The Poetry of
Michael G. Khmelnitsky

eight pee em & the painting
stands in the corner
I'm high on varnish again

gessoing a canvas (forty-eight
by forty-eight I get a reacharound
from my bicycle

tonight I put on a blue dress
drank pabst green ribbon
and hummed the red danube


dreaming of geometries
of flesh (tongue
tender fingerbite

ich wache just short of noon
turn all the lights on
in the apartment

when I grow up i want to be
a customer cervix
satisfaction specialist


the intoxicating smell of
detergent on dupont street
reminds me of the unity of signs

airplanes feed at a metal trough
my father lives in the
clipboard buffer

my job is to distribute
disappointment
in alephbetical order


I kill a bee with the waste land
(i guess poemtree is good
for some things

painting i realize
ten dollars sixty-one cents
masking tape changes everything

cadmium red stains my underwear
the winedark sea is all gessoed
up and nowhere to go


memory of singapore
she tells me bashfully with a laugh
supposedly gay crabs taste better

hi, customer complaint line?
these carrots are too pointy
your gasoline gives me headaches

your cake made me impotent
if you like cookies
you'll love this pie


ten oh two & I observe
her phillips head nipples
the sum total of breasts

if I were a spider
I would nest in my mother's hair
i'd be a melancholic

who imagined he had no head
but only a kind of void
in its place (is this porno flesh?


I hide in my bed-womb
from the ghost of christmas present
I read books to the break in the spine

the other day I screamed along
with the moonlight sonata
in my car  i'm not sure why

sweet daphne with her dark eyeliner
looks sixteen when she double bags
my mandarin oranges


tragically she cannot tell
the difference between
Lebensraum und Lebenstraum

two pretty boys reminisce
on their youth in line
at the liquor box

five fat white hares
play in the snow
appearing and disappearing