4 Poems by Christopher Keller

Metapoetry Is a Cop-Out

Derisive laughter
from the painter,

"Ever make a landscape?"

I had well over
a thousand words,

"Not one you could see."

Wishlistlessness

At the park she joked about crits
every time her shoe hit the pavement
atop an ant - her racial enemy.

She always smiled aloud
when an accidental voice considered
dexterity or constitution - she often laughed
alone at parties, but a license plate
stamped "afk" or "lfg" made rain clouds nevertheless
disappear.

She probably played soccer
in high school, had headgear in middle school,
and almost won a spelling bee in fifth grade
(but of course there was the problem
with silent "e"s and silences).

A clarinet sits sheathed under her bed
by My Little Pony dolls she plays with
when she cries. If people ask, she denies
their sentiment, but eBay is her only excuse.

She incubates a ballerina's grace
in every stumble and crash - she also breaks
into a rash with latex bandages,
as it turns out.

In lonely company with the stars,
she sings Twinkle Twinkle or Billy Joel;
her dad loved him, and she loved him,
but both of those have been moot
for a while.

Her therapist says she's in denial, swimming
codependent in technology, filling the void
where another hand would interlock with hers -
but Eliza says she's fine, and so does Yahoo
from her overclocked desktop (not
HP, Dell, or any other brand name corporate game).

She has a penchant for oversized sleep shirts
with understated allusions of belonging bases,
down systems, and the answer to life, the universe,
and everything -
but some nights she balls in front of the glow
of that 27-inch widescreen LCD HD monitor/TV,
WQXGA might-as-well-be-real-life-resolution.

Every morning after, her hair smells like L'Oreal
because she likes plastic encouragement,
and no chat room guy's gonna' say she's worth it
without blaming it on Maybelline.
She turbans a towel, robe-and-loafers up,
and says to herself, "You've got mail,"
as she opens an open-source POP-3 mailbox.

One of these days a pally will ride in
on an epic mount with tier three gear
and smite her fears of only enemy aggro
and a Beta named Bowser
to tide her over between raids.
But until then she sits, slipper-shod,
slaying bits of binary code
and owning her faults as well as that
phat-loot-dropping gnoll with a two-minute
respawn time.

She Lay Dead Like Love

It was an easy sentence,
passed from lips with pastoral reverence.

I love you.

Crowds had gathered,
amassed bigger joint heartbeats,
fumbled about in darkness with candles brighter.

I will always love you.

Their echoes hollowed out emptiness
already carved by years of routine; ice
caps couldn’t deepen the hole, holy
in its perfect silent soliloquy on high.

Always.

Clean up went quick enough,
the janitors swept as the masses stacked chairs,
flowers already wilting were thrown away,
replaced by balloons floating freely through the hall
in celebration, naively buoyant in the heavy air.

I do. I mean,
I do. I –

There wasn’t a crowd left for the collective gasp,
so the microphone shattered the champagne fountain
to turn at least one pair of eyes away from those trembling hands.

Induced Memory

It was the first and only – until
now,
when he should have been more ashamed
than a past perfect.

She was the tin man, and it was hard
to watch anything but her blonde pigtails
accentuated by a silver suit, a second-place medal
he’d never win. She was a wish at first,
a yellow dandelion just flowering, petal pristine
until he was awake enough to dream about her.

He never really did, though, and she stood
a vague, dotted feminine line in the dark
corner of his mind, until another blonde slithered
up beside him, a second place medal he
couldn’t refuse.

They both rocked his mind a little, and
the water lapping into the boat wetted his
socks and his compass – still unsure
which direction North was.