To a flower whose price fluctuates with the price of gasoline

Dear Carnation,

Downbeat, dyed, wannabe dahlia

You have bloomed into the wrong world

Condemnatory and cost-effective

Ubiquiflower, petals on Viagra

You do not wilt nor burn            

Or go away, stiff for a month

I honor your scrappy cobalt folds

And greens with baby’s breath

Where you endure purple-themed

Middle school dances and sticky

Red restaurant tables, budgeted

Into the very worst arrangements

Notwithstanding, dear Carnation

Dianthus caryophyllus

Ginger and mint and flushed

When the water evaporates

May you tumble into my grave

To fuse, colorless, in the folds of earth

An open letter to those who wear The North Face

To Those Who Wear The North Face

Arrogance enwraps you and your brand is phony

You set yourself apart from six point five billion people
The way you pat yourself three times on the right shoulder

Proud of your asinine three words.  Face The North

I have noted the way you talk.  Your exhaust blows

Hot and hollow.  You stink of pedestrian mall classism 

You avert your eyes.  Your elitism is out of fashion

Follower, your smile is wiped on and off like a script

You, wearers of The North Face, a liability of pride

Taking note of who.  Your gaze is bought with ads

Prowling sales.  Haunting aisles.  Down at your phones
You rank yourself on high in the very worst of ways 

You become bigger with those words, chill and smug

A quality you wouldn’t have felt.  Congratulations, Dear

Customer!  You have become that northernmost face

Cold.  Behind the front, where the steely winds howl

An eleventh commandment for poets. Take no offense; just follow the law, or burn in the flames of hell.

Though Shalt Not Spill Thy Seed of Debauched Poems

Do not spill your seed ‘til red

My ears are bleeding in my bed

The foliage of your poems need time

Understand, dear poet--your work is fine

It’s not your thoughts or what is said

I just do not like every line

You steal my time with your bad rhyme

Force tubes of stroppy turns down my throat

Rub sand of ill-wrought stanza in my eyes

Rob expansive meaning with cliche

From your unripe poem, give me liberty

Or give me silence.  Know when to give birth

Let your poem release from the body

In its time. Perhaps at ten fifty-two

In the morning, when October’s maple

Draws down the saps to the cooling earth

And a wobbly sun both bursts and seeps

To coax a letting go, a swooping fall