Phantom Pain
The little things like
sitting on Zelda's Title Screen.
That sad piano title theme.
Pop Art, Pop-tart,
spring out the toaster one day
and now you're an old fart.
"Remember that movie?
Or the Globetrotters with Scooby?"
Yeah, I remember the gang,
times have changed
we no longer hang.
Different branches
different stances,
we pass each other with sideways glances.
But every night, down in the park
I see our blue ghosts
race and tiptoe
back to the start.
Scrooge McDuck (a poem of crossword clues)
When I was a young
bit of plankton
I was attacked
by a Dead Duck wielding
a fanny-pack and donning a Scottish cap.
He came barreling down the hill like a
Feudal Baron or a Boeing 757.
Holding his anger like an item in a holster.
"I'll do it too!" he quacked and smacked
me around like an R2D2.
I joined a karate school, studied
Draft.com and mastered ti-chi.
Now, approaching middle age and
cooked like an onion ring,
I visit the old dodo.
He breathes the sound of
an unsound floor.
Years and years and years,
trees with seeds that whirl like
helicopter blades continue to fall.
There is pity
and there is compassion.
"I hope that you're satisfied now."
Friendshipstein
We fell apart like the cuts of
a dismantled Frank
and Stein glasses were shared
the last time we met up.
Un-stressed stitches, nothing abrupt.
The limbs of our friendship
nosedive to the floor.
“So what now?” We shift awkwardly.
You look at your phone and then cough at me.
You remind me of a bad band’s cacophony,
an unlit dance floor
and the stationary punch bowl
that no one drank from
at that Ogre’s 13th Birthday party.
“You remember that, don’t you?”
Your jaw starts to slip out of place
while we recollect and trace old timelines.
“Friend-ship-stein, you aren't looking too great.”
“I’ll make it,” you say.
Loneliness is a pile of limbs
on a bar stool.
And solitude is
a marble
hidden in a can
somewhere in Poznan
or San Francisco
that waits to be discovered
by a child
and held in the air
like a prize.
I tell you, I’m heading home for the night.
You mush-mouth something trite,
but you’re long dead
and too drunk
for it to make any sense.
I say, “I’ll see you next time.”
You say, “my neck’s fine.”
Another miscommunication,
I know you won’t survive
another New Year’s celebration.
So, I stack you up on the bar,
call you a car, order you
water with a straw and
I try to be nice.
I leave you there alone,
head on the counter,
chewing cubes of ice.