The Quiet World // Jeffrey McDaniel

in an effort to get people to look
into each other's eyes more,
the government has decided to allot
each person exactly one hundred
and sixty-seven words, per day.

when the phone rings, i put it
to my ear without saying hello.
in the restaurant i point
at chicken noodle soup. i am
adjusting well to the new way.

late at night, i call my long-
distance lover and proudly say:
i only used fifty-nine today.
i saved the rest for you.

when she doesn't respond, i know
she's used up all her words,
so i slowly whisper i love you,
thirty-two and a third times.
after that, we just sit on the line
and listen to each other breathe.

Absence // Jeffrey McDaniel

On the scales of desire, your absence weighs more
than someone else’s presence, so I say no thanks

to the woman who throws her girdle at my feet,
as I drop a postcard in the mailbox and watch it

throb like a blue heart in the dark. Your eyes
are so green – one of your parents must be

part traffic light. We’re both self-centered,
but the world revolves around us at the same speed.

Last night I tossed and turned inside a thundercloud.
This morning my sheets were covered in pollen.

I remember the long division of Saturday’s
pomegranate, a thousand nebulae in your hair,

as soldiers marched by, dragging big army bags
filled with water balloons, and we passed a lit match,

back and forth, between our lips, under an oak tree
I had absolutely nothing to do with.

Exile // Jeffrey McDaniel

Mathematicians still don't understand
the ball our hands made, or how

your electrocuted grandparents made it possible
for you to light my cigarettes with your eyes.

It isn't as simple as me climbing into the window
to leave six ounces of orange juice

and a doughnut by the bed, or me becoming
the sand you dug your toes in,

on the beach, when you wished
to hide them from the sun and the fixed eyes

of strangers, and your breath broke in waves
over my earlobe, splashing through my head, spilling out

over the opposite lobe, and my first poems
under your door in the unshaven light of dawn:

Your eyes remind me of a brick wall
about to be hammered by a drunk
driver. I'm that driver. All night
I've swallowed you in the bar.

Once I kissed the scar, stretching its sealed
eyelid along your inner arm, dried

raining strands of hair, full of pheromones, discovered
all your idiosyncratic passageways, so I'd know

where to run when the cops came.
Your body is the country I'll never return to.

The man in charge of what crosses my mind
will lose fingernails, for not turning you

away at the border. But at this moment
when sweat tingles from me, and

blame is as meaningless as shooting up a cow with milk,
I realise my kisses filled the halls of your body

with smoke, and the lies came
like a season. Most drunks don't die in accidents

they orchestrate, and I swallowed
a hand grenade that never stops exploding.

The Foxhole Manifesto // Jeffrey McDaniel

"There are no atheists in foxholes."
            -- old Christian proverb

The first god I remember was a Santa Claus god, who you only
    turned to around Christmas time,
who you tried to butter up, and then got mad at if you didn't
   get what you wanted.
That didn't make sense. I knew if there was a god, he could see
   through us, like we were made
out of cellophane, like he could stare directly into our hearts,
   the way we look into an aquarium,
like he'd know what was floating around in there, like he might be
   the one feeding it.

Then there were those people who used god to threaten you,
   saying you better
be careful - god's watching, like god was a badass hillbilly
   sitting in some cloud
with a pair of binoculars, a cotton candy beard, a six pack,
   and a shot gun.

Then i saw people who had Jesus' name on their bumper sticker,
   like he was running for president.
And sometimes those people with Jesus on their bumper sticker
   would cut you off
on the freeway and give you the finger, which is very different
   from lending you a hand.

Then there were people on television, dressed in weird clothes
   and scary make-up, swearing
they had the secret to god, like god was a keyhole and their eyeball
   was pressed to it, and if I just
gave 'em some money they'd let me look, and then I could see god
   just hanging around in his boxer shorts,
and though I liked the idea of spying on god, I began to wonder
   if the world would be a healthier place
if the Romans had just put up with Jesus and let him die of old age.

And then there were the football players, kneeling down in front
   of everybody, thanking god,
like he was their best friend, but then they'd jump up and spike
   the ball, yell I'm number one,
and I'd be confused, because if you're number one, then
   what number is god?

Then I saw politicians trotting god out on a leash, like a racehorse
   they wanted to hop on
and ride to the finish line. But if they lost it would be god's fault,
   and god would be the donkey
they'd pin all their problems on, and that was very nice of god:
   to be both a race horse and a donkey.

And then there were those who said you better be good on Earth
   if you wanna get into heaven,
like heaven was the United States, and Earth was Mexico, and angels
   were border patrol. Like when you die
you sit in a parked car on the outskirts of heaven, the engine idling,
   your soul in the back seat in one of those kennels
used to carry small dogs on airplanes, as you listen to the radio to all
   the people you ever wronged testify against you.

And then there was the church, which was like this cafeteria, where
   they served god to you on these very
un-godlike plates, but I wanted my god pure, and not watered down
   by human beings, so I just had one of those
catastrophe gods - you know, the one you only turn to in an emergency,
   like god's the national guard you call in
to clean up the earthquake of your life. So I got drunk one night,
   drove home, passed out behind the wheel,
woke, going sixty straight at a brick wall, slammed the breaks, heart
   banging like a wrecking ball in my chest,
staring at death's face in the bricks, close enough to see we had
   the same cheekbones.

Now I have a god who's like a mechanic who can fix anything,
   so when I wanna chew somebody's head off
like a saltwater taffy, or amputate my DNA, or open my wrists
   like windows that have been painted shut,
I just put my soul into a box, like a busted computer, and haul it in.
   And he never asks to see my paperwork,
or says my warranty has expired. And I walk out feeling better.
   And I don't care if he doesn't exist.

The Archipelago of Kisses // Jeffrey McDaniel

We live in a modern society. Husbands and wives don't grow
on trees, like in the old days. So where

does one find love? When you're sixteen it's easy,
like being unleashed with a credit card

in a department store of kisses. There's the first kiss.
The sloppy kiss. The peck.

The sympathy kiss. The backseat smooch. The we
shouldn't be doing this kiss. The but your lips

taste so good kiss. The bury me in an avalanche of
tingles kiss.

The I wish you'd quit smoking kiss.
The I accept your apology, but you make me really mad

sometimes kiss. The I know
your tongue like the back of my hand kiss.

As you get older,
kisses become scarce. You'll be driving

home and see a damaged kiss on the side of the road,
with its purple thumb out. If you were younger,

you'd pull over, slide open the mouth's red door
just to see how it fits. Oh where does one find love?

If you rub two glances, you get a smile.
Rub two smiles, you get a warm feeling.

Rub two warm feelings and presto-you have a kiss.
Now what? Don't invite the kiss over

and answer the door in your underwear.
It'll get suspicious and stare at your toes. Don't

water the kiss with whisky. It'll turn bright pink and
explode into a thousand luscious splinters,

but in the morning it'll be ashamed and sneak out of
your body without saying good-bye,

and you'll remember that kiss forever by all the
little cuts it left on the inside of your mouth. You must

nurture the kiss. Turn out the lights.
Notice how it illuminates the room. Hold it to your chest

and wonder if the sand inside hourglasses comes from a
special beach. Place it on the tongue's pillow,

then look up the first recorded kiss in an
encyclopedia: beneath a Babylonian olive tree in 1200 B.C.

But one kiss levitates above all the others. The intersection
of function and desire. The I do kiss.

The I'll love you through a brick wall kiss. Even when
I'm dead, I'll swim through the Earth,

like a mermaid of the soil, just to be next to your
bones.

The Obvious // Jeffrey McDaniel

We didn't deny the obvious,
but we didn't entirely accept it either.
I mean, we said hello to it each morning
in the foyer. We patted its little head
as it made a mess in the backyard,
but we never nurtured it.

Many nights the obvious showed up
at our bedroom door, in its pajamas,
unable to sleep, in need of a hug,
and we just stared at it like an Armenian,
or even worse-- hid beneath the covers
and pretended not to hear its tiny sobs.

The First Straw // Jeffrey McDaniel

I used to think love was two people sucking
on the same straw to see whose thirst was stronger,

but then I whiffed the crushed walnuts of your nape,
traced jackals in the snow-covered tombstones of your teeth.

I used to think love was a non-stop saxophone solo
in the lungs, till I hung with you like a pair of sneakers

from a phone line, and you promised to always smell
the rose in my kerosene. I used to think love was terminal

pelvic ballet, till you let me jog beside while you pedaled
all over hell on the menstrual bicycle, your tongue

ripping through my prairie like a tornado of paper cuts.
I used to think love was an old man smashing a mirror

over his knee, till you helped me carry the barbell
of my spirit back up the stairs after my car pirouetted

in the desert. You are my history book. I used to not believe
in fairy tales till I played the dunce in sheep's clothing

and felt how perfectly your foot fit in the glass slipper
of my ass. But then duty wrapped its phone cord

around my ankle and yanked me across the continent.
And now there are three thousand miles between the u

and s in esophagus. And being without you is like standing
at a cement-filled wall with a roll of Yugoslavian nickels

and making a wish. Some days I miss you so much
I'd jump off the roof of your office building

just to catch a glimpse of you on the way down. I wish
we could trade left eyeballs, so we could always see

what the other sees. But you're here, I'm there,
and we have only words, a nightly phone call - one chance

to mix feelings into cyllables and pour into the receiver,
hope they don't disassemble in that calculus of wire.

And lately - with this whole war thing - the language machine
supporting it - I feel betrayed by the alphabet, like they're

injecting strychnine into my vowels, infecting my consonants,
naming attack helicopters after shattered Indian tribes:

Apache, Blackhawk; and West Bank colonizers are settlers,
so Sharon is Davey Crockett, and Arafat: Geronimo,

and it's the Wild West all over again. And I imagine Picasso
looking in a mirror, decorating his face in war paint,

washing his brushes in venom. And I think of Jenin
in all that rubble, and I feel like a Cyclops with two eyes,

like an anorexic with three mouths, like a scuba diver
in quicksand, like a shark with plastic vampire teeth,

like I'm the executioner's fingernail trying to reason
with the hand. And I don't know how to speak love

when the heart is a busted cup filling with spit and paste,
and the only sexual fantasy I have is busting

into the Pentagon with a bazooka-sized pen and blowing
open the minds of generals. And I comfort myself

with the thought that we'll name our first child Jenin,
and her middle name will be Terezin, and we'll teach her

how to glow in the dark, and how to swallow firecrackers,
and to never neglect the first straw; because no one

ever talks about the first straw, it's always the last straw
that gets all the attention, but by then it's way too late.