Michael Philips

I set off a stink bomb
At the art opening of bad art.
It was funny how everyone started
Looking around as if they
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Your gentle yawn
while reading the sports section
as they fill your prescription.
A light scratch of your nose
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There are two types of people:
Those who play golf,
And those who recognize it
for the idiotic malpractice that it is,
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I want someone to invent
a coffee table book that
rapidly deteriorates and
transforms itself into something else,
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She made a scene at the wedding
Wearing a black leather miniskirt
Upstaging the livid bride
My kids thought she was exciting and cool
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I.
Researchers say Mormons have continued
to posthumously baptize Jewish Holocaust victims
into their faith despite a promise to discontinue the practice
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Colleagues who die
kept in my rolodex
alive in circulation
flipping round in ritual
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You cannot see the upper reaches of Everest
from the base camp, where you acclimatize
with attitude and finger exercises.
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Those old communists – the ones in the
triumphant revolutionary posters with
broad shoulders and eyes on the horizon
where the sun is rising on a better world,
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The white one purred and was soft.
We gave it a name.
Got hit by a car.
We buried it in back.
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Just shut up already about herbal remedies, I told her.
This was on Valentines Day, hours before Sally fed
my dog some herbal medication
and he brewed butt coffee
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Sitting on the patio
At Jeff and Melanie’s
Just to be near Melanie
In hopes I would be well positioned
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Roll down your window and smile.
Hold it.
Now let me get one with the background of vintage automobiles,
tinted postcards, motels, and Route 66 trying to slake my
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I forgot the bug spray
So mosquitoes keep attacking me
Some guy brought a blender for Happy Hour
And some people even bring their TVs
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That gray morning I purchased a cheap electric
bass, the man with a friend on the Force
offering color enlargements of a
strangled young woman
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As he crosses into
the end zone
and the crowd
ejaculates in rapture,
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When people heard
that you sent me poetry
they commented that
you must be a wonderful and sensitive man
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I’m giving all my Colombo videos to the library,
I don’t know if they want them,
Perhaps curious folks with time
Will check them out and get hooked,
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When your rationale for going to war
turns out to be false,
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Saturated in morphine
breathing like a hurt animal
maybe somewhere deep down
at the bottom of the mineshaft
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