Mills’ poems online:
The Pedestal Magazine
_______
David Mills
I Want H all of you but I ( )Ate your Guts
On your tongue the letter “H” sleeps when it should
be awake and sashays when it should sit
still. It’s then that you offer me weather
that you don’t want: windows of rain that are
flung open; a sky of suede cement dozing
on its navel. Here, I am sandwiched between
butterbeans and moonlight. Florida:
this country unbuttoning the sun. Soon,
you will be four cities of memory. Soon,
there will be a triangle of quiet; soon
my tongue will wonder why chocolate eyes
two eyes that blink and sizzle. Two nights
ago we passed a manhole cover painted
like bistecca florentina with tapioca bubbles.
The smoke that twined from this city’s
skillet seemed to gallop over supper’s room
temperature antipasto. I hope so. I so hope that life
can tell the difference between vanilla and hell.
And if love is an investigation let me suggest
a detective: then one day my insecurities
will wait in a queue so long that they
will eventually about face, know home.
life is a line
no one
should cut.
We cold, we cold. Sorry
we cannot
accept thoughts
of 17
dinars or less because beyond
the emporium, English
literature is a movie ticket
that should be defenestrated. My condolences
to all the furniture in the third
world and the bikini
Philistines. How cold ridge
of you. Please do not
irk a plus-sized Happy
Meal because
Santa Claus is coming to Town
Hall: Police Navidad.
Police
Navidad… With a dose of opium,
Kubla conned
the age
of reason into thinking
it would think forever. If you can,
toggle your bottom
lip to some sheet music. . .
where whole
notes
stand-in for eye
sockets
their gaze pong-pings
between Porlock
and Linton: over yonder, one thousand
300
(and) twenty
feats
from Culbone.
(after Terrance Hayes)
On a word tour, a quintet of “es” bops up & down streets 3-letters long. In Rome
they wanted more,
even formed a line as long as
the Nile.
A real pane
in the nape some dame made us late,
made our ride
to the club dire.
The car’s FM dial
so laid-
back the music hovers five feet in front of this coupe
de chill. Made-
moiselle we
rehearse backwords and forwords. And although I’m a linguistic drop-
out, do you Parlez vous bebop, its lemon lime-
light? Do you ever let your eyelashes sweep some line
-r notes? Damn, it’s already 8, which is 3 eyeing itself
in a mirror more
and more.
Late for the gig, my fallen cymbal: the sun KO’d, flat on
its back. Dixieland.
