Nick Twemlow

Default Margins

I am in my brain smoking my gun.
Get off Luvox, restore all defaults,
give me a breast to suckle & a blurb to write,
a symphony to conduct as I tick off
the latest sniper developments,
fucking a poem so fast & hard I come out its mouth.
I’m snorkeling through my exhaustion to kiss you.
Come crackle with me
as we formulate one hypothesis
to drain the faucet & another to keep us
anesthetized through lunch. I miss
the crayon-shaving candor we displayed
during courtship, the little boy
I’d like to become. I shave ticker tape into the sink
as the parade canters through my head,
did a protest turn violent on the capitol steps?
Film at eleven, you shuffle in to rinse, captions
by midnight. I kid you about every little thing,
I’m the shy type, and so am I.
Do you crave further information?
Tune the station to the thickets
of picketers, kindling in the far-stick madness;
the pyres rioters lug in their wake; the marble slab
of meat that is the body politic;
& finally, the barn ablaze, the horses’ whinnies
tapering to a vulgar hiss, the scrum of flies
encircling a carcassed cow’s eye. If I brandish
a gun in the first line, do I have to fire it
by poem’s end? It is not my policy
to frighten with consequences.