Soft Skeleton Coughs on Spadina Bus
a
Spring-Loaded Eulogy
by
APA Cohen
I’m wah-ing and, oh, you’re laughing?
Get this, you’re laughing?
When pants plan and G-d laughs,
Lilith gobs a poison over the heart
of your joke and paints a bust
through the wall,
Kool-Aid-esque in her
exclamatory diction, running
hijinks through the dewy cackle makeup
that undoes your pull on the pal on the
edits of the floor and under the glove,
where your hands are
a-trembling with sweat and accolades, a
teal-snotted overtime that you
wouldn’t want to find in your fridge
later, still, beside those
dang plums that we’ll
never-not stop buying.
This is how I win.
Are you lying?
I wouldn’t know.
Will you love me tomorrow?
For over forty years?
I wouldn’t know.
Which is to say,
I’m sorry, I’m gonna cum.
Oh, my darling, you can’t stop looking
at me
and my earth-crambling sky-mournings
prancing on down to heart the
aroundness
of kinged splendours unsprayable. And
frankly,
that’s very cute of you! I feel very
appreciated, rather cromulent.
Happy birthday, Spray!
I love you.
In this Gematria, you are a PERFECT
TEN,
embiggened by a tenderly tenderness
calling up the whole deck to sing its
tameness, slinging the feet under-belt,
carpeted by the brown under over the
fall,
so many falls at the loss control
downing of
the sleeveless soul, the double-double,
all over
sidewalk and spleen, maybe swollen
tumbling down under under under
under under under under under under
dunes that tumble on down to the next
song.
This episode has been brought to you by
RuPaul fracking for boils,
boiling you down into a… oops,
I touched my face again.
Slow down, Carole, I’m trying to emote.
Please
do me a good; how we wish we could,
harmonize or further syllogize or move
along the highway, ekphrastic and nude
and mute
in our newness, worked up and spinning
out, clothespinning
the barf from my backpack, drying in
the basement
of an old Chevy whose face has clearly
cracked to realize
how far away this would come.
This pome has no constraints–––
that pome has too many constraints–––
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
Okay, king, time to get some rest,
you’re
too tired to shuffle through ancient
virologies
on this stanky dancefloor.
Some of you have never self-identified
as
“mad simping for an official Elizabeth
Warren
Holocaust tattoo” and it shows.
I may be stoned out of my goddamn mind
but at leas
t I wrote that poem over there––yes,
right there!
*looks deep into your eyes to read
the poem that is deep into your eyes,
whispers*
That poem… over there, it’s mine… I
swear.
It says:
LET
US COMPARE
MYCOLOGIES
in the largest text inhumanly possible
in the ugliest font that’s also
cute as fuck, according to
Wired.com/MLA-Chernoff ––
it is there, yes then, that we shall
go, and afterward, we can finally
forego the need for
comparative frameworks
in
which our tongues
tie
themselves
to
hot radiators
while
reading in bed
during the
blitz of a
summer
and a spring,
echoing
our
lossless names
in
the stained grass lot
of the
dewy Dog Bowl
you kept
in your fridge
for so
many years.
Yes, that
one, yes––
the one
that’s
mostly
waving––
to
frighten off
the fears
and make
me me
again
MLA
Chernoff
(@citation_bb) thanks you for visiting their profile. They are a Jewish,
non-binary pome machine, a postmodern neomarxist, and somehow a PhD candidate
at The Neoliberal University of York University. MLA’s first collection of
pomes, delet this, was released by Bad Books in the spring of 2018.
Their second collection, TERSE THIRSTY, was released by Gap Riot Press
in the summer of 2019. MLA hopes you're doing well in these hectic, scary
times––they love you lots and still have a little bit of hand sanitizer, if you
need.
