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A Season’s Sporting

by Rob Rice

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One

I never called you back because you brought your bag to the bathroom and that seemed like secrets

Memory gone as of ’05’s accident

Thought it’d be funny to ask if you remembered

 

What accident

You thought

Not funny

 

I guess we didn’t fit it

Your trustless crumpled posture

Vertical fetal position

And my seated intention to euchre you

As you scolded yourself for expecting

 

 

Two

Exclusivity by demeanor and fashion’s

Integral to some self-esteems as it

Justifies the distance

They educated between us

 

Though like money it’s relative

Comparative purpose objects

Are no value less the idea they buy

Which is valueless if you have the object too

 

Rock

Paper

Scissor

 

 

Three

Remnants of the front

Of the war that exists now in as many bodies as can hold all the blood it spilled

Then, soaked up the confused purpose, salvaging it

Filling future generations

So furtively ire’s semaphored

 

Lost

Those must-be-moments of apology eye contact

Pre-bayonet

 

What do they count for

And how to appraise them

 

Me? incapable of a moment like that’s solving in a lifetime

A clear liquid’s not being water flips me out

 

But then I see it run; endlessly cold ethanol’s endless cold being my fault

The ripples in it poured are like heat distortion

 

 

Four

Rightly it’s impossible

The little croutons of contact

Day by day wearing it

The salad of each other

Us obsessively dieting

Swear by it

Fills us up

Swears

 

Isn’t it ironic that most muffins come already wearing Spanx?

 

And mixing Dew with powdered milk for breakfast

Into the frosted flakes

Lights ‘em up!

 

 

Five

Passing those guys on the street with their tongues screwed out unaware

They pass people everyday

Just not me

 

They say

It’s good to stretch on either side of the Matins

And is it easier to measure tablets or days?

 

Most people die with so much love still in them

Probably sadder than paying for the rental company to do a full tank

Then not even driving it in empty

(i.e. the losing money)

 

I wonder how many of the people I assume are sad are

They all seem it, and each one I’ve asked is

But they all talk tall tell of others

Laying in the lambent lap of

Having been heard of

 

 

Politics

How can you trust a person who wants to be a leader

That should immediately disqualify you

What indelicate world is it that we let people have power that want power

That’s a wrong trait

 

And their mixing media

The seat of civic somnolence

Who never even noted

The great bizarre truth in

How Oprah’s Law of Attraction

Relates to Pasolini

 

At the very least they want to be a conduit

And to feel it run through them even

Taste it on its way

Never negotiating with forces on the ground

For our release

 

 

Six

Tell me a story or I’m turning a TV on

Open up

I’m the quiet sage stalking you

My primary source

Unbeknownst I’m bivouacked on the street

 

 

Seven

I see faces I’ve never encountered when I close my eyes

but I recognize them they’re these fully formed people

 

Enough so that I can get a sense of what they’re like

I supplied them

 

I’m always attracted to them somehow

How they are seems fine to me

 

I never kept

Chaff or fleeced it

But I can weave

 

I know I can

Spiking the hook

With wire and lacing up a bobbing string of days

Globes that I’ll use to drape the railing

On the patio in festivity

Where we’ll have wine

Despite my not being totally sold

On the outcome wine

My not knowing about structure

 

 

Politics

Snuff films for sale

Snuff films for sale all taking

Place in an elevated ash boardroom

With a standing line of people shuffling circles

 

Their hanging hooded crania

And him seated at the slab oak head

 

One by one they arrive to face him

Bow permission turn

Oak-draping belly down

Avoiding ally eye contact while lowering their pants

Allowing him thus inspector’s access to their genitals

Which he considers

And then shoots into with a rifle

 

Gathering up pants

Cupping the bleeding

They resume the recovery line

To generate some resolve in

In the small interim pre-resubmission

Having updated their résumé

We’d expect