During a walk through the hallway
of the primary school
I find hallways
filled with turkeys and leafs and stiff scrawled characters.
What is Mr. Smith's class thankful for?
Flowers and toys and cars and dresses and pink and purple and soccer and skirts and barbies and family.

How could you sum up all of the things you are thankful for in one word?
At the end of the hallway I am faced with a choice:
What are you thankful for?
-----------------------------------------------------------­------------------------------------------------------------
What­ am I thankful for?
Happiness, and family and security and nature and
friends.
I am thankful for friends.
I am thankful for laughs and chatts and cries and sobs and games and smiles.

I am thanful for ****** contortions and 80s dance sessions,
for inabilty to speak.
I am thankful for hobos, eating on the side of the road,
and for devious scheymes of intoxicatation.

Hep beni anlayan bir arkadaşım var müteşekkirim
and who listens to my sob stories.
I am thankful for singing in the rain.
And styling hair in the sink
for screeching and howling
and hissing.

I am thankful for obkirchergasses,
for Ströcks and for ice cream plarlours.
I am thankful for mentos,
and walnuts.

I am thankful for bad lip readings and hilarious youtube vidoes.
I am thankful for unknown languages and nymphs
and for eloquence.
I am thankful for good taste in music
and for strong opinions.

I am thankful for dancing indian pirates with demon chicks and fireballs.
I am thankful for two-headed teenagers and barbeques.
I am thankful for God and healthy choice prayers,
and Hawaii get aways.

I am thankful for huge, hanging sweaters and crazy, funky leggings.
I am thankful for deep talks about the world's lack of beauty
and for poetry buddies.

I am thankful for dodgeball playing mice,
and poor old wenches.
I am thankful for pirate and mermaid adventures.

I am thankful for the looks we get:
looks of loud disapproval,
and whispers of quiet exasperation.

I am thankful for golden men and loud singing,
for crazy dances with crazy cousins and cute brothers.
I am thankful for Aunt Jemima.

I am thankful for banging on metal bars with rocks and shouting at the top of our lungs.
I am thankful for climbing over gates in order to not step on cracks.
I am thankful for amazing humanities teachers.
I am thankful for a laugh when the day is over.
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How those kids manage to fit all of their thankfulness into one word  is beyond me.
Even the one-word things we are thankful for, must be described with a million words.

Faking Bad

In anticipation of my
Evaluation to be declared
Non Compos Mentos
I slept under a bridge
For three days
"Getting into character,"

But on the morning of
My intake interview
My hair fell perfectly,
I mean I looked like
A ******* rock star.
College girls on the bus
Were giving me their
Numbers and my skin,
Which I'd purposely sunburnt
And caked in the finest filth,
Glowed like an Australian
Chippendale dancer named Weegie
And even the female Assisstant D.A.
Who had busted me for vagrancy
Waved her ******* from
The third story building
Of the Courthouse.

No matter how much I
Tried to speak gibberish
Poetry and philosophical
Tracts spewed from my mouth.

Shuffling past the park
I beat eight
Grand Masters
At chess on move 1

Inadvertently I solved
The Phi Epsilom Theorem
By kicking stones
Into an algorythym.

When I arrived they didn't
Make me wait at all.

My caseworker giggled like
A schoolgirl while I told her
Each day was like an endless shift
In a Chinese fish- gutting
Sweatshop and every one of my fellow
Employees was motivationalist
Richard Simmons.
She ungirdled her enormous
**** and as they spilled
Like fishguts onto the desk
She began to howl
"**** me, **** me, oh ****
Me right here in
Front of the open window
On State Street as everyone
Watches me ******* the strongest,
Healthiest, smartest, most popular,
Well-adjusted man in the world.

The rest of the examination was
Also a success.
But as I left the Mental HealthCenter
feeling marvelous
I accidentally bumped
An old woman with the door:
"Watch out you manic-depressive
Schizoid with Socially Avoidant
Features klutz."
-Thomas L. Vaultonburg

You smirk
for you think she's the dirtiest.
BABOY.
And you saw the clerk
failed to punch the mentos
and put it in the bag.
You didn't tell.

You cursed her and
almost hit your LED TV
with your coffee mug.
MAGNANAKAW.
You don't seem to remember
one seminar you took two sandwiches  
which you said
you'd give one to your friend but didn't.

You love the idea
of putting her fellow thieves to jail
HAYOP.
Was it only yesterday
when you stole the key to the test?

You thought of reviving death penalty.
MAGSAMA-SAMA KAYO SA IMPYERNO.
And you timed in and were paid for the day's work
which you never did.

i look at you
and a taste in my mouth
tells me,
"i like what i see."

Poets go blind from writing by moonlight,
But my artist smites the moon with her luminance,
I write by her subtle, cyan, rays
And would gladly go blind for, with her, my eyes find their fill quickly,

She is the unexpected wind bouncing off the water’s surface,
And my chest is the sail,
Lifted, pushed, expanded and fulfilled to its most righteous purpose,

If the world is a stage than she is the red velvet curtain,
Commanding a sway so slight and savory
That other rags rent and burn,

No matter how mesmerizing the performance is,
A sudden hush or vibrant ovation is demanded in her wake,
A sultry swirl of goddess and girl,
Too precious to be stored with other jewels,

Elegance with every hinting glance, every rowdy inhale,
And every placement of those sinister legs,
That rams would think twice to scale,

The bend in her back is the stroke of my oils,
The pout of her lips is scarlet meat to the lions,
And the feel of her hips sum up my surreptitious desires,

Like good jazz things seem to pull back
Before the cathartic crescendos,
But to put it bluntly dear, the next time you’re here,
It may pay to freshen up with a Mentos.

On a cafeteria table,
in the middle of February,
the kind where it gets dark at 5pm,
sat eight minature figurines made of shells—
brown, speckled, like a calico cat
with googly eyes on the middle of their heads,
one business man with a black derby,
one with a pretty pink bow,
or even one with blue suspenders,
and all their chubby bellies
rounding out over their pants. The woman

with her iridescent nails, bony fingers,
the skin pressed thin against her knuckles,
lines them up in a perfect row, tilting
their heads into one another as if
they are having a tiny conversation
admist the numbers being called—
B14! She stamps in red. B14!
A man pushes a cart around the tables,
like one mows grass around graves,
with fifty cent candy bars and potato chips
on flimsy paper plates. He asks the woman
if she wants ice in her Pepsi, but she just blows
a long sigh of smoke and flicks the sparks
behind her back. He doesn’t ask her to pay.

G56! She touches the head of the figurine
with the mustache. G56! I’ve lost count
of how many numbers I’ve missed,
but then there’s you, your hand on my thigh,
creeping, your fingers pushing
my cotton skirt up, up, and up—
O74!
We play with acrylic chips instead of stampers.
We’d like to win the lottery tickets,
maybe cash them in at the gas station
after we drink a couple iced teas and snack
on Mentos cause we ran out of money
two bottles ago.

The figurine with the fishing pole has one pupil
that lies at the bottom of the eye,
lop-sided, and staring at me while I pretend
that I have G47! or pretend that this isn’t
the first time you’ve brought me here, G47!
instead of a real date. Or pretend
that I can’t hear the woman cough, and cough,
and cough as she switches stampers between every ten calls
or touch this figurine or move that one, just slightly,
this way or that or

N44! She doesn’t have it. N44!
I don’t have it.
Don’t worry, child, you’ll have it all someday,
she whispers, sideways from her mouth,
with your thumb making circles around my hipbones,
and the man pushing the cart, the squeak of the wheels
B7! But I don’t have it. B7! I don’t have it.
I don’t have it.

you’re the mentos to my coke
you make me all bubbly
and open me up
but boy you can make me explode

Straddling the line of popularity
Teetering on the edge of trends and personality
As soon as I'm about to fall into them I revert back to introverted me.

This dissent from narcissistic sorcery may slip you into mental dysentery
Though reading into the stains is not necessarily a necessity,
It's a little difficult to ignore the symmetry.

Hock-up spit onto this canvas, rip up another piece for my portfolio.
Lock-up your kids inside the frames of your family's mementos.
I'm lashing out like diet coke infused with mentos.

I'm not your son, not your husband, nor your best friend.
I'm that guy you **** for fun sometimes on the weekend.

I used to hate people in school who said they "failed" when they got a "C",
Now I hate the people who say they're broke when they still have money.

I'll grab your skate-up , lame-duck, askin "Have you ever ate nuts?"
We need some action. Got the lights, the camera, but don't take cuts.
Shoot a provisional peripheral glance at my pay-stub.
Always take pride in where you came from even if it ain't much.

The glass is still half empty if you're only half full of ****.
Some days I'm a dog. Any day I'm a typical cat.
So on the days it's raining cats and dogs, I get really wet.
No...wait...not like that...
I mean I'm thrown really out of whack.
Spilling every drop of sporadic synaptic spit onto this paperback.

falling in love with your best friend
is one of the scariest, yet most lovely experiences
to be forever intertwined with the one who knows
everything about you
like mentos and diet coke
so exciting yet makes such a mess
and neither of us want to pick it up because we're too busy laughing
love is dangerous but with you
i love a little risk

seventy candles flicker in a room full

the sweet union of voices

sixty-nine times before that day

the man walked the moon when I was ten

I had heard stories and so I dropped

the mentos

as my son speared it into the sky

giggles erupted and hearts soared

As our chins tilted toward the sun