the mirror in which i'll be judged by jeffrey mcdaniel

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The Mirror in Which I'll Be Judged

by jeffrey mcdaniel

Watching my brother get married in Golden Gate Park,

I wonder how that question gets popped. Is it like a bottle

of expensive champagne, or a big, ugly zit

that won't go away? Asking a woman to marry you

is like chewing a mixture of gum and Krazy Glue,

then blowing a bubble. If she accepts, you stick

the bubble on the mantle. If she declines, it explodes

in your face, so you stay home to avoid the hey, man,

what's that pink junk in your eyebrows question.

Marriage frightens me. Not like it jumps out, yelling

Boo! But I know it's up there, lurking in the hills, ready

to stomp into my life in high heels, like an anti-Viking,

ending all my bad habits, late-night refrigerator pillaging.

Look at my divorced parents sitting there, five feet apart.

Staring at their fingertips, I see sparks. Those palms

made me, like a sand castle that wouldn't wash away.

I'm a porcupine handshake. They fought so much

that as a child I thought he must've asked for her fist

in matrimony by mistake. Some small part of me

wants to see them say I do, or at least how are you.

But that's not in the cards. Heck, it's not even in the casino.

The year they stopped talking, my blood followed suit.

My British blood refused to flow above my abdomen.

The Irish stuff pooled up in my chest. I can't ask

for a woman's whole hand in marriage. What would I do

with such a thing? Carry it in my back pocket

like a flank steak? No, I'll downsize my request

to merely a finger. But I'll be good to that finger: polish

the knuckle, carve a replica of the print on my ceiling,

scrub the nail till it sparkles and becomes the mirror

in which I'll be judged, 'cause I know it's so much easier

to be charming to a busboy than kind to the person you love.

renovating the womb by jeffrey mcdaniel

Renovating the Womb

by jeffrey mcdaniel

Dear Mom, thanks for giving birth to me

and not having an abortion. 2% of my time

on Earth has been spent inside your body -

more than all my girlfriends combined.

I enjoyed my time in the uterus, reading

what the previous fetuses had written

on your walls. That's how I learned

to spell. That's how I came out speaking.

the passion tree by jeffrey mcdaniel

The Passion Tree

by jeffrey mcdaniel

This California Live Oak at the end

of my block looks like a couple

mid-fuck: ankles, thighs, groin, hips

entwined, forming a single trunk,

erupting into two separate bodies:

a damsel tilted back, the green breeze

of her hair, fingers gripping the triceps

of a lad thrusting, his rainbow spine

in a perpetual state of timber. Most trees

are only visible from the knees up,

calves unraveled in dirt, shoes fallen off.

Not this one. I keep a tiny piece

of its bark under my pillow. I stuff

its leaves in my underpants. I sleep

naked in its branches, hoping to wake

with its initials carved into my shoulder.

the arsonist stood up in court and said by jeffrey mcdaniel

The arsonist stood up in court and said

I am not an arsonist. I dreamt

the building was a phoenix

and needed my help. Before sticking me

in a sentence, like a four-syllable word

with only one meaning, consider

what becomes of the ashes: see

how after smearing a palm-full

hair grows on a bald man's scalp, how

just a sprinkle makes irises sprout through

sidewalk cracks. You call me sick,

but have you ever seen a suicidal

parakeet, a homeless buttefly?

You want to know how you go crazy?

One marble at a time. It's the law

of your language that dictates mess

is the precursor for messiah. You don't

understand my logic to the hmph degree.

Your style of math is forty-three floors

beneath me. But you should have seen

the fire, a symphony of mayhem, people

leaping from windows, like lightning

bolts somersaulting out of a terrible cloud.

the scars of utopia by jeffrey mcdaniel

The Scars of Utopia

by jeffrey mcdaniel

If you keep taking stabs at utopia, sooner or later

there will be scars.

Suppose a thermometer measured contentment. Would you

slide it under your tongue and risk being told

your serenity was on par with a thirteenth-century farmer?

Would you abandon your portable conscience,

the remote control that lets you choose who you are,

lets you pick the right personality for every occasion?

I wish we humans cared more about how we sounded

than how we looked. Instead of primping before mirrors,

we'd huddle in echo chambers, practicing our scales.

As a kid, I thought the local amputee was dying in pieces,

that his left arm was leaning against a tree in heaven

waiting for the next part to arrive. There should be Band Aids

for what you don't know; whiskey breath mints so sober people

can fit in at wild parties; a Smithsonian for misfits:

an insomniac's mucky pillow hanging over a narcoleptic's

drool cup, the teeth of an anorexic like a white picket fence

designed to keep food from trespassing. I wish the White House

was made out of mood ring rock reflecting the health

of the nation. I want an atheist night at every church. Needle

exchange programs. And haystack exchange programs too.

Emotional baggage thrift stores. A Mt. Rushmore

for assassins. I'm sick of strip malls and billboards. I dream

of a road lit by people who set themselves on fire.

No asphalt. No rest stops. Just a bunch of dead grass

with footprints so deep, like a track meet in wet cement.

i am currently obsessed with the poems of jeffrey mcdaniel, like this one.

The Benjamin Franklin of Monogamy

Reminiscing in the drizzle of Portland, I notice the ring
that's landed on your finger, a massive insect

of glitter, a chandelier shining at the end of a long tunnel.
Thirteen years ago, you hid the hurt under the blanket

of your voice, said I guess there's two kinds of women.
Those you write poems about, and those you don't. 

It's true. I never slid sonnets under the door, or served you
haiku in bed.  My idea of courtship was tapping

Jane's Addiction lyrics in Morse code on your window
at three hundred a.m., whiskey doing push-ups

on my breath. I worked within the confines of my character,
cast as the bad boy in your life, the Magellan

of your dark side. We don't have a past so much as a bunch
of electricity, power never put to good use. What 

we had together makes it sound like a virus, as if
we caught one another like a flu, and desire was merely

a symptom that could be treated with soup and lots of sex.
Gliding beside you now, I feel like the Ben Franklin

of monogamy, as if I invented it, but I'm still not immune
to your waterfall scent, haven't developed antibodies

for your smile. I don't know how long regret existed
before humans hammered a word on it, or how many

paper towels it would take to wipe up the Pacific Ocean,
or why the light of a candle being blown out

travels faster than the luminescence of one that's freshly lit,
but I do know all our huffing and puffing

into each other's throat—as if the heart was a birthday cake
covered with trick candles—didn't make the silence

any easier to navigate. I'm sorry all the kisses I scribbled
on your neck were written in disappearing ink, sorry

this poem took thirteen years to reach you. Sometimes
I thought of you so hard one of your legs would pop out

of my ear, and when I was sleeping, you'd press your face
against the porthole of my submarine.  I wish that just once,

instead of joyriding over flesh, we'd put our hands away
like chocolate to be saved for later, and deciphered

the calligraphy of each other's eyelashes, translated
a paragraph from the volumes of what couldn't be said.


from The Splinter Factory, published by Manic D Press in 2002