Inflating Miro



Miro peered over my shoulder
with bloodshot and owlish eyes
and said to nobody in particular
that we're all either blobby shapes or dots

we can make it if we try
just the two of us
placed by circumstance
in a room lit by a bonfire filled with
milk jugs and halogen lamps

Miro held his breath and floated to the ceiling
calling down and bitching about the humidity

I closed my notebook and swallowed a sparrow
twitching cold in my beard

Bill Withers crawled from the fire
brushed his leather jacket off
and asked me where she went this time

I dug a tunnel with Bill on my back
searching for the door leading to an aortic chamber
whistling a fishing song
silver pants clutching my ankles

Miro screamed behind us in echo
but we went on
fearing his broad strokes of tuna salad romance






A Great Nobody



Somebody ran him over silently
with a morphine rainbow

they were lucky
to find his body folded up
in a pot of slippery gold

his wife sewed together probabilities
outside of a quantum fissure
deep within a plate of fried chicken

what a ruckus the monks made
when his ghost visited their zendo
riding a three-legged giraffe!

they split up his soul
with karmic carbonation
and watched it fizzle toward the
sun's lips, where his wife forgot
her needles and sucked him dry
with a tin straw

that cacophony is the sound
of monks celebrating silently
during the reincarnation of a great nobody





Cerealism



I still look for toys at the bottom of my cereal

there are empty boxes
stacked like shipping crates
against every wall in my garage

the toucans and pirates and vampires
are tangible cardboard gods

I'm either straightening the rows
or re-imagining Arkanoid in three dimensions
with a marbled pink bouncy ball-
then stacking the mess once again

I forget my children's names
or how many wives I've burnt through
but I have reached the unreachable:
memorizing the bar codes of every single box

all 1078 of them

I dream in bar code
while fuzzy memories of cartoon commercials
dominate my waking life like daydream ghosts

and I haven't been off anti-depressants
since they stopped with the toys




Shawn Misener lives and writes in Michigan. Along with being a staff writer for Haggard & Halloo, his poetry has appeared in Zygote in My Coffee, Calliope Nerve, deComp, Word Riot, Killpoet, Ampersand Poetry Journal, Peyote Milkshake Review, Madswirl, West Memphis Witch Hunt, and dozens of other disreputable pages. His first full-length book of poetry, God Sheds His Gravy On The, is due out in 2010. He edits the miniscule yet hoary blogazine Clutching at Straws.