Michael Gardner 

 
next time we meet
let’s keep our clothes on

what am I the dalai lama

if they’ll cheat on someone else for you
they’ll cheat on you for someone else

we are the animals that paint themselves
polyrhythmic manifestations

a conjurer came to town
mustached
collecting the rubbings of my eraser

imagine the inorganic
mineral elements forming new rumors

but where is dystopia anymore
with a surplus of choices
desire or narcotics

even if you’re dead it’ll
still kill you

just watch the horizon line
so you won’t get sick
at sea

I dreamt of animal-made art
cézanne was fond of
crested macaques

and of a place where
merely painting horses meant power

the black cows
on the brown grass
in a way that is true to life

it’s a time of Tennyson
and sober up
realism’s a noun

and prevention and treatment
of sugar water

shamble along behind
a dawning age of poetry
poems of Bogan
where the body
is the shadow’s prison

the web of life
officially stationed
in the Expo

regarded as a kind of
one million copies sold
between a scattering of jades

and a semi-precious
often drink tea

Michael Gardner lives and writes in Santa Barbara, California. He is the author of two chapbooks, Opening Out, and Acoustic Shadows. He considers his work to be of the West.