It’s surfaces all the way down.
Cold ones, wet ones, starry ones,
ones that blow the mind
not expecting anything in return.
How they multiply/divide
is neither our concern
nor theirs, and if at times
they add up to nothing,
that’s all there is to say.
But go on, run your stale fingers
across them, tell me
you don’t feel something:
The drag of ecstasy.
The whirl of melancholy.
The thrill of apathy.
The pop of epiphany.
-r. miller
By all means,
don’t dream
on this or nothing.
These hairy premises
will ultimately fall
to dandruff.
Internalize the wait,
or else.
We only actualize
what the body discloses.
-r. miller
A dearth
endowed and downy
imparts a frowny
function.
Weeding the junk,
we jettison all
tint and tincture,
raise chalets
of girth
and grit
and finance.
Prominence
no longer suits,
only underscores.
How this poor waltz
stultifies,
red and dripping
over droops of nod,
and readies able us
as sustenance
for a gruesome
gluey god.
-r. miller
To be honest, I’m barely able
to chew these new verbs
the kids are coming up with.
Barely able to use my hands as hands,
to walk upright as intended.
The old ticker is a bit distended, I’m sure,
from all the force-fed notions of romance
that come on like empty calories.
All in all, it’s been
an unproductive use of 36 years,
and if I’m lucky, I’ll get
another 36 to squander on rough poetry,
long drives to nowhere after midnight,
and triumphant pissing in the stream.
This is the dream I’ve always had
but never wanted,
and waking, at this stage, is thoroughly
inadvisable.
-r. miller
At 2:16 I wonder
if I will get a poem down in time.
At 2:17 I wonder
the same thing, and also
if I’ll survive just one more shift
before the seven nights of revelry
that most definitely
await me.
Depends on what you mean by revelry.
Depends on what you mean by night.
I am an honorable man, you see.
As such, I am honor-bound
to transcribe exactly
what I’m thinking
as I’m thinking it.
If I’m lucky, I’ll even be
able to transcribe
what I’m not thinking,
which is the goal,
to pull words from the slop
and make brand new thoughts
by my own pensive hand.
-r. miller
I could sit here, un-tensing,
taking all of this in.
Laughter, suffering, electricity.
All perfectly poised.
The sound of my body coming undone.
The mere mention of romance.
The residue of a kiss
after the lips have passed.
Honestly, could anything be
more precious?
What else can be said?
Or unsaid.
A new cool mood develops,
envelopes the whole
with a mind to consume.
I have all I need
right here, collapsing
in bright wordless bliss.
-r. miller
New day, same vantage.
I’ll tell more about it sometime,
but for now, we rumba.
Leaden whispers drop
decisively in the ear.
Mangled mind devoured
by recurrent dawns,
I keep my gaze contained.
Future stained a livid shade.
You must be wondering,
and in so doing,
dissolving.
-r. miller
On the chaise longue, on the chaise longue, on the chaise longue,
All day long on the chaise longue.
-Wet Leg
Following the great pause,
mild epiphanies flow like molten silk
through the multicolored canals of the mind.
Indeed, I was just pondering
the aesthetics of the chaise longue.
The curves and rise colliding seamlessly together,
crushed velvet absolving the body of its responsibilities.
Sometimes what I want is to be ethereal,
and this isn’t one of these times.
I inhabit this woozy moment,
imbibing its nectarine sweetness.
Kinda warms the solar plexus
with nuzzles and nifty kisses.
It’s uplifting, no?
in a generic brand sort of way.
And so, what do these curtains,
so carefree and barely parted, contain?
Merely the night, my son. Merely the night.
-r. miller
You don’t understand; I don’t have
these pictures in my head, can’t have
them even. Abandoning vacation mode,
we have the appearance of jet streams
against a soft red sky, and the bills come
one by one to be collected, off
again seeking the next fucking letdown,
the pen low on ink, evidence
in tatters by the incandescent roundhouse.
I like the look of lacking
through the melted glass of private lives,
stitching together a vast theory of everything.
You weren’t supposed to see
what it is you’re seeing, even glimpsing,
at this merry moment of reply, and me
as haggard and horrid as ever, wearing
the feeling in my cheek the feeling of you
bubbling cool and classy as you whisper
to me through the crescendo of afternoon,
clapping me real good with temptation.
-r. miller
Alright, I’m going to need a moment.
A haunting sound, a haunting image.
A single sigh swathed in sheets of blue.
To think I once thought myself capable
of measuring the will of the earth
using only extremities.
I’m afraid I must retract the following:
past statements, past indiscretions, past lives.
Rosy dust coheres in an out-of-touch space.
I caress the finer points of time’s edge,
singing to myself and myself alone
a litany of little deviations.
-r. miller
*Insert Propaganda Here* 