I belong to the school of watching people try to act naturally

And decided recently to incorporate trying to get noticed for good deeds

Into the curriculum to replace trying to get noticed for voluptuary consumption

And its predecessor, trying to traumatize banality for the giggles.

A deadened mind is no more attractive than a cankered heart.

Put that in your casket and cremate it, kids.

You can sit at the edge of my mental furniture anytime.

It is capacious. Just sit and cogitate. There might be some anxiety in

Falling off the perch, but mine as well become becalmed.

Leaving your spot, if you coarse out and down to the diastolic pump,

For whom, would you say, does my blood most freely flow?

Can empirical measures tell?

The outer limits of self-fashioning have softer teeth than

the outer limits of accounting.

I would rather swim in money than self-expression.

Going green at the gills when the pump stops working, then go

Blue at the tempo of funereal decay, which – mutatis mutandis –

Decrescendos out of time and

Into charred black history.

I belong to the school of capturing people trying to act naturally.

Play acting Goffman will not beautify

Any of the old anxious slogans or titillate

Any of the overdetermined overtures.

A grinning shark and vertigo comprises all of

what has been left over.

Still, a cankered heart trumps a deadened mind trumps

A desiccated vestige of a constantly-evolving ideal.

Say what you want about the virtuous lash, but

It leaves a mark. It’s mine as well.

Just try to stop me.