Electricity

Blue Wedgwood China cracks across the midnight sky.

Then, black.
Silent everywhere.
Alone, bone cold, but cool.

Lonely like childhood, but all romantic
like I like it, anything can happen.
Tonight, the sky is literally the limit.

I say, in the dark, out loud, “Well,
you gotta die sometime
I may as well try for it right now, dramatically!”

I stand in a puddle of rain and wait
FLASH! 
I count, wait a few seconds and—BANG.
A cool blue breeze, but no, not the end of me.

Because now, I glow in the dark.
The dark glows, too.

And childhood is over.

Chewing the Cud

A couple of cows, talking in the grass, in Iowa.
A bottle of white wine chilling on ice between them.

They look up at the jets flying low
lower their heads and focus across the fields
at all the cars on the road, all of them on the way
to the Iowa Writer’s Workshop.

“Here come those fuckers again,” says the brown cow.

“Yeah, look at ‘em. They oughta stop,” says the black cow.

“Why do they do it?”

“Beats me. And they call us herd animals.”

“I came up with an acronym.”

“A what? That's a little ambitious, isn't it? Ok,
let’s hear it.”

“CUD.”

“Spell it out.”

“C for conformity.
  U for uniformity.
  D for deformity.”

“That's good. I think I get it. But why the last one?
Why deformity?”

“Comes from the first two, what happens
to whatever they were born with
when they come up here.”

“Well, it almost happened to me. Roll me
some hay. Is hay better with white or red?
I don’t think anybody'd believe that we could
come up with an acronym, as cows.”

“I don’t think they think we could talk.”

“I don’t think I think they can write.”

They aim and open a bottle of red
and the cork shoots straight up into the blue
barely missing a jet full of writers.

“That’ll show em!”