Bottles and Cans

Bottles and cans. They can’t make me go.
Like holding your ear to the side of a hill.
If it sounds like the ocean, you know it’s a shell.
You can talk during this.

Nobody’s hurting you. Nobody yet.
My stomach is starting to feel upset.
People pretend like they don’t understand?
Anvil, hold that pose.

You wouldn’t dare, tables and chair.
Cutting a cake with the door of a car.
The sun is a “G-type, main sequence” star?
Believe it when I see it.

Well! what have we here? Goodnight your vow.
Nothing and no one can help me now.
Take it away, habitual happiness!
Time to lie and mean it.

Hey, Li Shangyin. The fix is in.
Bottles and cans in recycling bin.
Annihilating all that’s there
To a green thought in a green bear.

Bottles and cans. Help yourself.
Personally my plan is to be lucky, Ralph.
A bird in the egg, extending its wings.
Impossible to make them admit it.

Bottles and cans. I’m wrecking our plans.
You’re too little to understand.
Force of logic isn’t much force. I’m
Giving the rhythm the thing that it wants.

Bottles and cans. Meet your match.
Not for me to dispatch the earth.
There’s my dust and here’s a fork. Much
Adidgeradoo about nothing.

Texas rain. Canceled flight.
With a step to the left and a flick to the right.
Poor little poem, nobody likes you.
Frogs having a field day.

Toppled tree? Quit copying me.
Like Slavic Rāvaṇa raising the rents.
But it’s not like me to detect offense
Where no offense is present.

It’s simply delicious, how you did the dishes.
A person of whom there is no getting rid.
The Japanese say that the twice-mended lid
Belongs on the cracked pot.

Quit stallin’, son. Tassel and gun.
Tearing your hair ’cuz a day on Mars
Is thirty-five minutes longer than ours?
Most days, it’s all I’d need.

I follow no man, a hawk in my fist,
Nor am I brilliant whenever I list. This is
Auto-complete out of Hundoland.
Bottles and cans, Batya.

Hot-chocolate hot and getting hotter:
Richer drug than scalding water.
Mollify, melt us, huevos revueltos.
Hush now. I don’t exist.

Wet piece of thread? It’s just like I said.
Decorum is spontaneous order, Fred.
The new Mother Nature is starting her shift,
But I’m not a big fan of last drops.

Bottles and cans. There I was, cowering.
Thistle improve your complexion, darling.
Sugar-palm fiber, double-edged saw—
The evil queen having bad thoughts.

Sprocket and cog and mockingbird mocking:
A good old man, Sir. He will be talking.
I don’t like thinking, I like already knowing,
’Cuz Boss don’t like mistakes.

Oh, you know me all, a plain blunt man
That love my friend and beat my fan.
This is Mount Everest, whatever else it is.
It doesn’t have a door.
 
 
 
Anthony Madrid lives in Victoria, Texas. His poems have appeared in Best American Poetry 2013, Boston Review, Fence, Harvard Review, Lana Turner, LIT, and Poetry. His second book, out this year, is called Try Never (Canarium Books).