Bad Ideas. Michael V. Smith
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being nothing
but noise without a pause.
The hand
envies the hangnail
which harms
without intent.
Prayer for Paternal Love
All eight fingers on his right hand refuse
to be a blessing
so that even at the dinner table
he cannot pinch salt from the crowding
of his digits.
Days after he was born,
Only dogs,
his father had said,
could ignore them.
Eight splayed fingers on the back
yard stump, knuckles
around the wrist,
Hold still, his dad says.
The boy prays the octopus
of his hand contains
a secret.
Bouyancy
like silt that can storm
then settle, given time.
He has loved his father
less than either of them
would wish.
Now give it here,
his father says, and the boy
to prove the point
reaches for their axe.
Prayer for Happiness
When your father dies and leaves you
more money than you anticipated
can you admit there is not in his death
some fickle breeze of how easy it is
to embrace happiness?
Liquid,
hard to hold, happiness is an acid
not long contained, it leaks
through any trap. Assumes
any shape:
Happiness comes to the hand
holding the knife that slits the throat.
Happiness in the eye of the kiddie
porn find online.
Relief is bedfellows with happiness
when the car crash fells someone
else’s daughter, when cancer
takes down a killer who we breezily
forget is loved by family.
Each time we celebrate
the downfall of a dictator
we drag happiness through our muck
by its collar so that happiness
will not recognize itself.
Prayer for a Wig
in memory of Elise Partridge
In the untidy storage room before a reading,
she touched a small hand to her cancer wig with a laugh
at its benefits. Like, my hair is always done;
no more expensive cuts!
The irony had an echo, how the more
people you love the more bad news is had.
She smiled. We smiled. I described a drag mullet—
a dear friend’s wig re-gifted, that she’d been given
with cancer at sixteen (what luck to be born
to outlive experimental treatments)
—that I admitted was a joy to wear. Proof
my dear friend lived.
Prayer for Promiscuity
Midnight in Stanley Park,
the moon is an ally. Night
breathes a chill into firs.
Men double as tree trunks,
appear a darker dark.
Within, your ears are readied eyes,
sift animal sounds from human,
some differences of intent.
The dark will always see better.
As though it hides our lovers
like the dead, dead before we met,
the night teaches us to miss
what we never had.
Across Lost Lagoon, the apartment
complexes rise, pixelated
a horizon lonelier than childhood.
If we’d been children together, perhaps
we could have saved each other.
When they lift from the shadows of trees
what do your palms reach for?
Have you noticed your fingertips,
bark peppering the skin? I could lick them
clean as silence if they rested here
and here awhile.
Prayer for Humility
Here is my father’s leg
in the incinerator, freed
from the routine of glass
sharps, his poor sad dick
cathetered when Carmen,
the Phillipina nurse without
a wedding ring, arrives
for wound care.
Prayer for Optimism
my
nails mooned
with filth the
last three men salting
my breath I walk further
the woods dark & owning a
power I don’t trust the alchemical dark
transforms us men young handsome as dreams scrubbed
clean by moonlight we are sick with some kind
of optimism every man potential nails mooned with filth four
men salting my breath I walk further the dark woods owning
Prayer for Gender
A teacher instructs the students
to draw their future selves.
One child draws the outline of a body
he is not going to be.
Watch how easily his hand transforms
the page. A dress where there was no dress.
Heels where none had been before.
He senses the future is something more
than black ink, white paper.
He draws another line, marking time.
Dreams of Friends and Family
I Dream of Good Management
I’m