riddle me this fatman

I must not grieve my silences
while choosing not to breathe lies into them

yet because you feel you are owed a poem
my education, which has only been borrowed,
must make the arguments promised of a bullet
more compelling than Neruda could even know

 

linked through bitterness, to
deluge the starving with the busy
decorum of disastrous diligence
you may, if you like,  fly kites overhead
to read all six million concerned yawns

 

never one to let a past friend's
boundless progress unsettle me
once suitably distracted I might elect

to steal and invade an overfilled wife,

or three,

and water their names audibly with a riddled pencil

so fiercely democratic am I

 

do not write your size in nervously,

you’ll find my hands are larger inclined,

save the trembling for your poems,

but first, let me be the perfect swine

 

for curiosity arms such liars as I

with a slow typed copy of rich disgust

and lays the inappropriate howls

in rhyme that leaves me far from crushed