeks, a banana muffin undressing in our nostrils,

but bodies broke down too,
and things are easier now.

Strange, how we see further without eyeballs. Our eyes tricked us
into thinking a wall was something not be seen through.

Mouths got in the way
of saying what needed saying.

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poem by Jeffrey McDaniel
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Friends And High Places

It's like escaping a hot, bright room
for the serenity of a city at night, covered in snow.

People eliminated. A carpet of silence
for taxis to whisper across. The world becoming

a pleasant dream of itself. The itch
of want smoldering to life on skin. Memory sends

a chill vanishing between vertebrae.
It's New Year's Eve. Hail the Calendar! As if

clocks will pause for a moment
before reloading their long rifles. Years are tiny

freckles on the face of a century.
Where is the constellation we gazed at each night

Through a bill rolled so tight
the first President lost his breath, as our eyeballs

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poem by Jeffrey McDaniel
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Absence

On the scales of desire, your absence weighs more
than someone else’s presence, so I say no thanks

to the woman who throws her girdle at my feet,
as I dropp a postcard in the mailbox and watch it

throb like a blue heart in the dark. Your eyes
are so green – one of your parents must be

part traffic light. We’re both self-centered,
but the world revolves around us at the same speed.

Last night I tossed and turned inside a thundercloud.
This morning my sheets were covered in pollen.

I remember the long division of Saturday’s
pomegranate, a thousand nebulae in your hair,

as soldiers marched by, dragging big army bags
filled with water balloons, and we passed a lit match,

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poem by Jeffrey McDaniel
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The Boy Inside The Turtle

Yesterday was an extra-long day
for the boy with no arms
or legs. Neighborhood children
played outside his window.

A soft machine, they circled,
joined hands, closed eyes,
jumped up and down: shoelaces,
giggles moving in time.

One caught the boy peering.
The boy contorted out of sight,
his breaths lumped on one another
like cows in a mat house.

He twisted too slow. Look,
it's the turtle! The children
gassed like an audience
responding to a laugh sign.

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poem by Jeffrey McDaniel
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Meeropol

How strange, the miracle slant rhyme of your name,
a three syllable oasis, here in the White Pages

next to information I once knew by heart: the nape’s
bouquet, the hip’s cliff, the ear’s hiding spot.

How simple it seemed that spring, with a quart of green
cactus milk between us, on the ferry from Naxos

to Crete, when the moon was the one clock, and stars
only had gums. And the summer in Barcelona

when the French children actually cried at the sight
of my dreadlocks. I used to think, if we kissed

in every time zone, it would always be the blue hour
in which I loved you. It still is. The literal

lightning bolt lodged in your family tree. The erased
surname. The alibi bone placed inside you.

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The Jeffrey McDaniel Show

I walk into a candlelit room.
All the women I've ever dated

are passing around the love poems
I gave them, and guess what?

It's the same poem — My sweet
[Put Your Name Here] if I was God

I'd make flowers smell like the back
of your neck, trees with trunks

as soft as your thighs. When we kiss
I feel like a cheerleader being crushed

to death by a giant pom-pom. Then Alex
Trebec appears. A game of Ex-

Girlfriend Jeopardy ensues.
All the categories about me.

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Letter To The Woman Who Stopped Writing Me Back

I wanted you to be the first to know - Harper & Row
has agreed to publish my collected letters to you.

The tentative title is Exorcist in the Gym of Futility.

Unfortunately I never mailed the best one,
which certainly was one of a kind.

A mutual friend told me that when I quit drinking,

I surrendered my identity in your eyes.

Now I'm just like everybody else, and it's so funny,

the way monogamy is funny, the way
someone falling down in the street is funny.

I entered a revolving door and emerged
as a human being. When you think of me
is my face electronically blurred?

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Arrivederci Lipstick

'After careful study and due deliberation it is my opinion the head remains conscious for one minute and a half after decapitation.'
-Dr. Dassy d'Estaing,1883

The ax whistled down, my head
tumbled off, twirled through the air, landed

between my wife’s ankles. I looked up
her skirt: one last glimpse at those alabaster

chimneys. What good will the word “thigh” do me
where I’m going, I wondered, as I stared

at the red door of her panties, the brass knocker
that I installed one rainy morning

when we were young and in love. Good-bye
little red door I used to walk through

after a long day at the office and say, “honey,

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poem by Jeffrey McDaniel
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When A Man Hasn't Been Kissed

When I haven't been kissed in a long time,
I walk behind well-dressed women

on cold, December mornings and shovel
the steamy exhalations pluming from their lips

down my throat with both hands, hoping
a single molecule will cling to my lungs.

When I haven't been kissed in a long time,
I sneak into the ladies room of a fancy restaurant,

dig into the trashcan for a napkin
where a woman checked her lipstick,

then go home, light candles, put on Barry White,
and press the napkin all over my body.

When I haven't been kissed in a long time,
I start thinking leeches are the most romantic

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poem by Jeffrey McDaniel
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Day 29, Where The Self Divides

1.
Loneliness is a privilege, and I'm grateful
for the afternoons I had as a child

to feed the crocodile I invented in my closet.
How the knob's wood expanded in my hand

when I threatened my friend with death.
Twenty years later he still has nightmares

where I get mad and fling open the door.
Upstairs our mothers were one mother
measuring emptiness by the milligram.

Their laughter clung to the ceiling
like helium balloons after a party.

Only they never came down, stayed there
without color or reason. Bruises are genetic.

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poem by Jeffrey McDaniel
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