Jeffrey McDaniel

Jeffrey McDaniel was born in 1967 in Philadelphia, and holds a BA from Sarah Lawrence College and an MFA from George Mason University. His poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including The Best American Poetry 1994. An acclaimed performance poet and the recipient of an NEA Fellowship, McDaniel is the author of three books: Alibi School (Manic D, 1995), The Forgiveness Parade (Manic D, 1998), and The Splinter Factory (Manic D, 2002). He lives in Brooklyn and teaches creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College.

Logic in the House of Sawed-Off Telescopes

I want to sniff the glue that holds families together.

I was a good boy once.

I listened with three ears.

When I didn’t get what I wanted, I never cried.

I banged my head over and over on the kitchen floor.

I sat on a man’s lap.

I took his words that tasted like candy.

I want to break something now.

I am the purple lips of a child throwing snowballs at a taxi.

There is an alligator in my closet.

If you make me mad, it will eat you.

I was a good boy once.

I had the most stars in the classroom.

My cheeks erupted with rubies.

I want to break something now.

My bedroom is so dark I feel like an astronaut.

I wish someone would come in and kiss me.

I was a good boy once.

The sweet smelling woman used to say that she loved me

and swing me in her arms like a chandelier.

I want to break something now.

My heart beats like the meanest kid on the school bus.

My brain tightens like a fist.

I was a good boy once.

I didn’t steal that kid’s homework.

I left a clump of spirit in its place.

I want to break something now.

I can multiply big numbers faster than you can.

I can beat men who smoke cigars at chess.

I was a good boy once.

I brushed my teeth and looked in the mirror.

My mouth was a brilliant wound.

Now it only feels good when it bleeds.

Lineage

When I was little, I thought the word loin

and the word lion were the same thing.

I thought celibate was a kind of fish.

My parents wanted me to be well-rounded,

so they threw dinner plates at each other,

until I curled up into a little ball.

I’ve had the wind knocked out of me

but never the hurricane. I’ve seen two

hundred and sixty-three rats in the past year,

but never more than one at a time.

It could be the same rat, with a very high

profile. I know what it’s like to wear

my liver on my sleeve. I walk in

department stores, looking suspicious,

approach the security guard, say What?

I didn’t take anything. Go ahead, frisk me,

Big Boy! I go to funerals and tell

the grieving family The soul of the deceased

is trapped inside my rib cage and trying

to reach you. Once I thought I found love,

but then I realized I was just out

of cigarettes. Some people are boring

because their parents had boring sex

the night they were conceived. In the year

thirteen hundred thirteen, a little boy died

who had the exact same scars as me.

Opposites Attack

I walk on tiptoes, so as not to disturb

the blindfolded elderly couple, sleeping

quietly on the floor. Outside the sky

is the color of a drowned man’s face.

The birds are still on strike. The local

children build a snow transvestite.

The trees have rolled up their long sleeves.

They’re cousins with the octopus.

I remember packing snowballs in the ice box

and dreaming of beaning sunbathers

in July. I was never good at sunbathing.

I used to climb the fire escape and recline

on the roof’s rough blanket at midnight,

pretending the house was a wedding cake,

as I covered my limbs with cooking oil

and offered myself to the moon.

Those were the good cold days, when

a Peeping Tom was worth something,

and a wisecrack got you a swift kick

in the pants. Nowadays you need a Glock

in the glove compartment and a cavalry

of narcotics galloping through your veins,

just to get a cop to spill coffee on you,

and sometimes even that isn’t enough.

I’ll see your cross-eyed pigeon

and raise you a jar of epileptic brains.

Put your business cards on the table.

Read the palm trees and weep.

Roman orgies weren’t built in a day.

I bet you an opera singer’s esophagus

that my apocalypse can beat your

apocalypse—even on an off night.

The Archipelago of Kisses

for Sarah Koskoff and Todd Louiso

We live in a modern society. Husbands and wives don’t grow

on trees like in the old days. So where

does one find love? When you’re sixteen it’s easy—like being

unleashed with a credit card

in a department store of kisses. There’s the first kiss.

The sloppy kiss. The peck.

The sympathy kiss. The backseat smooch. The we shouldn’t

be doing this kiss. The but your lips

taste so good kiss. The bury me in an avalanche of tingles kiss.

The I wish you’d quit smoking kiss.

The I accept your apology, but you make me really mad

sometimes kiss. The I know

your tongue like the back of my hand kiss. As you get older,

kisses become scarce. You’ll be driving

home and see a damaged kiss on the side of the road,

with its purple thumb out. Now if you

were younger, you’d pull over, slide open the mouth’s ruby door

just to see how it fits. Oh where

does one find love? If you rub two glances together, you get

a smile; rub two smiles, you get

a spark; rub two sparks together and you have a kiss. Now

what? Don’t invite the kiss

to your house and answer the door in your underwear. It’ll get

suspicious and stare at your toes.

Don’t water the kiss with whisky. It’ll turn bright pink and explode

into a thousand luscious splinters,

but in the morning it’ll be ashamed and sneak out of your body

without saying goodbye,

and you’ll remember that kiss forever by all the little cuts it left

on the inside of your mouth. You must

nurture the kiss. Dim the lights, notice how it illuminates

the room. Clutch it to your chest,

wonder if the sand inside every hourglass comes from a special

beach. Place it on the tongue’s pillow,

then look up the first recorded French kiss in history: beneath

a Babylonian olive tree in 1300 B.C.

But one kiss levitates above all the others. The intersection

of function and desire. The I do kiss.

The I’ll love you through a brick wall kiss. Even when

I’m dead, I’ll swim through the earth

like a mermaid of the soil, just to be next to your bones.

Dear America

I am but a riverboat—hopelessly in touch

with my inner canoe. On the first day of nursery

school, I cried in mother’s arms. It wasn’t

separation anxiety. I was scared she would

come back. In high school, I was voted most likely

to secede. In college, I took so many drugs

the professors looked at samples of my urine

just to know what books I’d been reading.

I’m a narcissist trapped in the third person.

The sound of my own head being shaved

is my all-time favorite song. I stop people

on the street, show them pictures of myself

as a child, ask have you seen this boy?

He’s been missing for a long time. His eyes

are the last swig of whisky before stumbling

out of a bar on a sunny afternoon. His cheeks

are twirling ballerinas. His cheeks are revolving

doors. I’m all out of cheeks to turn. I’m all

out of cheeks. My ego is a spiral staircase

inside a tornado. My eyebrows are that furry

feeling you get in your gut when you’re about

to tell a lie. My tongue is a dolphin

passed out in an elevator. My tongue is a red carpet

I only roll out for you. My penis is a wise ass

in the back of a classroom who doesn’t know

the answer, but sticks his hand up anyway.

My heart hangs in my chest like a Salem witch.

My heart is a turtle ripped from its shell.

My heart is a street so dark nymphomaniacs

are afraid to kiss. My heart, America, my heart.