Eric Amling
Two Poems
Miami Vices
What a nice day to have your legs insured, they are so good looking.
With a plum fragrance over the abandoned shoe district
and the old Sears conservationist preserving the state
historical landmark; Oh, to be sipping limousine water, to tend
to the new sprouts of a Chia pet coaxed by the palm trees sway
like the talons of impaled buzzards and the diamond
sparkle of a cruise ship far out on the edge of the sea.
To think of how many ex-girlfriends you sat with in front
of the Barracuda breaks your mind calculator
listening to the swamp sizzle over the dusty hemisphere.
But now sound is merely a suggestion when alive
the early part of an afternoon looking through a glass-bottom
boat when what catches your eye is the third-rate makeup model
shimmering like a tall bank building
and the wedding party on the beach stricken with cummerbund tans
and the sandy champagne due to the warm breezes
that beat the pale windows of a hotel room where a bridesmaid
is giving award-winning head to the best man for the second time
since high school. It is hard to say what keeps a man going,
you can’t undrown a lost answer;
then what formidable result can be acquired from so much dancing?
So many shoes now come with buckles on them and the tragic
beauty that exists in pill form can not prevent the aging elbows
of the varsity women along the main street.
Each day you pull at the sod grass but notice the yard’s a little smaller.
The crinkled toilet paper and misspelling of your name in the window
envelope show you are frustrated.
What is it about humidity that contests you to bite the head of a peacock?
What is the abstract expression that I’m feeling today?
In my life there is always something pending.
For it is these confrontations that discern the art critic
in cut blue jeans anticipating the arrival of his New England taxidermy
when suddenly, a beard blows down the street like tumbleweed.
Today’s Smells
Singed foliage from a time machine in the Ozarks.
The rain tarp over an experimental anniversary gift.
The ventriloquist’s hand, in the dressing room, after
An intense set.A porcelain bowl of discarded hearing aids.
Haunted guano by an Irish bat on historic rubble.
An open cold-cream jar on the midday windowsill at the K-spa
Reminded me of ox red quartz in the showy plaza of a blood cell.A Gene Clark cassette sandwiched in the Mazda seats.
The X-ray of a complicated handshake.
Wrestling trading cards drizzled with King Cobra.
A piñata of a corncob pipe filled with baby corncob pipes.Much later, stink lines from a bog within meters of a crayon
Factory, its consistency like that of a child’s brain.