come on in and take off yr skin and rattle around in yr bones # 5

            “Try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in”

            the bloodstreams of paramedics •• at the 7-11 as they look out of the windshield toward a cityscape •• near the waterfront •• of an alligator in a tweed suit •• writing “Dear Diary” poetry full of Congressional Hearing jargon & rhetorical questions •• why isn’t palindrome spelled the same way backwards •• trying to forget skeletons in the closet •• (i.e. youthful frottage w/ movie studio glossies of Shirley Temple or flirting w/ a zebra mascot during a K-Mart grand-opening weekend) •• the recollections uncovered •• unpredictably •• like they were found in a pocket of a topcoat •• hung on a wooden hanger that belies the snug harbour •• of disjointed lines •• in a hypothetical poem called “doubting Joseph Burgess” •• it’s like Postmodernism in reverse •• a semicolon is just a broken bone •• that limns the tension w/in the lines •• so here we are concealing concessions •• “i plead the 3^rd, senator” •• (as there’s no escaping this box w/ no sides) •• how can we abdicate our dreams •• when there’s no shelter w/in the double-agent charisma •• of a penguin martini-drunk & reading a first-edition Roget’s in the back of an ambulance •• at the boat ramp •• tumbling for an answer •• w/ the tragic melancholy of a sterile white stretcher •• reframed as an analytical question •• “what evidence can you list that wd substantiate the claim that ‘a sterile white stretcher is tragically melancholic?’ •• each of us must have, at one point, looked past these latent emergencies •• Aucun chemin de fleurs ne conduit a la gloire •• as the synonyms inside a one-time pad •• start to hum an updated jazz standard •• (b/c the idle time between calls of EMTs are like Salvation Army brass bands) beginning a different set of surreally existential enquiries