tender buttons that please
so easily, unravel? no!

a story about pom poms;
slope of an arm reaching its
bump where i fought you
left only smoothnesses
whence bruises reigned
for a fortnight

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little pleasures run ripples thru my suckling tongue, unabashedly.

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the last time it snowed during spring break i regurgitated backwater gin from the tin tub where it came. the snow was wettish and clung to my hair in damp clots. the gin mixed with the snow into a soupy mess that still pervades, with a bit of intrepid sniffing, the little nooks and crannies of my navy peacoat because of the thoroughly lackadaisical cleansing effected the morning after. words were like math for me, i gargled to the tow-headed fellow beside me as i barfed. "they contain numeric value and--heave... proportion, harmony and ratio. you add them--hurl....pant... together, randomly or not, and there is a sum that can or can not be the sum of its parts..." he paid no heed, aware that i made no sense whatsoever and was in fact absolutely taken with his dark-haired friend and completely self-satisfied in this awareness. "THAT'S POETRY!" (interjected in the background) foreground: we had been discussing the comparative merits of linguistic versus binary modalities as systems for cognitive apperception; that is before the fatal fall into the tin tub. that was barely a true story. it was more like this:: i was so happy playing my civilizing games that i dont remember spring break at all, it was a blurry gin.