Two Poems
by KJ Hannah Greenberg

 

While Dancing Elsewhere the Mortise and Tenon

 

Our sleeping bag caprices, long ago, meant garnering toadstools.

Counting mulligans in sacks (at secured adolescent gatherings),

Bringing on hiccups, worrying over insidious adult behavior,

Inviting others to sip, slurp, revel. Our lives' zeniths went realized.

 

Yet, we demimondes couldn't know the best of intuition, or of spiritual healing

(Young things' seemingly ritualized procurement of memories most resembles

The face of pressure, the limbs of cruelty, the corpse of assimilated opinions,

As husbanded by growing up, lines of white powder, and expensive whiskey).

 

Situations culling pointless stress might have, at times, nearly thrived, endured bombings.

Nonetheless, thereafter, events: bumped along odd swellings (egg shell specks on stoops),

Safely transversed thousands of landlocked miles (envisioned by adolescent suggestions),

Lived with dementia, crashed on ice, celebrated relatively shiny things' weird howling.

 

So, philosophunculists pushed superfluous negotiations, poured no peer-level succor.

Would-be manipulators prevented collapse only when blending teachers' and DJs'

Cognitive behaviors; such fronting altered enough caustic discourse to again fly carefully

Alongside orchestrated cabals. Impractical boys and girls held fast to grownup "truths."

 

Extent ideals carried on, notwithstanding enforced learning schedules, the strop of status.

Kids' supersonic cosmic oboes, mentions made of adhering to regular studies of death,

Impressive conquests, as well, annealed almost everyone, including friends hovering

Paths to emotional bankruptcy, dreamt matchmaking, engineered kindnesses, money.

 

That's why "influential" partiers sidestepped struggles, pain, unicorns, rain, cantaloupes

(Teen sparking employs gentling words, sails to locations known for weathered trust).

Social thresholds, more than self-righteousness' triumph over eager, eye-wide imaginations,

Changed once cameras began rolling. Interpersonal talk, too, became especially variable.

 

Judge madrone trees as affording deficient forestry for tuataras, for bridging distance.

Know, all that "nudging under tables," when well distributed, made for baby phooey,

Lacked mention of vital worry, loud coughing, dripping tears, snot, even as it exulted,

Wrongly, places mutual buddies consulted over eviscerated environments, and deceived.

 

A paradox or two, however three, got conveyed by heralded outsiders' "new" ideations.

Children cowered, dispersed, took cover, left compounds enough for idle state prisons

(Some puzzle boxes, keyed or not, demand business as usual, insist on payment, bite often).

It's dumb to tell a lass that you love her, while dancing, elsewhere, the mortise and tenon.

 

 

 

Broken Mouse Ears

 

Broken mouse ears stay behind (such unnecessary stuff).

Roommates, beyond halfsies paid on gas or rent,

Learn fending without salacity, minor lusts, yearnings.

 

No matter the mission, editors complain that pullating

Texts don't lucubrate, disappoint as pastiches,

Never causes sacramouches to be culled from corners.

 

Contra fuliginous cats, skies, lovers' eyes; these

Transform purviews on paying bills,

On using skim milk, on flossing regularly.

 

Peripatetic others, all feral during nightly runs,

Thrill more than bingo wins, manuscripts

Sold, even habituated wakings; dawn's relative.

 

Hiding behind heliconia leaves does nothing for temp

Agencies' scrum. Decades of suffered ennui,

Likewise, falter when producing elation's frissions.

 

Unions based on priapic design, after all "win"

Or "lose;" few grownups like to share

Salient trophies, plutocratic partners excepted.

 

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