under the table
melissa found a 20 in a puddle in the acme parking lot
the dean showed us a picture of his grandchildren right before the labor-management committee on job security
most people have a name and address, it’s true
you can buy lottery tickets for everyone in your family
you can read the sunday paper to your dog
some people think that maureen dowd is more persuasive than a riot
the columnist was just a little girl once, a baby
maybe that’s when she learned to love cops
if you turn up your favorite song, you can drown out all the truth, at least for a little while
the university will pay for your subscription
what is education, after all
the horrible knot of pain in my back came from a horrible knot of an impossible situation, but i can’t prove it
the acupuncturist nodded and said yeah, it could be
it could be that you cannot fight for people and for the economy at the same time
it could be that choosing one over the other will cause you to lose friends
at the end of the tunnel, another middle-class person is talking about individual responsibility
we have to run him over and keep going
rent should be going down
when it starts to go down, i’ll cross that off my list
confirmation of your claims
on jupiter rolling behind your eyelid
how we milk the clock
it’s a long way to the corner in the dark, each car a piece
of a different dream swept into a crease
you arrive and snow falls off an awning, a flicker
of heart in the heavy weather
work won’t work, we know that
you got tired, put your head down on your desk
and never woke up
you put ‘i told you so’ on your tombstone
and i liked it like the grass around you too
dead labor barks all day at the unopened mail
you can’t be that piece of paper enough
i wipe my ass with it, a profile pic
at night i speed thru an infinite garage, past all the cars
parked like crooked teeth in the mouth of a city half-asleep
past all the empty desks not yet on fire, the knots in the wood
are eyes of the sun
you can see the bricks catching up to the windows
the raises can’t keep up with the rent, so the bricks
are catching up to the windows
a breath of fresh air, and then another
help wanted
you’re right but the cloud’s pulled apart
already, baby, a wise man once said nothing
beware of jobs and the self and the unraveling
of human life, the money, hysterical, demanding
progress, the butcher across the street losing
his shit again, voice rising against the illuminati,
the mafia, the catholic church as i shave, peek out
the blinds of my bathroom, he’s going to kill you
i don’t give a fuck about your family name, you think
you’re fucking special, now he’s waving a butcher knife
like a sword up the middle of the block screaming at
whoever taunted him, mind your fucking business, mind
your fucking business until the cops come and the owner
and traffic’s all backed up w/ horns going at a brick wall,
what are you going to do, wait and wait and look, an hour
later a help wanted sign hangs in the shop window, stand
by me drifts from a car radio to my ear, a line stretched
between us until it disappears like a cloud, a relationship,
old song bright as our clothes hung out to dry, the wind
worn out, whiff of that one year long ago, when we were
all together and then suddenly not, off w/ our heads
Ryan Eckes
Ryan Eckes is a poet from Philadelphia. His most recent books, General Motors, Fine Nothing and Wet Money, can be downloaded for free from Internet Archive. His work can also be read in Protean Magazine, Wax Nine Journal, Tripwire, Elderly, Bedfellows and elsewhere. He edits Radiator Press.