Pretense

…I mean if that’s what you want to do, go right on ahead. There’s some two by fours out back by the driveway. If you need help getting yourself onto that cross, let me know. Otherwise, I’ll be in here watching my show.

His crime was that he would find people having drinks with those little umbrellas in them and he would close them.

Then he’d run away laughing.

In Case You Needed to Hear This

Hey like, man, you can do and say profound things and still like gummy worms.

What I Should Have Known

Things were going well.
She ordered salmon.
I had beef wellington.

We were in orbit
feeding each other's
id
with history
and half-truths.

We got the check
and when I pulled out my wallet
she saw my
team hufflepuff logo.

Without a word
she got up and out
of my life
forever.

Donate to my GoFundMe to ban drum sets because hand percussion is far superior

This Poem Was Written By an LLM Trained on Eurodance*

Take Me
Energy
Higher

Pressure
Move Your Body

Energy
Tonight

Pump
Moving
Energy—
Forever.

* This was actually written by a human

On Convergence

This nugget of an idea eventually became a much longer free-verse poem called “1 in 3”.

going to grandma's
i've brought her some cherry pie
why is a wolf here

grandma was tasty
oh and here comes another
bringing cherry pie

My Campaign for Treasurer

I decided to run for some position
on the junior high school student council.

Treasurer, maybe.
No idea.
I think we all kind of knew
it was performative power anyway.
You don’t get to decree
school is cancelled
but you can promise whatever.

I wasn’t a popular kid
and I knew this
and I knew this was really
a popularity contest
more than anything.

I had to give a speech.
I prepared nothing.
I stood up in the gym,
“Vote for me, because you should.”

When they tallied the votes
it was such a blowout
that they didn’t tell me the actual results.
Probably because they thought
it would hurt my feelings.

Rocketry

As a kid, for a while I was into model rockets.

Kind of.

There are different model rocket engine sizes and I think engines like “D” were the big ones.

Designed for big rockets. But in my mind, for fun rockets.

I became interested in trying to shove D engines into tiny A rocket bodies. This took duct tape and an acceptance of the fact that you will never see the rocket again after you launch it.

But this was the only way. The fun way.

When you wake up at 3am

like a shot

cause it hits you out of nowhere.

Wherever You Go, There You Are

We really should have known.
He was burning the candle
at both ends.

To perform brain surgery
and then immediately
put the overthruster
into that old Ford F-350
and drive into that mountain?

Looking back, it was all right there.
All our funding got pulled but
they couldn’t pull
Buckaroo
out of that mountain.

I knocked on heaven’s door, but only before I saw the “No Soliciting” sign. My bad.

Of all the things that are important right now, none are more important than this. You must be told, in as many ways as I can sneak it in, that I like black coffee and lots of it.

This is the cornerstone of my identity, you see.

A Hollow Light

They come with crosses.
They leave with...

they never leave.


Jeff's Note: I expanded this into a much longer poem.

When I read a poem to someone and they get misty-eyed, I do too.

Continuing your travels across the plains, you will come to the city of Juro. The architects of Juro took advantage of the local resources and sculpted a city made of donkeys. Passing beneath the ornately designed gate of donkeys, stepping carefully on the backs of donkeys below you, you will come to a wide plaza where a central fountain of donkeys commands your attention in the center. At night, you enter your house of donkeys where the walls are made of donkeys standing on the back of other donkeys. You find yourself mesmerized by the twitch of their ears and the slow swish of their tails.

Your donkey bed is soft. It brays once, gently, and you drift to sleep.

Turbo Simile, Volume 1

“…like the feeling when a friend has tickets to a concert but can’t go so they offer them to you and you accept but decide to skip it and the next day your friend asks how the concert was and you wonder… do they know”

Look, I cancelled Xbox Game Pass only because it was the thing to do.

Point at things and command me: “cancel”. My cancellation fingers are ready.

They said they’d give me a hundred dollars when I reached the horizon and I took them up on it.

my favorite hamburger?

the one I’ve just eaten.

rooftops passing by
tar crowns on withheld moments
fire and stone between

Bad Jokes Deluxe

Yesterday I was trying to eat some ice cream, but the kid I stole it from wouldn’t stop crying.

I went to a fancy dinner that had multiple sets of silverware and I panicked because I didn’t know what course the little fork was for. I shouldn’t have worried though, I got arrested for trespassing before anything was served.

One time I was bitten by a vampire. It gagged and ran away screaming.

One day I almost had sex. She took off her hair and put it on the nightstand. I was wearing some of those underwear that make your butt really big and I couldn’t get my pants off. She put her hair back on and left.

Naming Ceremony

Maybe love is a farce.

Maybe it’s
the thing we say
to convince ourselves
we’re different.

But forget that.
Let’s call it love.

It can only be more than that,
but love
is the least
that it is.

Rolling

I wasn’t close with my dad.

We tried.

But one day we were eating ice cream
and watching cars on a highway.

My dad asked,
“what if we started rolling tires
into the road, just to see what happens”

And it was right there that I
loved my dad the most.

I've got a dad body. That's why you shouldn't go down to the basement.