Gray balloons —
Shrink like tinfoil balls crumpling in the hands of oxygen
Wrinkle like defeated faces, missing eyebrows and other remnants
of steel wool hair, as with chemotherapy
Sink like dying suns,
with strings dangling like visible regrets
and
Spread across the prairie like scattering schools of the ocean floor,
enjoying the exercise, the mental block of their spot

Pioneers in discovered lands
Setting deep, reaching roots like all successful weeds

They'll never rise again nor float on their own
They'll maybe be lifted by fingertips like a health risk, now crusty white
Released like rejected prose, trash can waiting,
to their humiliation crinkling, this their last recorded landing

An epic shower of gray balloons

No Free Lunch, No Free Legends

Napoleon Bonaparte did not simply appear in history,
pull a cannon out of his coat like a Looney Tune,
and start shooting up Europe with an instant army. It got paid for,
along with everything else that makes a dent in our legacy.

Napoleon was not escorted back to Paris on a cloud for the 100 Days.
On a planet Earth that is economics (the true universal language), that trick didn't just occur,
but was fueled forward with the fire of cash burning in some chamber of history's iron belly
and should therefore SAY something, should be COMMUNICATION to us.

Waterloo was a battle preceded by handshakes
striking a price; it was a booked banquet.
The paying for it was an utterance of economic language. It was telling. It was "SHARING."
We in the classrooms should accept graciously this charity.

The opposite of a cemetery is a library
So the preachers haunt the cemeteries
while I find on meticulously packed shelves
the souls of eons of brothers and sisters
that the preachers thought they had given
a good shoving off
Maybe not the opposite
but better is the library than the cemetery
In my morals, a kind of heaven

Wineglasses

You had eight wineglasses when we started out
They were as fragile as bee stingers
They died one by one like the marines in Aliens
They each perished in a memorable way,
like the wineglass that got a faceful of acid blood
when a nearby alien took an exploding round to the torso
or the one that fell through the dishwasher's bottom rack
and I helped you take the remains to the garbage
in the funeral way one handles broken glass
Maybe one wineglass even betrayed another
and caused its death before an outsider could harm it
Then of course karma killed the guilty wineglass off pretty quick after,
the cat swatting it down for attention or something, I don't know,
I can't keep up with this shit

You're down to two now. All we really needed.
But when it's down to the last two in a movie like Aliens,
you know the end credits are coming soon,
and the movie will let out, and we will exit into summer
and the fragrant air that we osmose into in a seamless segue

Evel Knievel

Evel Knievel,
you thrill to be evil

All these devils, I'll be plural about it:

motley in multihued
wind suits, cannonballing
from stroboscopic space shuttles
and imploding B-52s

: they are storms to kill someone!

They want to chew brains
Their parachutes burst

You weep to be evil, Evel
You have no guts; you don't dare
You wrench Herculean
from the Earth's core to be O U T , at large