Escape from the Intergalactic Lunar Prison
Four suns hang in an alien sky.
Suddenly it’s Thursday.
My heart feels transplanted,
feels like four hearts humping
away on a desert floor, and as if
I hadn’t surrendered enough this week
I go to the bar. Obviously my nemesis
there thwarts me at karaoke, seals me
forever in the intergalactic lunar prison.
So I learn to meditate, to long
for myself so completely I vanish.
This whole town weighs less
than a bird’s heartbeat anyway:
no one will care what the snow plows
carve on the wrong side of the moon.
°•°
Shark Week
Either I’ve run out of things to conquer
or they’ve run away from me.
Perhaps I am not fit for murky water.
I am a cruel governor craving
tropical getaways, solutions clear
as a boiled ocean. Most of all I want
to box the shark with hammers for brains
to death in a seafloor cage.
Nowadays everything I police scatters
to plankton, outnumbering the stars.
Nowadays I fight the skin cells
I lose each night, tiny aboriginals
shoving me out of bed, shadows
making puppets of my weighty gestures.
—
Nathaniel Duggan used to sell mattresses, now he is unemployed. He lives in Maine.
Twitter: @asdkfjasdlfjd
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