11.21.18

Stiff and sharp, unkempt perfection
lies down in the company of weeds.
Listen, I resent the curve of each gaze
which lands delicately upon my roguish
persona like a maple pod. I can’t exactly
say if I was realized or simply a daydream.
But I’m not making a distinction,
I’m creating a distraction, erupting
as I often do in contemporary fashion.
Let the grace drain out of all these
false pretensions, let each inauthentic mouth
be pressed into a paste. The wasteland
dutifully encroaches upon
what can easily be put into words.

-r. miller

9.3.18

Young blood tongue tied
and tired, you relinquish
the wired dawn to a sequence
of distress. As the avenue
fills with squalor, a myriad
childhoods stumble forth
from creepy recesses in the glowing
gullet of the town to spit up
all over themselves
and meet their great reward.

Not the best environment
for introspection,
nor for counting sheep.

Cool rain bites deep,
drenching your every tissue
until your body, waterlogged,
becomes too burdensome to wear,
but how absorbing is the weight!
Enamored by your new heaviness,
you recline tenderly
upon a bed of headaches
and fractured sunlight

drifting soundlessly
into an unbroken aimless sleep.

-r. miller

11.17.17

One more narrative thrust.
Certain kinds of trust
ramble along the mind’s interior
without any introduction,
doing their own thing,
singing careless hymns.
More often, I’m startled
by the grim face I always seem
to be wearing when
the angels come jostling.
Time for a new hustle.
Autumn wives rustle fingerprints
with slick and sinewy
motions of the spine.
Further down the line,
my memory begins
to anthologize itself
and gets real dickish about it.
Just once, I’d like to sleep
through my alarms.
My anxieties.
The feeding frenzy in my chest.

-r. miller

10/27/17

Pieces of ourselves
we know, and how…
Fresh light chimes,
insistently.
Wondrous movement.
A sky fit for touch.
Eventually
too much
fills the spaces of our bodies.
The home intensifies…
Poorly,
we recognize
these things
as they were for us,
once only.

-r. miller

10/13/17

Forget the drizzle, the bits
of broken reverie
that land with a damp thud
upon the lap
of any given Sunday.
It isn’t like there’s
an obligation, or anything dire like that.
It isn’t like there’s
a green and gruesome torrent
of puerile fantasies
keen on devouring you
building within the clouds…

-r. miller

Elegy for John Ashbery

If I willed it,
would this elegy envelop
every perception
in swatches of gray?
Nothing to say
now, for yesterday
stormed in and stole
the voice which could
shape them into phrases.
You held my breath,
and carried it with you,
page by page,
until the pages burned away.
Before I ever was,
you held my breath.
And in death, you hold it still.

-r. miller

8/16/17

Whatever we’d said amongst friends
has steadily grown fat in the cold
of this dismal atmosphere.
It wasn’t until post-coitus
that we’d reappear like dandelions
with twice the tenacity.
Something like cognizance overflows
the opal dome of domesticity,
that, frankly, I’ve been trying to rupture
since that day I pulled a nerve.
Next time, act like an undeserving pest.
Yours is the last request I’ll ever honor.
Sonority’s a drag,
and the weather’s feathery implements…
Lastly, we consent to be collared
with a shock and awe kind of strategy,
and from there,
it stagnates, an antiquated metric.
One can only play dead for so long
before the scavengers start salivating.

-r. miller

Thee Anxiety Bell

Allow me to arrange all this
so that it defies comprehension.
We come unto apprehension
with a plate of cold.
Heartbeats melting, discrete
and excreting a liquid hum.
And then I shouted “Crab feathers!”
into the tether ball court of a bandaged lampoon.
Sliding spoons. Up the walkers!
Up the fantastique! Them guts
get guzzled. Before you can deconstruct
an oppressive structure, you must first
deconstruct the language that upholds it.
I threw a noose and she half-assed it.
Took the trash to the talk box.
And… And… Cokes the joke,
smallpox on the horizon.
A mercurial purgatory.